Wild Salmon

Question for Short Debate

Asked by

To ask Her Majesty's Government, in the light of the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organisation international year of the salmon, what assessment they have made of wild salmon stocks in the United Kingdom, in particular in Scotland.

My Lords, I had an interesting letter the other day about the International Year of the Salmon. It said, very politely, “Dear Lord Shrewsbury, do you remember the days of wild salmon in abundance”—oh my God, yes I do—“watching those magnificent fish making their epic journeys upstream to their spawning grounds?” If only. There was a wonderful picture on the front of the largest salmon I had ever seen.

I am most grateful for the opportunity to discuss the problems facing the wild Atlantic salmon, the wonderful king of fish. The problems revolve mainly around fish in the United Kingdom, especially in this, the International Year of the Salmon. I declare an interest as an avid angler—an extremely unsuccessful one—and a member of Salmon & Trout Conservation.

I tabled this debate for two reasons. First, like many keen anglers, I am increasingly concerned about the demise of both salmon and sea trout in United Kingdom, especially Scottish, waters during the past decades. Secondly, I hoped that the subject would attract some excellent speakers of considerable knowledge to highlight a most serious situation. I am delighted to see the speakers’ list and am extremely grateful. I intend to be brief and wish to concentrate on a few suggestions and thoughts. I intend simply to open up a wider discussion, for in this room we have a number of experts, be they anglers, landowners, riparian owners or knowledgeable enthusiasts and conservationists, and time restrictions are tight.

There can be little doubt that the Atlantic salmon is under increasing and unprecedented threat. The figures produced by the Scottish Government, the Environment Agency and Salmon & Trout Conservation make for dismal reading. In terms of rivers being described as “at risk”, the 2014 Environment Agency assessment of salmon stocks showed a decline to the lowest levels on record. Thirty-eight of England’s 42 principal salmon rivers were classed as either “at risk” or “probably at risk”. This is not restricted to England; it is a situation mirrored throughout the United Kingdom.

Does the noble Earl realise that, although much of the salmon farming in this country is owned by the Norwegians, they have started in Norway to breed salmon in tanks on land, thus avoiding the problems of pollution and escaping? That does not seem to be happening in this country.

I am most grateful for that interjection. I did know that.

All these matters and more can, and must, be addressed with great urgency if we are to stem the decline of this great fish. Taking water quality, for instance, one only has to look at the successes achieved on the Rivers Tyne, Mersey and Don to see that it is possible to restore water quality and physical river habitats. In Scotland, the Deveron, Bogie & Isla Rivers Charitable Trust has done remarkable work in bank restitution and other physical reparation works. Where the Deveron has her source in the Cabrach hills, much damage was inflicted many years ago by tax break-funded afforestation. I have been fishing that river for well over 40 years. In the old days, the Deveron was celebrated as one of the best salmon and sea trout rivers in Scotland, where Mrs Tiny Morison caught her record-shattering 61lb salmon in October 1924 at the Wood of Shaws, Mountblairy; I have tried like mad and never had a touch in that particular pool. When I first fished the Deveron, the water rose slowly and fell slowly, designed perfectly by nature. These days, she rises fast and falls away fast, leaving a horrible, black, acidic, peaty water, often lasting for days, which the locals reckon sickens the fish. Since protection came in, the population of mergansers, goosanders and cormorants has ballooned. The damage these birds do to salmon parr is immeasurable.

I have a friend, Robert Shields, who owns a place called Avochie half way up the Deveron. I quote from his email to me this morning: “We stopped our hatchery, funded by anglers, because it was made clear that there would be no funding from central government if we continued. It is a sad fact that since our fishing lives have been taken over by scientists, there has been a relentless decline in returning salmon. Our tracking results point to smolt survival being dire. Smolts are being devoured by goosanders, mergansers and cormorants, and little or no control is taking place, as getting a licence is made so very difficult”.

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for introducing this timely debate. There are a multitude of possible reasons for the decline in Atlantic salmon. We have heard that fish farms may be a factor, with pollution and crossbreeding. We know that the rise of the seal population is not helpful, neither is the rise of the goosander population, and of course climate change may have an effect, as rivers have become warmer. However, it is clear that the most important factor is probably netting of salmon out at sea, far away from the British Isles. We need a co-ordinated policy from the Government to look at this issue and deal with those who oppose remedial action. It is surely wrong that we should allow people to oppose licences for the culling of cormorants, particularly those of non-native species, or, for example, a licence to cull seals when they swim up a river—far away from their natural habitat.

The angling community has played its part: nets have been bought out at quite large expense. The question we have to ask is where the fish that were netted have gone, because they have not come up the river. They have actually disappeared. If we take that into account, the decline in Atlantic salmon is even direr. Something must be done. As I said, the angling and fishing communities have carried out work to allow more spawning and have opened up rivers for fish parties. A great deal has been done but, unfortunately, it does not seem to be having an effect. I have studied the Environment Agency’s laudable five-point plan but, again, I am afraid that it is not producing clear results. It may be that it will take a longer time, but we have to go further.

The Environment Agency seems to have a mixed view on hatcheries in managed rivers and I would like to ask the Minister about this. The Environment Agency manages its Kielder hatchery, which has been responsible for a large increase of salmon on the Tyne, but I understand it wishes to close other hatcheries—for example, one in Yorkshire on the River Ure. What is the Government’s policy? Some claim that hatcheries are a last resort and should not be used until then, but perhaps we are in the position of last resort now. We need to use hatcheries, which allow us to tag more fish and to learn more about the life of the Atlantic salmon. They are not the whole answer but they must be part of it. We need to understand what the Government’s and Environment Agency’s policies are on this.

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Earl on securing this debate. Three minutes would hardly give one an opportunity of landing a decent salmon, let alone making a serious contribution to this debate. I have had the privilege and pleasure of fishing for salmon in Scotland for over 50 years, initially with Hardy’s on its Junction Pool on the Tweed, then for a number of years in Arthur Oglesby’s courses on the Spey and, over the past 20 years, taking a beat on the wonderful Hendersyde beat of the Tweed, just below Kelso.

I wish briefly to talk about the economic and environmental consequences of a reduction in the adult salmon population. The reduction in the population of salmon means a greater number of unlet fishing days, fewer anglers, reduced income for the riparian and heritable owners and reduced spend, obviously, in local hotels, tackle shops and clothing shops. It potentially puts at risk the staffing levels of gillies and others employed by the owners. More particularly, taking the longer-term view, it could have a possible deleterious effect on the stewardship of the rivers because during the course of the year the riparian and heritable owners and their staff—the ghillies—maintain the paths along the river, the banks, the weirs and the croys to the benefit of not only the angling community but the local community and the wider visitor population.

It may be that the effects of the Environment Agency barring netting off the Northumberland coast will be of some help. Those nets take something like 5,000 salmon each year. I wish the Tweed commissioners every success in the noble work they are doing to try to rebuild the salmon stocks and population of the Tweed.

My Lords, I declare my interests as in the register. I served on the Caithness District Salmon Fishery Board under the excellent chairmanship of my noble kinsman, who will follow me in speaking in this debate.

Salmon stocks are at risk all across the north-east Atlantic, whether it be in Portugal, Spain, France, the UK or Ireland. Part of the problem is that it is international, through climate change, acidification of the oceans and far too much overfishing at sea. So what can we do at home? Fishing is a devolved matter in Scotland but it is worth noting that the catastrophic decline in salmon catches on the west coast of Scotland coincided with the rise of aquaculture. Scotland is the largest producer of farmed salmon in the EU and it is big business there, but it has consistently got away with rule-breaking, which threatens the environment and wild migratory salmon. Marine Harvest reported that, between 2012 and 2017, sites breaching the national sea-lice trigger level increased from 15% to a horrific 69%. Grieg Seafood admitted to constantly breaking the trigger levels from November 2016 to August 2017. The two Scottish parliamentary committees involved in last year’s inquiry into salmon farming were clear that effective regulation of salmon farms was imperative. It is time for the Scottish Government to fully enforce their regulations, particularly in the International Year of the Salmon.

I turn to England. Today, as we speak, Salmon & Trout Conservation is launching the river fly census. I refer that to my noble friend the Minister because it will be dreadful reading for him and the Environment Agency. It identifies that there is a huge insect species loss and that four out of five rivers in England and Wales are failing ecological health standards. It identifies that more than 300,000 regulated chemicals are currently in use but that only 45 are checked in our rivers. It tells us that atrazine, which is banned in the UK, is still found in water samples. Following the point made by my noble friend Lord Shrewsbury, it tells us about the difficulty that sedimentation is causing to all our wildlife. It also tells us that 45% of rivers exceed phosphorus standards; the Environment Agency does not monitor phosphorus in riverbed sediments. That is horrific reading for any Government. For salmon to survive, they need help from us humans. The Environment Agency is doing its best to make the Government not the greenest but perhaps the dirtiest on salmon fishing.

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Caithness—the chief of my clan—and more importantly to congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Shrewsbury, on securing this debate in the year of the salmon. I declare a number of interests. The first is as chair of the Caithness District Salmon Fishery Board and owner of the River Thurso. The second is that I am chairman of VisitScotland and therefore responsible for the economic side of tourism.

I will make two points on, first, the economic importance and, secondly, the environmental importance. This morning I got in touch with the VisitScotland office and said, “Give me the figures we’ve got”. I can do no better than read out the bullet points they gave me. Fishing tourism delivers in excess of £130 million per year in spend and forms a really important source of income for the Scottish tourist industry. There are 233,000 visits by domestic anglers from the UK, representing 1.5 million bed-nights. Some 41% of all anglers take a fishing break at least once a year, and £500 is the average sum spent by an angler trying to catch a Scottish salmon—that might be going up. More than £24 billion is spent on fishing and sports fishing by fishermen in Europe. The average Scottish angler spends £110 per day during each of his 17 annual days on fishing trips, and Scotland received the highest rating as an angling destination by participants in the TNS activities panel research. One other vital point is that the majority of that spend is made in rural areas, where the jobs and the value of the jobs are of particular importance. I congratulate the Scottish Government on allowing VisitScotland to support salmon anglers, and on the regulations that have been passed over the last three years preventing fish being taken from rivers that are not graded 1 on the grading system.

The main point I wish to make regards the importance of the juvenile biomass in the river. In 2012, Thurso got a £30,000 grant from the Crown Estate. As a result, we have electrofished, using a three-part system under a noted scientist, every year since then. We have added in to the sites of our own choosing last year the sites chosen by Marine Science Scotland. Each of those years’ results are published on our website, and are available to see.

My Lords, I have listened to the debate so far, upon which I congratulate the noble Earl of Shrewsbury. However, I have not heard mentioned what I feel may be another cause of the salmon’s decline in Scotland.

Before the clearances some 200 years ago, the highland economy depended largely on cattle, with very few sheep and deer but an abundance of fish and other wildlife by today’s standards. Sheep replaced the cattle and did very well on the rich ground they left behind. Deer started to increase because the men were no longer there to kill them. Most of the highland catchment areas were gradually taken over by sheep and deer, which prefer the short, nutritious grasses, while cattle eat the longer grass, particularly purple moor-grass—molinia caerulea—which otherwise grows tall and shuts out the light, forming an unhealthy mat when it dies back each autumn. It lives naturally in wettish ground but gradually colonises drier ground, which should carry heather, berries and many other plants, if it is allowed to. It grows quickly and establishes itself in a couple of years after large-scale muirburn, smothering much of what was there before. Cattle then turn it into rich manure—much richer than the droppings of sheep and deer—letting in the light for the benefit of other plants and breaking up the unhealthy molinia mat with their hooves. Earthworms and other insects do well under cowpats, even on acid soil such as ours, whereas they can hardly live under the meagre droppings of sheep and deer.

Some years ago, we ran an experiment, putting cattle back into the catchment area of an old spawning stream. The molinia reduced from 52% cover in 1993 to 13% cover by 2005. The effect on the water quality was less obvious, but there were signs of improvement by the time the experiment ceased in 2009. We are now planning to start another, much longer one, perhaps for 25 years, looking particularly for any increase in the food available for alevins when they finish their yolk.

My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Shrewsbury, on securing this important debate. I declare my interests as a director of the Galloway Fisheries Trust, chairman of the Fleet District Salmon Fisheries Board, an owner of a stretch of the Water of Fleet and, perhaps most importantly, a keen fisherman. I will raise an issue that has been particularly devastating for many of the smaller rivers of Galloway and south-west Scotland. It does not seem to be widely known about, although the noble Earl touched on it in his excellent opening speech. I am referring to the impact of large-scale conifer reforestation on river catchment areas.

While planting trees is generally a good thing, commercial conifer reforestation can lead to serious acidification, erosion and saltation of river systems in certain circumstances—there is not time to go into the complexities in this debate. As the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, will know, most of the rivers of Galloway have been very seriously affected following the widespread deforestation of the area in the 1960s and 1970s. Salmon and sea trout catches declined dramatically. In fact, there are parts of the river systems where the water is so acidic that fish life is now extinct. Salmon are particularly vulnerable, but other endangered species such as eels and lampreys have also been seriously reduced or, in places, wiped out. We have heard about the other factors such as predation, overfishing at sea, fish farming and so on, but if the river ecology itself does not allow fish to spawn successfully all other remedial actions will fail.

The Galloway rivers have been studied intensively for some years. Action is being taken and is helping to improve the situation, but there is a very long way to go and problems remain, particularly around the requirement to replant after felling, which means that the underlying peatland never has a chance to recover. New planting rules are greatly improved, including the restrictions that have come in on planting trees on peatland, but they remain far from perfect.