Chamber and committees

We set up the Fisheries Management and Conservation (FMAC) Climate Change Subgroup in early 2023 to help guide us and to build our knowledge and understanding of both climate mitigation and adaptation. The group is formed of industry reps, eNGOs, academia, as well as organisations such as Seafish and Fisheries Innovation and Sustainability.

We will work with the subgroup to understand what options for reducing emissions from fishing can be taken in the short, medium and long-term and develop a plan of actions.

The Scottish Government works closely with the legally categorised emergency responder organisations who are responsible for assessing, planning, responding to and recovering from the consequences of emergency risks as identified in the National Risk Assessments and Community Risk Registers, including for severe storms and wildfires.

Representatives of all responder agencies are also required, by the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, to meet regionally in Scotland’s 3 Regional Resilience Partnership (RRP) areas, in the North, West and East . Below that structure, 12 Local Resilience Partnerships (LRPs) are in place which apply the co-ordinated response at a local level.

The Resilience Partnerships meet to ensure there is a shared awareness of responder agency capabilities and capacities to co-ordinate a multi-agency response to any kind of emergency event. Existing plans are regularly tested in joint exercises and during real emergencies.

After any event, responder agencies, LRPs and RRPs routinely hold structured debriefs which identify lessons to be fed back into the system and improve future response. These debriefs are the responsibility of the agencies and partnerships and therefore not overseen by Scottish Government.

Wildfires are specifically an operational responsibility of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service. As such, they are responsible for the initial response and for developing and deploying plans which enable them to respond as a national service with the ability to move and deploy staff and equipment as necessary. Their arrangements will link into generic police, NHS and local authority major incident plans as necessary, within the resilience partnership structures.

The Scottish Government supports this partnership activity in many ways including supporting multi-agency partnership meetings, and organising on line multi-agency learning facilities on the Resilience Learning Hub.

The Scottish Government has agreed with NHS Highland that due to exceptional circumstances there, a mixed model of vaccine delivery can be put in place. This will be a hybrid model for vaccine delivery in which NHS Highland will also continue to provide some vaccination programmes.

The Scottish Government recognises and values the very important role that many women play in Scotland’s fisheries sector.

Scotland's Fisheries Management Strategy 2020-2030 seeks to recognise the important role that all parts of society make to the fishing industry, and to promote involvement across all genders and equalities groups in a positive and inclusive way.

We want to work with the industry to shape the policy outcomes which contribute to better outcomes for women working in the sector.

Our commitment to Scotland’s seafood sector was reflected in the publication of the Strategy for Seafood in October 2022. While there are no current plans to update this document, Scottish Government will continue to work with industry to realise our ambitions for the sector. This includes continuing to work with the sector on trade barriers arising from EU Exit, which has impaired the competitiveness of Scottish seafood.

GPs should visit their registered patients as clinically required.

The Scottish Government has since 2021 awarded £8.25m to Seafood Scotland as Scotland’s national trade and marketing organisation for the seafood industry. Seafood Scotland projects have included those:

• supporting domestic and export market development;
• promoting wide awareness of Scottish seafood as a sustainable food source and the opportunities it offers as a career destination; and
• co-hosting, in October 2024, the Responsible Seafood Summit in St Andrews which attracted 350 delegates from around the world to further develop a healthy, responsible global seafood community.

Seafood Scotland is currently leading on the development of a Scottish Ocean Cluster alongside other key stakeholders including Zero Waste Scotland, Ibioic, Opportunity North East and Aberdeenshire Council. This project is part of a concerted and integrated movement to increase the utilisation of processing and catching by-products, and to increase their value by converting them for example to food and biomedical products.

The Scottish Government is currently supporting a UK Government Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs project on “Co-designing an Evaluation Framework for Recruitment and Retention of Domestic Seafood Workers”. This project includes a survey and focus groups with people working in fishing, processing and aquaculture across the UK, including Scotland. The project will seek to explore questions related to barriers and opportunities for new entrants and across different project stages.

We acknowledge that there is an overall lack of data and evidence on women in fisheries for a number of reasons, and we agree that steps are needed to improve this. This is an important issue and many of these gaps will need to be filled in collaboration with the industry and the wider research communities.

We are aware that the fishing sector is not always understood as welcoming to women which can discourage women from entry. There are also reports of sexist attitudes, behaviour and language and this is unacceptable.

We would benefit from further research into views of men (of different ages) working in seafood jobs towards women and how these are changing, and we would be happy to explore options for collaborative working and for actions to be developed in partnership with the fishing industry and the wider research communities.