Current status: Answered by Mairi Gougeon on 11 April 2025
To ask the Scottish Government how many scallop dredgers have been indicated by vessel monitoring system (VMS) or remote electronic monitoring (REM) data to have fished inside nature conservation marine protected areas in Scotland in each year since 2014.
It is not possible to provide all incidences where either REM or VMS indicated that a scallop vessel fished inside a nature conservation area since 2014. Our retention policy for camera data is one year and for position data as long as we feel necessary as per our privacy notice REM privacy statement found at: Remote Electronic Monitoring ("REM") systems on fishing vessels (2024): Privacy Notice - Fishing - remote electronic monitoring: privacy notice - gov.scot. We also do not have access to VMS data going back to 2014.
We can provide the number of detected cases submitted for enforcement action where VMS and/or REM was the initial method of detection since 2020.
2020 – 1
2021 – 2
2022 – 2
2023 – 2 (note these were for incursion into the Mull Crab box, designated to protect crab stocks)
2024 – 1