In 2010, the Government’s independent report, “The Future of Fisheries Management in Scotland”, said that of the 12 Scottish fish stocks that had been assessed,“only four are without immediate concern.”On a longer timescale, we know that the seas used to be full of fish, but the current level of large predatory fish biomass is only about 10 per cent of the pre-industrial level. British trawlers now need 17 times more effort to catch the same volume of fish than they needed at the start of the 19th century.