Scottish Sea Fisheries Employment Report

1. Introduction

Employment in capture fisheries has decreased significantly over the past ten years as a result of declining fishing opportunities and increased productivity. Anecdotal evidence suggests that alongside the decline in overall employment there has also been substantial shifts in the profile and characteristics of those employed in the industry. This report presents analysis undertaken by the Marine Analytical Unit in Marine Scotland Science on data collected between August and November 2013 by Seafish on behalf of Marine Scotland.

This survey is the first of its kind in the UK to collect fishing industry data on more diverse social indicators than those relating purely to employment and income. Driving the survey design was an interest in crew recruitment and retention with a particular focus on demographics, qualifications, mobility, crewing patterns and remuneration. This is to be explored and results presented by the positions crew have on vessels and by five key fishing sectors. The survey sampled 254 vessels equating to 13% of the fleet (in terms of vessel numbers) and 844 fishers equating to 17% of the work force. The survey was conducted face-to-face with skippers and crews on the quay side of all major ports around the Scottish Coast and the majority of small harbours. This report presents descriptive analysis and tables of the main outputs from the survey. Inferential analysis (analysis to make inference about the fleet from the sample) on specific questions will follow in supplementary papers to this main report.

Fleet Classifications: Vessels have been clustered to high-level gear grouping to allow comparison between: 1) vessels targeting different species and; 2) large and small vessels. To achieve this boats were clustered primarily by target species type to account for the different fishing patterns required to harvest each group of species e.g. pots and traps (creelers) tend to fish and return to harbour on the same day, whilst demersal (whitefish) vessels often fish over one to two weeks returning only to land catch, and secondly by the size of vessel to reflect the size of crews. This created five key sectors: 1) pots and traps (creel fishing); 2) demersal vessels under 24m; 3) demersal vessels over 24m, seiners and pair trawls; 4) Nephrops trawls and; 5) scallop dredgers. In some sections pots and traps and Nephrops vessels have been broken down into North Sea ( NS) and West of Scotland ( WoS) vessels for comparative analysis.

The fleet segments used by Seafish in their annual economic survey are grouped under these higher level clusters and details of what segment is clustered under each is presented in Annex 3. Three other groups were sampled in the survey - pelagic, beam trawl and a mixture of static gears. Only one beam trawl and one pelagic vessel were sampled so these boats were removed from the analysis and as the sample size in other static gear was low ( n = 10) to reduce the complexity of the graphic presented in this report they were also removed. Data on 'other static' is included in the tables in Annex 1. Lastly in some cases the data is presented by the positions crews have on vessels which are: 1) skipper/owner; 2) skipper; 3) engineer; 4) mate; 5) cook/deckhand and; 6) deckhand. In some cases skippers and deckhands have been combined, but notes are attached to each section to indicate where this is the case. For more details on the methods and key definitions please see Annex 2.

In this report the amount of crew or vessels included in each analysis i.e. the sample, is stated under each graph and in the text as ( n = x) e.g. ( n = 156) means 156 people/vessels are included in this graph/table.