Marine pen fish farming: Charging changes

In October 2021, in their response to the recommendations of the Salmon Interactions Working Group, Scottish Ministers identified that SEPA would become the lead body with responsibility for managing the interaction between sea lice from fish farms and wild salmon and sea trout. 

In December 2021, we launched our first consultation on proposals for a regulatory framework to manage sea lice losses from marine cage fish farms. We issued a second consultation in May 2023 in which we set out our detailed proposals for implementing the framework. This consultation included proposals for the development of an enhanced monitoring programme.  

In the second consultation, we identified three main objectives for the first environmental monitoring strategy under the framework which was intended to support an adaptive approach to the implementation of the framework:  

• Gather data to assess the effectiveness of the combination of actions taken to protect wild salmon populations, including action to manage risks from sea lice.  

• Support the development and introduction of a framework for assessing risks to sea trout, including in the Northern Isles. 

• Support and complement the development and validation of refined models for the Wild Salmon Protection Zones in which screening indicates the sea lice exposure threshold may be exceeded.  

All stakeholders agreed that we need to develop an enhanced environmental monitoring programme to help validate refined models and to assess the effectiveness of the regulatory framework. Almost all respondents who made comments about environmental monitoring supported a collaborative approach to developing the monitoring programme. See our response to the second consultation. 

It is intended that this work will contribute to the delivery of the Scottish Governments Wild Salmon Strategy. We believe that it will allow us to take a big step forward in our understanding of the relationship between sea lice concentrations in the environment and wild salmonids. It will allow us to improve our understanding of the consequences of elevated levels of sea lice in the environment resulting from the operation of marine fish farms.