Scottish Sea Fisheries Statistics 2024

Scottish Sea Fisheries Statistics is an Accredited Official Statistics publication produced by the statistics team within the Scottish Government Marine Directorate to provide detailed information on the Scottish fishing industry. The statistics presented in this publication include the:

• Tonnage and value of all landings of sea fish and shellfish by Scottish vessels.
• All landings by any nationality of vessel into Scotland.
• The size and characteristics of Scottish fishing vessels.
• Employment on Scottish vessels.

All landing tonnages are given in terms of live weight equivalent. Overall financial values in the publication text are generally provided adjusted to 2024 prices to account for inflation (real terms). Most of the financial values in the supplementary tables are provided unadjusted for inflation (nominal terms). Year on year percentage changes in financial values are calculated at 2024 prices to adjust for inflation unless otherwise stated.

Changes from the 2023 publication

This year we changed our imputation methodology to use UK average prices by species and year to impute missing values for landings of greater than 100 kg that were not below minimum size. This is the same methodology used by the Marine Management Organisation who publish UK Sea Fisheries Statistics. Previously, our methodology used a mix of average Scottish prices and UK prices and did not impute for all landings consistently. The new methodology uses the same average prices regardless of vessel nationality or landing location. This has resulted in a change in values for previous years for some species but ensures more consistent values over time, between tables and across the UK.

Also, this year we have removed all tables that include landings by vessels registered in the rest of the UK if they land anywhere apart from Scotland and will no longer be including information on all UK vessels or all landings into the UK for comparison. These tables have been removed for quality and consistency reasons. The Marine Management Organisation is delaying their UK Sea Fisheries Statistics 2024 publication until 27 November 2025. This delay is to enable them to revise their publication to correct for the under-recording of under 10 metres vessels registered in England, Wales and Isle of Man. For more information on this quality issue can be found in the quality assessment UK Sea Fisheries Statistics: Catch Recording Data Statistical Quality Assessment - GOV.UK and associated news story UK Sea Fisheries Statistics: Quality assessment into full year of Catch Recording data now complete - GOV.UK

Rather than delay our publication or publish information that is known to be inaccurate, we made the difficult decision to remove the tables that were most impacted. The data for vessels registered in Scotland are unaffected by this change. Although a small number of under 10 metres vessels registered in England, Wales or Isle of Man will land into Scotland, the impact of this under-recording to the overall tonnage and value of rest of the UK vessels landing into Scotland in 2024 is small, less than 0.2%.

An Accredited Official Statistics Publication for Scotland

These statistics are accredited official statistics. The Office for Statistics Regulation has independently reviewed and accredited these statistics as complying with the standards of trustworthiness, quality, and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics. Accredited official statistics are called National Statistics in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007.

Scottish Government statistics are regulated by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR). OSR sets the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics that all producers of official statistics should adhere to. More information about Scottish Government statistics is available on the Scottish Government website.