Northumberland and North Tyneside can help improve local fishing communities lot, even though Government abandoned them.

 Two minute read from Councillor Liz Simpson, Labour Councillor for Newbiggin Central and East.

One of the few things the extremely poor handling of the pandemic has done to improve my lot was to remind me that I needed to take some exercise daily.

Most days my husband and I wander along the prom at Newbiggin by the Sea and I look at the improvements to the beach behind the breakwater planned and delivered by a Labour Council. It reminds me to look around and see what has been delivered by the current Tory controlled unitary Council based in Morpeth, and I keep coming back to Paul Daniels and his catchphrase of ‘not a lot’.

The Newbiggin bay improvements were designed to save the town from rising sea levels and would be cost prohibitive on a larger scale, but looking around further I have noticed that the rocks at Church Point and the Quarry are worn smooth now by the tides and are beginning to wear faster. So how can we improve fishing for both anglers who bring tourist pounds, protect our shores and homes whilst helping traditional communities who rely on an industry lied too in the Brexit deal improve their lot.

The Euorpeans always expected that they would retain fishing within UK territorial waters and armed with a confident assumption that Britain would sell out the industry, reduced fish catches in the Medditeranean by 20% in 2019 and plan a further 15% reduction this year to help stocks recover, while investing heavily in inshore fishing reefs and commercial breeding programs to replenish depleted stocks much more easily in future while they can still raid UK waters to cover any shortfalls. So with a Government who appears to have abandoned an industry to simply raise its own profile, what can we do to help our traditional communities survive?

History and the Welsh,Scottish and Yorkshire embryonic but growing rapidly, coastal rewilding programs can give us pointers on some simple things that smaller levels of Government support and investment from established sources such as the Coastal Communities fund can achieve.

In Scotland, Wales and Yorkshire, the Government is investing in expanding commercial Oyster production activity and reseeding oyster beds to protect the coastline. Oysters and the reefs they develop protect our shores from erosion and filter our coastal waters free from algae developing a more oxygen rich environment within our inshore environments, allowing other marine animals and shellfish species to survive the batterings from rising sea levels, increasing quality fish stocks into the bargain.

In the past, history shows that huge oyster beds and their ecosystems protected our shores from Tynemouth to the Firth of Forth and now that better and more effective sewage treatment by Northumbria Water is online, they can again.

The benefits for Northumberland and North Tyneside if rewilding projects got underway would offset the cost particularly in areas reliant on tourism as sea angling is still a huge draw for the Tourist Pound.

As the County Councillor for a traditional fishing community I would really like to see any rewilding program start here in Newbiggin by the Sea and will push for it over the next four years. It would be nice to be able to watch as other shellfish began to revive and save the rocky shoreline around my Town. But wherever a program begins we would all benefit in some way and the spin off is that once oyster ecosystems become established they spread to surrounding areas.