‘A national scandal’: trawlers scour seabeds of supposedly protected UK waters

‘Precious ocean life is being pushed to the brink,’ say campaigners, arguing that overfished marine areas are ‘protected only on paper’

Almost 40% of England’s seas are designated as marine protected areas. Their purpose, the government says, is “to protect and recover rare threatened and important marine ecosystems … from damage caused by human activities”.

And yet in the four years to 2024, trawlers using vast nets, including those that scour the seabed, caught more than 1.3m tonnes of fish within them, according to official figures that campaigners say show they are “little more than lines on a map”.