Many Crown Estate Scotland fishermen and angling association tenants will receive significant rebates on their salmon fishing rents from 2019 to 2021. The move is in response to a continued drop in fish numbers and tenant feedback on the need for increased support to deal with the challenging circumstances they face.
Crown Estate Scotland will provide rebates of up to 50% to fishing tenants until 2021. This follows rebates of 25% for those in category 3 rivers over the last two years reflecting the challenges currently facing salmon fishing beats due to reductions in wild salmon populations in recent seasons.
It also comes on top of the £10,000 contribution made by Crown Estate Scotland in March 2019 to the Atlantic Salmon Trust’s Missing Salmon project, a campaign to raise awareness and fund research to uncover the reasons behind the recent declines in salmon returning to Scotland’s rivers.
Crown Estate Scotland wants to support tenant clubs, angling associations and individual tenants so that the policing, river care and management, project work such as habitat improvements and the social benefits angling provides can all continue. It is hoped that this additional support will reduce financial pressure on tenants and enable them to look to plan for the longer term.
Fiona Simpson, Asset Manager for Crown Estate Scotland, said: “We’re all aware of the pressures that we face as the numbers of adult fish returning from the marine environment continue to reduce. It’s vital that we gain greater knowledge of the factors causing this so that we can put in to place the correct management plans and that’s why we were so eager to contribute to the Missing Salmon project. In the meantime, it’s only right that we help our tenants as they try to deal with the consequences of falling fish numbers. We hope these rebates will help, and we will continue to engage with our tenants as to how we can support them moving forward.”
From the 2019 season until the end of the 2021 fishing season on category 3 rivers, as assessed by Marine Scotland, all tenants on beats managed by Crown Estate Scotland will see their rents rebated by 50% and all tenants on category 2 rivers will see their rents rebated by 25%.
Crown Estate Scotland manages the rights to fish wild salmon and sea trout in many river and coastal areas.
2019 has been named as The International Year of the Salmon and Crown Estate Scotland sees this support as a contribution to the efforts by many in the sector to contribute initiatives to this focus.
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Notes to Editors:
Tenant survey
The tenant survey was sent to all 128 salmon fishing tenants and 67 responses were received. The research was conducted by independent researchers Research Resource, via online and telephone from Dec 2018-Jan 2019. A summary of results will be published shortly at www.crownestatescotland.com
