Reflection on the changing landscape of UK marine environmental governance

27 June 2026

In this blog, Coast-R co lead Dr David Bailey brings longstanding expertise and personal insight to this reflection on the changing landscape of UK marine environmental governance. He explores the frustrations, uncertainties and unexpected opportunities that have emerged in the wake of Brexit, asking how new regulatory systems might reshape accountability and protection for UK coastal seas.

Working in marine conservation can be incredibly frustrating, with little to show for years of effort. And to make things worse, we left the EU and that meant we wouldn’t have the European Commission to make our governments follow environmental laws. But something surprising has happened. Will the new super-regulators turn out to be more effective than the EU system they’ve replaced? And how can we use these new systems to make change? 

For decades the threat of punishment by the EU helped protect our marine environment, by making governments stick to their commitments under EU Directives. Various EU governments have been subject to infringement proceedings by the Commission, in particular for not adequately implementing the Habitats Directive by designating and protecting “Special Areas of Conservation”. In the case of the UK, the EU demanded extra protected areas, leading to the “Inner Hebrides and Minches” protected area for harbour porpoise.

Coordinated action by the EU could achieve great, if imperfect, things. I had first-hand experience of this through work on deep-sea fishing. The process took years, with intensive lobbying from both NGOs and the fishing industry. But in the end, a huge area of sea was closed to trawling. If not to the depth that our science said was best.

The downside of supra-national organisations is a lack of focus and slow action. The deep-sea trawling ban has been weakly enforced, and this sort of problem is surprisingly common.

The Habitats Directive from 1992 remains unimplemented by many member states, with supposedly protected sites lacking conservation objectives. The Marine Strategy Framework Directive is so poorly implemented that the European Commission has just consulted on revising the Directive, six years after “Good Environmental Status” should have been achieved. But even a bureaucratic and sometimes ineffectual regulator is better than none at all, and the scope for the UK government and devolved administrations to weaken environmental protections was real after Brexit.

In the UK, we decided to keep most EU environmental rules in place, but would these be enforced without the threat of Brussels?

The Rise of the Super Regulator

Quoting directly from their web page, The Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) is a public body that protects and improves the environment by holding government and other public authorities to account”. Its remit is England and Northern Ireland, and it has an equivalent in Environmental Standards Scotland (ESS). The Interim Environmental Protection Assessor for Wales covers this remit for that devolved administration until a permanent body is established.

While these organisations were created as a response to Brexit, their remit covers all environmental law and policy.

I’ll begin with the enforcement and compliance function, where Environmental Standards Scotland has been active. An early example was a complaint by the Coastal Communities Network about the use of Acoustic Deterrent Devices by salmon farmers in the “Inner Hebrides and Minches” Special Area of Conservation (SAC). The devices were there to deter seals, but clearly posed a threat to harbour porpoise (the protected feature of the SAC).

The complaint showed that they had raised the issue with the appropriate national regulatory and advisory organisations (Marine Directorate and Nature Scot) and presenting scientific evidence of a problem. ESS found that the Marine Directorate had not adequately enforced the existing rules and forced it to amend its approach, leading to widespread abandonment of acoustic deterrent devices by the salmon farms. This process took from November 2021 to April 2022.

In another example, my colleagues and I were employed by Nature Scot to review whether wrasse fishing could be damaging the protected features of SACs. Wrasse are used by the salmon farming industry as cleaner fish to remove lice from salmon in sea pens. We determined that wrasse should be considered “typical species” of the “reef” feature for which many SACs were designated. This would give wrasse species protection under the Habitats Directive and require governments to monitor their populations to ensure that none of the activities they permit were having “significant adverse impacts” on them.

The implementation gap.

While ESS has been a responsive and effective enforcer, the larger OEP has more of a strategic advice function. A key issue for the OEP is implementation. This report, and informal discussions with the OEP say that we don’t need new rules, we need to implement the ones we have already. But in a democracy it’s an issue of the exciting introduction of new initiatives and imaginary future benefits vs the annoying enforcement of old rules with their inevitable down-sides. The key benefit of these new regulators is that we help them can identify the governments’ promises and insist that they be implemented. Previously the only route to this was through the extremely slow and expensive Judicial Review process, e.g. on the licensing of trawling and scallop dredging under the Scottish National Marine Plan.

The future of the super-regulator

EU environmental laws are aspirational and wide-reaching, but implementation has been weak. From a compliance point of view, having local super-regulators who can respond rapidly and insist on implementation is great news. It is possible that the threat of actually having to do things will reduce the scope of future promises. But that might not be a bad thing.

For these regulators to be effective they need to know about cases. Before you contact ESS or OEP, you need to be clear about the problem you see and what laws or policies you think the relevant government isn’t following. You need to have given the relevant authority an opportunity to fix the problem by pointing it out to them in writing and giving them time to respond.

Talk to your colleagues working on the topic in academia, communities, and NGOs to put in a collective request. Your complaint needs to be specific, but not so narrow that it allows the government to avoid doing something important. Information about previous cases is building up on the ESS and OEP web pages, and these will be a useful resource for shaping future cases.