Photo by Markus Spiske

Greenpeace UK has announced plans to create new underwater boulder barriers in UK Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), a decade after the Brexit vote and five years after the Fisheries Act 2020 gave ministers full powers to protect them. As Afloat.ie reported, the charity argues those powers have gone largely unused, with destructive industrial fishing still permitted across the vast majority of England’s so-called protected areas.

A familiar tactic

This will be the fourth time Greenpeace has used boulders to physically block bottom trawling, having previously dropped them in the Dogger Bank MPA in 2020, the Offshore Brighton MPA in 2021 and the South West Deeps MPA in 2022. Following the Dogger Bank action, the government closed that site and three others to bottom trawling as part of what the Marine Management Organisation calls Stage 1 of its MPA byelaw process; after Offshore Brighton, a further 12 MPAs were protected under Stage 2. Greenpeace points to this record as evidence the tactic forces government action. Notably, the BBC reported that the UK government has now dropped a legal case it had previously brought against Greenpeace in an attempt to halt the boulder-dropping tactic, though the location of the new barrier has not been disclosed.

A stalled process

The picture since has been less encouraging, according to Greenpeace. The government opened a Stage 3 consultation in June 2025 proposing to end bottom trawling in a further 41 MPAs, including South West Deeps, but the charity says no action has followed in the six months since that consultation closed. A theoretical Stage 4, covering MPAs protecting harbour porpoise and certain bird species, has not yet even been announced, as The Ecologist also noted in its coverage of the campaign. As things stand, just 17 of the UK’s 78 offshore MPAs have any protection from industrial fishing, and Greenpeace’s own analysis, cited by Afloat.ie, found 1.3 million tonnes of fish have been caught in offshore UK MPAs since 2020, more than a million tonnes of it by pelagic trawlers, a method the Stage 3 proposals would not restrict.

Will McCallum, Greenpeace UK’s co-executive director, said: “Post-Brexit powers to fully protect marine protected areas have been available to successive governments for the last five years but all have sat back and let destructive industrial fishing continue. Our oceans cannot wait any longer. If this government won’t protect our seas, we will.”

The case for site-wide protection

Greenpeace’s central complaint is that the MMO process is piecemeal, restricting only certain gear types in certain areas rather than protecting whole MPAs from all destructive fishing. In its official response to the Stage 3 consultation, the charity argued: “The appropriate response is to protect offshore MPAs site-wide from destructive, industrial fishing of all types, using the power enshrined in the Fisheries Act. Anything less will continue to fall short, for marine life and vulnerable habitats, for low impact fishers and fishing communities, and for the wider UK public.”

In a letter to the Prime Minister signed by Oceana, the Blue Marine Foundation, the Angling Trust and Rewilding Britain, Greenpeace wrote that “our seas are being pushed to the brink as industrial fishing vessels continue to plough through so-called protected areas,” adding: “this leaves us no choice but to step in again… Using our ships, we will create more boulder barriers to repel destructive industrial trawlers and turn the UK’s weak Marine Protected Areas into proper protected Ocean Sanctuaries.”

Celebrity backing

The letter was also signed by Stephen Fry, Paloma Faith, Simon Pegg and environmental campaigner Mya-Rose Craig. Fry called continued trawling in protected sites “not merely absurd” but “a complete failure of common sense,” while Pegg said “all the paperwork was done years ago and yet the government is still delaying,” adding that the approach “worked before and it will work again.” Faith said she found it “hard to understand how this has been allowed to continue for so long,” warning that protections “must become more than a promise on paper.”

Government response

A Defra spokesperson, responding to the announcement, told the Press Association: “We have strict legislation in place to protect our marine environment that also supports sustainable fishing to help industry and local communities thrive.” The same point was carried by Afloat.ie in its own reporting on the campaign’s launch.