Shooting & Fishing: 'What inspectors might find if they pitched up unannounced hardly bears thinking about'

Sea lice, may I remind you, attach themselves to passing wild salmon, if uncontrolled, and eat them alive. Which is why there aren't many wild salmon on the west coast, and even fewer sea trout.

The S&TA report, which relied on government figures extracted through the Freedom of Information Act, said lice infestations frequently breached the industry's own codes of practice. In Norway these figures are published. Here the public is not allowed to know because the industry, worth 412 million in 2009, doesn't want us to know, and the government won't upset it.

Its view is that even if the industry is behaving badly, it employs hundreds of EU migrants besides a few locals in areas of fragile employment. So let's not get too hung up on preserving wild stocks. The industry response to the report was to point out that the figures related to only 15 per cent of farms, ie not very many.

But considering fish farms are given ten days' warning of an inspection, it actually means things are so bad that 15 per cent still can't get it together in time. What inspectors might find if they pitched up unannounced hardly bears thinking about. Meantime a victory for common sense in Lewis, where the council refused an application from the Scottish Salmon Company (SSC) (ne Caledonia Lighthouse) for a fish farm in Broad Bay. The council decreed the firm's environmental statement was "deficient of a robust, independent and accurate assessment of the potential impacts on the wild trout populations from sea-lice dispersal and on salmon and trout populations arising from containment failure".

Now, SSC is one of our most successful fish farming companies with oodles of expertise. But it still could not make an acceptable case for a fish farm in Broad Bay. It must have hoped that the council had neither the man-power nor brain power to absorb quires of bio-babble and would opt to open the box labelled "jobs".

Local anglers, who restored the rivers Gress and Creed to fishable health, protested that a fish farm would destroy runs of trout and salmon. And so the application got a thorough going over. The council is to be congratulated.

But councils, unless chivvied, will not check the accuracy of applications so long as all the right boxes are ticked. How many fish farms have been waved through on the basis of semi-intelligible, quasi-scientific environmental statements from highly paid consultants? Planners know about drains and car parking densities. Not the life cycle of sea lice.

This article was first published in The Scotsman on 23 April 2011