It’s 4am at Billingsgate fish market in London and trade is brisk. Prawns are being sold by the kilo, gigantic Scottish salmon are going for £50 and pallets of red snapper are being wheeled through the aisles by welly-clad traders splashing through melted ice.
For those used to bagging a measly scrap of cod at Waitrose or Sainsbury’s for a small fortune, Billingsgate may seem cheap, but even for traders, fish is more expensive than ever. In 2021, Aldi’s pack of smoked salmon cost £2.99. Now it’s £4.49 — leading many of us to think twice before adding it to our trolleys.
Fish is proving an emotionally charged subject for Brits. We are an island nation: fish and chips is our national dish. The British fishing industry was thrust under the spotlight in the campaign to exit the EU, with “take back control of our waters” the rallying cry of fishermen who overwhelmingly sided with Vote Leave. Eight years on, and with Brexit in the rear-view mirror, why has fish become so expensive?
Part of the issue is that the UK consumes a lot of fish, but exports almost everything it catches. In 2022, we imported 647,000 tonnes with a value of £3.7 billion, while exporting 330,000 tonnes worth £1.7 billion. Almost half the produce at Billingsgate comes from overseas.
The UK’s top exports are salmon, lobster and mackerel, which primarily goes to France, the US and Spain. Mackerel is unpopular here but eaten more widely on the Continent. Our top imported species are salmon, prawns and cod which come from Norway, Iceland and China. Despite being our most-consumed fish by far, Scottish salmon was the UK’s top food export in 2023.
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After Brexit, rather than bouncing back, the UK fishing industry continued its steady ten-year decline. According to gov.uk, the number of fishers’ jobs dropped by 5 per cent in 2021, and 3 per cent in 2022. In 2021, British fishermen, incensed by EU quotas, were furious when the government only marginally raised the quota of how much they could catch, and did not automatically ban EU trawlers from UK waters. Not being in the EU also meant more red tape, making it initially more difficult for fishermen to sell their catch abroad.
The rising cost of utilities have also increased the price of fish.“Everything’s more expensive — everything,” says Russell Parish, when I find him unpacking a box of salmon at J Bennett, a wholesaler that has been in Billingsgate for more than 100 years. “[The cost of] customs clearance has gone up, fuel prices have gone up, rent has gone up.” Farmed Scottish salmon — the UK’s most popular fish to eat — is grown from an egg and relies on electricity and intensive labour, the costs of both of which have also increased.
There’s another factor rocking the boat: unpredictable weather. Parish says that this pushes prices even higher. “With wild-caught fish there might be weeks when the weather’s bad and we don’t get any,” he says. “With farmed fish you can guarantee that you’re going to get it every week and you can almost guarantee a price, though it does move up and down.”
In 2023, El Niño raised sea temperatures off the coast of South America and contributed to the closure of the largest fishmeal fishery in the world, creating a shortage of food for fish to eat and leading to fishmeal prices spiking as a result.
Demand from overseas outstrips the demand at home. Lobster from the Outer Hebrides is being snapped up by French, Spanish and Italian buyers who are more than willing to pay a premium for the quality, with a weak pound making the produce more attractive to overseas customers.
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“A decade ago crab was relatively inexpensive and you could pick it up for £5 a kilo,” says Jackson Boxer, who owns the high-end seafood restaurant, Orasay, in Notting Hill. “But now it’s incredibly expensive — five or six times that — partly to do with the enormous international demand. Crab costs almost as much as lobster now.”
Boxer says that certain ingredients are now off-limits to him. “We’ve had to reluctantly stop using certain things, like razor clams and cockles. Sadly, they’re going overseas because people aren’t prepared to pay for them.”
Darren Walkerdine, from Essex, who works at James Nash & Son in Billingsgate says British produce is viewed as premium overseas. “They’ll pay more for it on the European market than the British will, so fishermen are going to do what they will,” he says. “When it’s short, we’ll sell more to China than over here. They’ll pay a fortune.”
According to Boxer, we should stop questioning why fish is so expensive and instead reconsider its value. “People think fish is and should be cheap,” he says. “It is a shame that culturally we don’t have a deeply ingrained sense of the specialness and the magnificence of fish.”
So what can people do to eat fish cheaply? First of all, don’t have your heart set on a certain breed. Boxer says the price of turbot can vary from £20 to more than £50 a kilo depending on seasonality. “A good fishmonger should advise you on what’s affordable and how to prepare it,” he says.
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Back in Billingsgate, Parish is less convinced. “There isn’t any cheap fish around any more, really,” he says. “Unless you want to eat fish fingers.”
Additional reporting by Phoebe Luckhurst
