Sir Keir Starmer has squandered the best opportunity in decades to boost Britain’s fishing industry and help struggling coastal communities, the chief executive of the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations has claimed. Mike Cohen branded the agreement unveiled on Monday by the Prime Minister and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen “a massive wasted opportunity – and a far worse outcome than we had even pessimistically thought we would get”.

He told the Express: “I got kind of tired of people telling me, ‘Well, fishing is really small, isn’t it?’ It’s a really small part of the economy, why should we care?’ Well firstly, it’s only a small part of the economy if you play with the stats – if you just look at the price paid for fish on the quayside and ignore the supply chains, the processing, the restaurants. That’s like saying the value of the arms industry is whatever was paid for raw steel, and ignoring that it gets turned into something else and sold on.

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“And secondly, even if you don’t think it’s a large contribution, we’re still talking about tens of thousands of families. There are about 12,000 people working on the decks of boats. That’s 12,000 households. That’s a lot of people to just write off.”

Mr Cohen said the narrative he encountered throughout the day was “’this is a sacrifice worth making’ – but it’s always easy to say that about someone else’s livelihood”.

He said: “If you think the industry’s small, well, clearly Europe doesn’t think its fishing industry is small – because it fought tooth and nail for this.

“That should tell you something. Our fishing industry could be a lot bigger if we got more control of our waters and actually fished the fish that are there, rather than giving them away.”

Mr Cohen’s comments follow the unveiling of a new UK-EU agreement on sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures — part of a wider package of changes aimed at resetting the post-Brexit relationship.

The deal, announced during a joint press conference in Brussels, was billed by both sides as a “reset” in cross-Channel relations, with plans to reduce border checks on food and plant products, improve cooperation on youth mobility, and strengthen scientific collaboration.

Ministers claimed the changes would ease the flow of trade and benefit exporters across the UK. However, fishing representatives believe it offered little for coastal communities and failed to address the long-term imbalance in access to British waters.

Mr Cohen insisted the UK industry had not sought any change to the post-Brexit status quo.

He said: “We didn’t come asking for anything different – the EU came to us. They wanted a longer-term deal because their fleets, particularly the French, Belgian and Dutch, are completely dependent on access to British waters. They’ve been allowed to develop that way since the 1970s.

“They’re living beyond their means, as the EU is, when it comes to fishing. So of course they came asking for something. I’d probably do the same if I were them.

“But if you want something incredibly valuable – hundreds of millions of pounds a year in fish – you’ve got to give something back. Norway does this. Iceland does this. We had that leverage – and we’ve given it up for nothing.”

Mr Cohen was dismissive of suggestions that the agreement signed by the UK and EU would benefit fishermen.

He said: “It’ll help retailers. It might help hauliers. But it won’t help fishermen.

“The idea that savings from reduced paperwork are going to trickle all the way down to the bloke in oilskins is a nonsense.

“I spoke to one guy who runs fishing boats and exports directly. He reckons he’ll save about a quid per box of fish. That’s a couple of hundred quid on a wagonload – but that’s fish from maybe 16 or 20 businesses. It’s not meaningful.”

He also warned against comparisons with salmon farming.

He said: “I know Salmon Scotland are very pleased – but they’re not the same as us. Farmed animals, farmed fish – that’s not what we do. This is wild catch. That’s an industrial food business. It’s no more like us than sheep farming is.”

Summing up the mood in the industry, he said: “This is a huge let-down.

“People are going to feel that this is now the third government – or third Prime Minister – who has been willing to sell fishing out to benefit someone else.

“It happened in the 1970s, it happened under Boris Johnson – and now it’s happened again under Keir Starmer.”