United Kingdom

D

Fishing

The fishing industry provides about 55 per cent of British fish supplies and involves both deep-sea fishing and fish farming. The deep-sea industry has declined since the 1960s, in part because of conservation restrictions legislated by the EU; it remains most important to the economy of Scotland and parts of south-western England, and is a major source of employment in certain ports.

In 2007 the total fish catch was about 0.80 million tonnes, of this figure 782,279 tonnes was the marine (or deep-sea) catch. The main catch species include mackerel, cod, haddock, whiting, angler fish, hake, plaice (various flatfishes, including flounder), herring, and shellfish. The principal commercial freshwater fishes are salmon, trout, and eel; the first two now mainly come from fish farms.

Notable fishing ports include Hull, Grimsby, Fleetwood, North Shields, Lowestoft, Plymouth, Brixham, and Newlyn in England; Aberdeen, Peterhead, Lerwick, Ullapool, and Fraserburgh in Scotland; and Kilkeel, Ardglass, and Portavogie in Northern Ireland. The British fishing fleet consists of 9,174 vessels. Not all of these, however, belonged to British fishers; a significant minority of UK-registered vessels are owned by non-Britons, notably citizens of other EU-member states.

E

Fishing Policy

As with agriculture, fisheries policy in Britain is largely determined by the EU, through the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). A long history of overfishing in European waters has led to the imposition of increasingly strict quotas through the CFP as part of measures aimed at protecting remaining fish stocks and allowing them to recover. With one of the EU’s largest fishing fleets, Britain has been particularly affected by such measures. Boats have had to spend many days a year forcibly laid up and the government has implemented financial schemes to encourage people to leave the industry.

At the start of 1996 traditional British and Irish fishing grounds, known as the “Irish Box”, were opened to Spanish boats under a December 1994 agreement. Narrowly ratified by the British parliament in January 1995, the agreement had caused considerable friction between British and Spanish boats during the year, including various incidents of net-cutting. The arrival of the Spanish boats in the Irish Box led to a resurgence of complaints from the British fishing industry, particularly after the EU indicated plans to cut back on British fishing quotas.

The European Court of Justice ruled in March 1996 that compensation claims made by Spanish fishing vessel owners previously kept out of British waters could go ahead. Further demands were made by the European Commission for a 40 per cent reduction in the British fishing fleet over a six-year period.

F

Mining

Britain has a variety of minerals, notably coal (see Energy below) and iron ore; the juxtaposition of deposits of these two was a key element in the country’s early industrialization. The location and historical importance of these and other mineral deposits is reflected in Britain’s population distribution and in the development of certain towns and cities. Mining in Britain has an ancient history. Salt mining, especially in Cheshire, dates back to prehistoric times. In the pre-Christian era, Phoenician traders visited what is now England to barter for tin from the mines of Cornwall. These tin deposits are now almost completely worked out, as are the iron ore deposits of northern England.

Today, construction raw materials form the bulk of non-coal mineral production. Some zinc, lead, and gold are produced; gold mining occurs in Wales. Ownership of gold and silver (as well as oil and natural gas) in Britain lies with the Crown, and producers can only obtain production leases. Virtually all other mineral sources are privately owned. Output of non-coal minerals includes (1995 figures, tonnes): limestone and dolomite (112.6 million), sand and gravel (101.7 million), sandstone (19.8 million), common clay and shale (13.9 million), salt (4.8 million), and china clay (2.6 million). Cornwall’s last remaining mine, South Crofty, produced 1,922 tonnes of tin-in-concentrate in 1994—some 20 per cent of domestic demand.

G

Energy

Britain has the greatest energy resources of the EU, and is a significant world producer of oil and natural gas. The other main primary energy sources are coal and nuclear power. Water power, although the main energy source for the early stages of Britain’s industrialization, is today little used except in Scotland, which has a number of hydroelectric power stations. Alternative energy sources are just starting to be developed, notably through the construction of so-called wind farms in parts of northern and south-western England, Wales, and Scotland.

Large parts of the island of Great Britain are underlain by coalfields, and coal mining can be traced back to Roman times. Taxes on coal sales helped pay for the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of London (1666), and coal was the key energy source of the Industrial Revolution.

Production reached a peak in 1913 when the industry produced 292 million tonnes, exported 74 million tonnes, and employed 1 million people. Since then it has been in decline. The main cutbacks in the coal industry have occurred over the past 20 years, however, and particularly since the end of the bitter, year-long miners’ strike. When the coal industry was nationalized (see History below) in 1947, some 200 million tonnes were produced by almost 900 pits. By the end of 1992, when the British Coal Corporation offered 28 collieries for lease to the private sector as the first stage of privatization, production was under 84 million tonnes, and there were just 50 pits remaining. Fewer than half of these were still in operation by the time British Coal was privatized in January 1995, and production was down to some 60 million tonnes. In 2003 some 27.8 million tonnes of coal was produced. Employment in the industry had dropped from around 200,000 in 1985 to around 11,000 a decade later, with enormous social consequences for the mining communities of areas like Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, and south Wales.

The decline in the industry has reflected the loss of domestic and export markets to cheaper overseas producers, even though modernization and mechanization programmes have made the British coal industry one of the world’s most efficient and productive, on a per capita basis. Other factors have included the phasing out of subsidies to the coal industry by the Conservative government from 1979 to 1997, and growing concerns about the adverse environmental impact of coal-burning. Almost three quarters of British coal comes from deep mines, the rest from opencast mines, and, notwithstanding the industry’s problems in recent years, some 25 per cent of British energy is still supplied by coal.

Oil was first discovered in 1969 under the bed of the North Sea, off the coast of north-eastern Scotland; production began in 1975. By 1980, 15 fields were producing 1.6 million barrels a day—virtually all of Britain’s requirements—and oil was becoming an important source of export revenue as well. Production of natural gas from the North Sea fields off the coast of eastern England began in 1967 and has steadily increased. New offshore oil and natural gasfields have been located since 1980, and small onshore oil deposits have been discovered, notably at Wytch Farm in Dorset, southern England.

By 1996 Britain was the world’s ninth-largest producer of oil, with some 96 productive offshore oilfields (1997), and the fifth-largest producer of natural gas, with 48 offshore gas fields. Output of crude oil in 1997 totalled some 2.09 million barrels a day; output of natural gas amounted to 102,841 million cu m (3,631,795 million cu ft).

Britain was a pioneer in the development of nuclear power plants. The world’s first commercial-scale nuclear power station at Calder Hall, Cumbria, north-western England, became functional in 1956. By 2009, 19 nuclear power stations generated about 19 per cent of Britain’s electricity. Of the remainder, about 47 per cent is generated by coal power stations, 5 per cent from petroleum, 16 per cent from natural gas, and hydroelectric power stations and other renewable fuels account for the remainder. Annual electricity output in 2006 exceeded 371.9 billion kWh, of which around 35 per cent was taken by households and 32 per cent by industry. The majority of the electricity industry was privatized in 1989; the nuclear power stations, as British Energy, in 1996; and British Gas in 1986.

H

Manufacturing

By the mid-19th century Britain was an industrialized nation, the world’s first. The main causes of its early development in this area included: Britain’s early leadership in the wool trade; a favourable climate; mineral wealth; the development of shipping and naval control of the seas; the acquisition of colonial markets; a much greater freedom from political and religious wars and persecution than elsewhere in Europe; the development of more efficient manufacturing methods, such as the factory system, and labour-saving machinery; and the agricultural revolution. This last, which preceded and paralleled the Industrial Revolution, was very important. Improved production methods, crops, and breeds of animals, as well as mechanization, boosted food production to feed the burgeoning towns. It also freed thousands of agricultural labourers to work in the new factories.

The 16th- and 17th-century influx of Flemish and Huguenot immigrants during the Protestant Reformation gave great impetus to the wool industry, the foundation of Britain’s medieval economy, and introduced new industries such as silk-weaving, garment-making, and the manufacture of hats, pottery, and cutlery. With the invention of mechanically powered machinery the textile industry grew rapidly to become one of the most important industries of Britain. Improvements and development of early steam technology by two Scottish engineers, James Watt and George Stephenson, were of major importance in British industrialization generally, and in the development of the coal industry, and iron and steel manufacturing in particular. Britain’s wealth by the mid-19th century was based on the manufacture of iron and steel, heavy industry, shipbuilding, coal mining, textiles, and trade.

Today, Britain is still an important manufacturing country, despite the many problems facing the sector since the 1970s, including foreign competition and the detrimental effects of the recession of the 1980s. In 2004 manufacturing accounted for 15 per cent of GDP, while 75.4 per cent of visible exports consisted of manufactured or semi-manufactured goods. However, employment in the sector has fallen as firms have closed or new technologies have been brought in to raise productivity. In 1995 some four million people were employed in manufacturing (16.5 per cent of the workforce).

The structure of industry has changed substantially in the past 25 years. The traditional industries, which by the 1930s had expanded to include motor vehicle production, have generally been much reduced in overall size—although individual firms like British Steel and, in textiles, Coates Viyella and Courtaulds Textiles are among the biggest in the world in their respective fields. There has been a growth of high-technology industries, such as pharmaceuticals: Britain is one of the world’s top three producers of pharmaceuticals and is a pioneer in biotechnology. Glaxo Wellcome is one of the world’s largest pharmaceuticals companies and London is the headquarters of the European Medicines Evaluation Agency, which is responsible for licensing of drugs on an EU-wide basis. Britain is also a world leader in electronics, aerospace, and the manufacture of offshore oil equipment, in which the country has pioneered a number of technologies involved in drilling, seismic surveying techniques, and rig construction. By the early 1990s Britain was making some 40 per cent of Europe’s desktop computers, as well as being a world leader in the supply of communications equipment, including fibre-optic cables.

In 1995 the approximate production figures of some important products were: 17.6 million tonnes of finished steel, 1.5 million passenger cars, 80,000 tonnes of worsted and woollen yarn, and 207.9 million tonnes of synthetic fibres. In terms of the value of output the most important industrial sectors were: food and beverages; electrical and optical equipment; pulp, paper products, printing and publishing; chemicals and synthetic fibres; machinery; transport equipment; and textiles and leather products.

Scotland and Northern Ireland have long been noted for their production of whisky and textiles, notably tweed and linen respectively. Scotland today, however, is also a major producer of computers. The leading traditional manufacturing regions of England are Greater London and the metropolitan counties of Greater Manchester, West Midlands (Birmingham); South Yorkshire; and Tyne and Wear. Electronics and other newer industries are also concentrated in parts of south-east and western England.