Transport Minister sees benefits of working with Seafish

During a visit to Grimsby last week, Mike Penning, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Transport, met with staff from the safety team at Seafish to see for himself the benefits to fishermen's safety of collaboration between Seafish and the Department for Transport, reports www.megafishnet.com with reference to Seafish.

Since 2008, the Department for Transport has matched Seafish's levy investment in fishermen's training enabling Seafish's network of Approved Training Providers to train 2,500 fishermen on courses designed for skippers of fishing vessels less than 16.5m.

Over the same period 1,600 fishermen have registered at Seafish's e-Academy, an online e-learning platform that allows fishermen to study navigation, engineering and stability free of charge, in their own time and at their own pace. The e-Academy has been particularly popular with fishermen in remote areas.

Simon Potten, Safety Coordinator at Seafish, said: "The financial support we have received from the Department for Transport has enabled us to train twice as many fishermen as we would otherwise have been able to. We hope that this support will continue as we start to re-focus our funding towards providing voluntary refresher safety training for experienced fishermen."

The Minister was in Grimsby to talk to fishermen about fishing safety and see what is currently being done to try to improve safety by Seafish, the MCA, RNLI and the Fishermen's Mission.