Open data
271 legally closed areas in UK and Crown Dependency waters — the boundary, the rule, and the instrument behind it. Free to download and reuse.
There is no single official list of where fishing is restricted in UK waters. The rules are made by fifteen different authorities under their own instruments, published in different formats, and sea fisheries are devolved, so the answer changes at the border. CAUGHT assembles them in one place in order to watch inside them, and the assembled list is published here because it is more useful to more people than it is to us alone.
The case statistics are also served live, as JSON, at /api/case-stats — the one API path open to crawlers.
There are more polygons than closures. 271 closures are
drawn as 440 features, because a single closure is often several disjoint
areas — a byelaw covering three bays is one rule and three boundaries. Group on
name if you want one row per closure; the CSV already does.
The boundaries are simplified. The geometry in the GeoJSON is the version drawn on the map, reduced so it renders quickly. It is accurate enough to show where a closure is and not accurate enough to decide whether a particular position falls inside it. For that, use the authority’s own published boundary — the legislation link on each closure page leads to it.
The restriction class is our reading, not the authority’s wording.
restriction_class is CAUGHT’s classification into five kinds of ban, derived
from the measure’s summary text, and each class deliberately claims a subset of
what is really prohibited — it is built to under-claim rather than over-claim.
restriction_summary is the source dataset’s own paraphrase. Where we have read
the instrument itself, the reading is on the closure’s page and the instrument
governs; a dataset paraphrase can be narrower or wider than the law it summarises.
Deliberately. A case is a reason to look, not a verdict: it is judged on three independent factors — whether fishing happened there and then, what gear the vessel actually uses, and what was prohibited there at that time — and the weakest of the three decides. Most cases are examined and resolved. A spreadsheet of vessel names would travel without any of that, and could not be corrected or withdrawn once copied. Cases are published one at a time, each with its evidence and its status, through its own page on the map.
If you are researching something that needs more than this, write to contact@caught.org.uk and say what the question is.
The closure boundaries and restriction summaries are public sector information from Seafish Kingfisher, NatureScot, JNCC and Natural England, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. CAUGHT’s own contributions — the restriction classification, the assembled list and the rule research — are offered on the same terms. Use them freely, including commercially, and credit the source.
The dataset is also on GitHub at
angus-e-mcmillan/caught-uk-closures
— versioned, forkable, with the field documentation and a machine-readable
CITATION.cff. Issues and corrections are welcome there.
Please cite as: CAUGHT, caught.org.uk, with the date you downloaded (this copy: 2026-11-11). If you publish something that uses it, we would like to know — contact@caught.org.uk.
By rule: No-take zones Bottom-towed gear Trawling Dredging All seabed fishing
Scotland England Wales Northern Ireland Isle of Man Jersey
The full A–Z of all 271 closures · See live cases on the map · How a case is made
1444 cases recorded to date across 88 closures. A case is a reason to look, not a verdict.