Sadly, the populations of most species of fish around our coasts have suffered serious decline in the last forty or fifty years. The major culprits are the fishing industry, where greed is the name of the game, and the EU, whose crazy rules and practices are only motivated by politics without regard to any form of management or conservation.
Unfortunately, it is not just target species like cod and haddock that are affected. Trawls churning over the same ground time and time again smash everything in their wake, leaving a surface like a ploughed field behind them. In the process, they sweep up huge quantities of invertebrate life and small fish which are just thrown back dead when the catch is sorted. The fish may be juveniles of the very commercial species they want to catch or just non-target species which are all part of the delicate food chain of the marine environment. The effect has been catastrophic for a lot of species and many that were a common sight whilst diving inshore, are now hard to find.
Many of the pictures you see in this section of the web site were taken some time ago for these very reasons although I am always hopeful that some day common sense may prevail and we may see some improvement in the situation.