Concerns with the consultation survey

Salmon Free Falklands has concerns that the way the salmon farming consultation survey is written could lead to bias in the findings.

Salmon Free Falklands considers there to be issues with wording throughout the survey, specifically in two areas:

  1. The way in which agreement or disagreement with whether salmon farming should go ahead is formulated; and

  2. The apparent lack of ability to validate where respondents are located both in terms of IP addresses and geographic location.

Because of these concerns, Salmon Free Falklands approached Eunomia Research & Consulting Ltd to undertake a review of the survey.

The Eunomia report addresses issues of survey design, leading questions, verification of residency or location, and access to data.

The Eunomia report explains how the survey responses cannot be verified, making it impossible to check if coordinated responses looking to erroneously influence the survey have been submitted. The report also identifies substantive failings, including a number of leading questions with embedded assumptions and unbalanced response sets.

The Eunomia report can be viewed here.

  • When the Falkland Islands Government (FIG) published the salmon farming consultation survey following a decision by ExCo in March 2026 to commence a consultation on salmon farming, Salmon Free Falklands (SFF) contacted FIG officers.

    Emails were sent and meetings held with FIG where SFF set out our concerns about leading questions, the lack of opt out responses and other matters. FIG refused to make changes beyond the grammatical errors that SFF had picked up and the substantive flaws SFF raised were dismissed. Officers told SFF that lawyers had signed off the survey. When SFF asked for copies of the advice, FIG refused.

    At drop-in sessions and at public meetings, SFF and others raised concerns with FIG about the integrity of the survey. With no registration required, concerns were raised that pro-salmon, anti-salmon, or those just looking to cause mischief would be able to respond to the survey multiple times, using both online and paper versions of the survey, using multiple IP addresses and devices. Concerns were also raised that survey questions about status and residency could be answered erroneously as there was no mechanism to check them. In response to concerns, FIG officers repeatedly claimed that they would be able to verify survey responses using IP addresses and other methods.

    When SFF learned that Unity Marine Ltd had been given the opportunity to see the draft survey prior to the version that was presented to ExCo in March and to offer comments and ask for changes, we asked for sight of the exchanges and earlier versions to better understand how the final version was arrived at. FIG refused.

    It is against this backdrop of denial and refusal by FIG officers to consider flaws and make changes and their decision not to share documents which provided the basis for their position that the survey was robust and that the responses could be checked, that SFF turned to Eunomia Research & Consulting Ltd to review the survey and produce a report with independent analysis.

  • “We are deeply concerned by the findings of this report, it is clear that the cumulative impact of these substantive failings including the large proportion of leading questions with embedded assumptions and unbalanced response sets is that this survey is not fit for purpose.

    “FIG will not be able to verify status nor residency of respondents, and there is no mechanism to check that those who would like to impact the outputs have not orchestrated multiple responses, from different devices and IP addresses and/or in writing.

    “It is disappointing that following SFF and others raising concerns about the survey months ago FIG did not commission this type of work for themselves and publish it to be open and transparent about the shortcomings and then fix them.

    “The public, and Members of the Legislative Assembly who  will be considering the consultation documents and survey before reaching a decision on salmon farming, deserve better than this.

    “At every step we have sought to work with FIG to make this consultation better, more robust, less likely to be the victim of another successful judicial review. For this reason, and in light of the findings of this report we have commissioned further work to review other documents in the consultation bundle”.