Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what his policy is on the UK's role in global ocean conservation.

The oceans are vital to support life on earth, and are critical to the United Kingdom. The UK and its Overseas Territories are custodians to the fifth-largest marine estate in the world. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) therefore has an important role in promoting security at sea and improving the conservation and sustainable use of our oceans, and we are looking at how the UK can take this yet further. We already take a leading role on maritime protection and are on track to deliver marine protected areas across nearly 4 million square kilometres of the planet's oceans and seas through our Blue Belt programme by 2020.

The FCO works closely with the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and others including agencies such as the UK Hydrographic Office, the Centre for Environment Fisheries and Aquaculture Science and the Maritime and Coastguard Agency to promote global marine conservation. The FCO and DEFRA in particular have also been closely involved in the negotiations of the Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) to develop an international legally binding instrument under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction.

I am committed to combatting the menace of marine plastic pollution. This Government introduced a charge on plastic carrier bags, cutting their use in the UK by 80 per cent, and avoiding the disposal of 9 billion carrier bags, many of which might otherwise have ended up in the oceans. And from 1 January 2018, we will ban the production of plastic microbeads, the strongest legal measure of its kind anywhere in the world.