Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment he has made of the effect of changes in frequency and scale of algal blooms on the health of the marine environment in the last 12 months.

The health of the marine environment including phytoplankton (and any potential algal blooms) is monitored for ecological status in the nearshore coasts and estuaries and for environmental status from the coast to offshore waters. The majority of English marine waters are considered to be healthy. There are some localised areas – estuaries or shallow harbours – that are affected by eutrophication but this is primarily due to nuisance green macroalgal mats, not blooms of phytoplankton.

Several years’ worth of data is used to assess the health of marine waters which allows for typical variation between different years (often due to local meteorological conditions). The Environment Agency uses the latest evidence from a number of sources in a regular Weight of Evidence (WoE) assessment that suggests there has not been a significant change in recent years.

The Environment Agency is involved, with other partners, in the S-3 EUROHAB project which is investigating using data from the recently launched European satellite, Copernicus Sentinel 3, to track the growth and spread of harmful algal blooms in the Channel in near real time.

The Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (CEFAS) collects water samples from designated shellfish growing areas on behalf of the Food Standards Agency (FSA). These are analysed for various species of potentially harmful phytoplankton in the context of human health. The FSA data at individual beds shows that the proportion of samples over harmful limits varies quite widely each year.