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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, when he plans next to undertake a census of seabirds.

Work on the next breeding seabird census, covering 2015-2019, is underway. The Seabirds Count census approach was developed by the Seabird Monitoring Programme (SMP) partnership, which is coordinated by the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) in partnership with government agencies and conservation organisations.

To date the census has incorporated data collected by volunteers and professional surveyors as part of ongoing SMP annual monitoring and from other survey initiatives such as Common Standard Monitoring of the UK’s breeding seabird special protection area network. During the 2018 and 2019 breeding seasons, the JNCC will be working with the SMP partnership to increase census survey coverage.