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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if he will make it his policy to (a) attach conditions limiting vessel size on fishing vessel licenses to 100m in length in the UK’s Marine Protected Areas and (b) publish a timeline for implementing those conditions.

As an independent Coastal State, we can now review which vessels, including supertrawlers, can access and fish our waters. The new licensing framework within the Fisheries Act allows us to apply conditions to the activities of all fishing vessels in our waters - regardless of their nationality – and will need to abide by UK rules around sustainability and access to our ‘Blue Belt’ of protected waters.

The activity of ‘supertrawlers’ is managed in the same way as all fishing vessels. The Marine Management Organisation (MMO) closely monitors vessels, including large trawlers, when fishing in English waters. Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are set up to protect specific seabed habitats and species. Supertrawlers are pelagic trawlers whose nets do not touch the seabed, so generally don’t cause damage to seabed features. MPAs, being protection of specific locations, usually aren’t a suitable conservation mechanism for the highly mobile fish which supertrawlers are catching. Measures that will work to protect those fish need to apply across their full range, such as quotas.