Fisheries: Telephone Services

(asked on 15th January 2021) - View Source

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 publish the (a) number, (b) geographical breakdown of callers and (c) issues of concern relating to calls made to his Department’s Brexit helplines on (i) fishing, (ii) Catch App and (iii) export certificates.


Answered by
Victoria Prentis Portrait
Victoria Prentis
Attorney General
This question was answered on 25th January 2021

To support industry with the new requirements introduced following the end of the Transition Period, Defra has introduced contact centres to directly support businesses. The two main services managed by the department are Export Health Certificates, led by the Animal Plant and Health Agency (APHA), and Catch Certificates, led by the Marine Management Organisation (MMO).

APHA does not hold a breakdown of calls received relating to queries about seafood exports specifically. The information requested is therefore not available.

For Catch Certificates, a 24/7 helpline has been introduced to support exporters in obtaining a digital catch certificate. There have been 273 calls to this helpline since 1 January 2021 and no geographical location of the caller is recorded. 204 of these calls relate to the categories requested:

  1. 201 were recorded as calls relating to the fishing industry
  2. No calls recorded the MMO "Catch App" as the reason for the call
  3. 3 calls were identified as being in relation to export health certificates

179 of the calls received were to assist users in applying for digital catch certificates. The reason for the calls are set out below:

Topic

Volume

Queries about the Catch Certificate service

99

Catch Certificate system registration or account management issue

16

Queries relating to failed validation checks on the Catch Certificate online system

15

Assisted digital support for the Catch Certificate online system

8

Other Catch Certificate queries

41

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