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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps his Department is taking to increase the domestic labour pool in the fisheries sector.

Through the Seafood 2040 framework for England, the fishing industry have made a number of commitments to devise and deliver a single cross-sector seafood training and skills plan based on needs and requirements. Following a pilot labour survey of the catching sector in 2017, Seafish will be conducting a full labour survey as part of their wider analysis of the UK fleet in 2018. The results of the 2017 pilot are published by Seafish and the analysis undertaken in 2018 will be published later this year.