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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what estimate his Department has made of the lifetimes of the (a) Marine Protected Areas and (b) Highly Protected Marine Areas programmes.

Marine conservation is a devolved competence and the following information therefore relates to England only.

We view MPAs as permanent features of our conservation efforts at sea and the improvements we will see to marine biodiversity within each site would be lost if their protection was to be removed. We will keep them under review and make changes where new scientific evidence suggests it is needed.

On 8 June 2021, the Government published its response to the Benyon Review into Highly Protected Marine Areas (HPMAs). The Government accepted the central recommendation that we should take forward some pilot sites with the purpose of biodiversity recovery. The Government is developing criteria for HPMA identification to create a list of potential sites this year, followed by consultation and designations in 2022. We will evaluate the effects of pilot HPMAs on the ecosystem, social and economic factors and this evaluation will inform future HPMA work.