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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment his department has made of the potential impact of bycatch on marine wildlife.

To assess bycatch and the impacts on marine species, Defra continues to fund a range of monitoring initiatives such as the Bycatch Monitoring Programme which reports annually on bycatch rates analysed by gear type, the Cefas fisheries observer programme, and the Cetacean Stranding Investigation Programme (CSIP) that closely monitors UK-wide cetacean strandings and conducts post-mortems on stranded marine mammals. Defra has also commissioned the Bycatch Risk Prioritisation Framework, which is a comprehensive evidence review analysing bycatch across sensitive marine species (cetaceans, seabirds, seals, elasmobranchs).