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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether her Department plans to follow European Commission advice on adopting maximum sustainable yield for fish stock that has improved as a result of the data-limited precautionary approach.

The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) have made significant efforts in recent years to assess stocks where analytical maximum sustainable yield (MSY) assessments and estimates are not available and we support both developing MSY proxies in such cases, as well as moving towards full analytical MSY assessments for any stocks whenever supported by available science and evidence.

When a stock first moves from a data-limited assessment to an analytical MSY assessment, it can result in a large change in the advised Total Allowable Catch (TAC) due to the incorporation of additional evidence such as recruitment, both actual and predicted, rather than reflecting a real change in a stock’s dynamics. Therefore, in some cases it may be appropriate to have a short-term staged transition towards MSY.