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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps her Department has taken to tackle (a) bycatch and (b) illegal discarding by vessels in the last year.

We continue our effort to minimise and, where possible, eliminate the bycatch of sensitive species. Working in partnership with industry and eNGOs we have a range of activities in place including: continuation of the long-standing Bycatch Monitoring Programme (BMP) which reports annually on bycatch rates analysed by gear type; the Cetacean Stranding Investigation Programme (CSIP) that closely monitors UK-wide cetacean strandings and conducts post-mortems on stranded marine mammals; the Clean Catch programme which recently launched a bycatch monitoring and mitigation trial; a comprehensive evidence review analysing bycatch across sensitive marine species (cetaceans, seabirds, seals, elasmobranchs); and developing a seabird bycatch mitigation action plan for England.

The Marine Management Organisation (MMO) monitors discards and catches from all commercially licensed vessels in England. MMO collects this data alongside undertaking regular inspections of vessels. The Landing Obligation, introduced under the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy, has not met its goals; illegal discarding still happens, and discard patterns in the English fleet haven’t changed. To improve discards management and move away from the landing obligation in England, Defra and the MMO are conducting a paper trial of ‘catch accounting’. This is a new approach that accounts for the total removal of stock compared to the current system which only logs landings.