Ocean Conservation and Stewardship

Debate between Edward Morello and Tristan Osborne

Tuesday 15th September 2026 Westminster Hall

[Tristan Osborne]

I do agree. The UK Government’s engagement on the global plastics treaty, in alignment with the European Union and other nations, is looking to resolve that exact issue. Microplastics that get into the human biology can significantly heighten the risk of cancer and other problems, and they are a persistent form of pollution that needs to be resolved.

Let me start with a number that should give every Member in this room pause. A third of UK waters now sit within a marine protected area. On paper, that sounds like a country taking marine conservation seriously; in practice, however, the Government’s own assessment finds that we are failing on 13 of the 15 indicators of good environmental status in our seas, and not one of our offshore habitats is currently assessed as in good condition. How can that be when so much of our sea is supposedly protected?

The honest answer is that designation is not always the same thing as protection. Across large parts of the MPA network, bottom trawling and dredging remain entirely lawful. Oceana estimates that, in 2024 alone, there were more than 31,000 hours of suspected bottom trawling in UK offshore marine protected areas. More than 70% of those hours were concentrated in just 41 English sites—the same 41 sites covered by the Government’s stage 3 consultation. That consultation ended some time ago, and fishermen, conservation groups and coastal communities responded to it in good faith, so will the Minister provide a clearer timetable for the publication of the outcome?

Bottom trawling deserves a moment of its own, because it is not a marginal or peripheral issue. Heavy gear dragged across the seabed flattens reefs, uproots seagrass and disturbs carbon that has been locked in the sediment for centuries. It is, by some distance, one of the most destructive things that we allow in our oceans.

[Edward Morello (West Dorset) (LD)]

I had the pleasure of going out with some non-governmental organisations and marine conservation groups into the Lyme bay marine protected area, which has been protected from bottom trawling for over a decade. We had an opportunity to take a drone down to the seabed to see exactly how quickly nature can recover when we remove artificial barriers such as bottom trawling. There are now reefs and fish, but more than anything, the marine protected area now provides a sustainable business for local fishermen because the fish population has improved. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we need more of these conservation areas in order to allow British fisheries to recover?

[Tristan Osborne]

I absolutely agree. Marine protection and a viable fishing industry are not competing interests; they depend on each other. It is impossible to fish from a stock that has collapsed, and coastal communities cannot be sustained by paper promises about future abundance. I agree that the question needs to be looked at, because we can do both and they are mutually beneficial.

That is why this year’s fisheries data should worry us. The Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science assessed 79 baseline catch limits negotiated for 2026 and found that 46 of them, or 58%, were set above scientific advice. The consequence of repeatedly setting limits above what the science recommends is not an abstract matter; it shows up in the value of the fishery itself. The Blue Marine Foundation reports that UK fishing opportunities in 2026 fell in value by around £136 million on the year before, as well as real declines in commercially important stocks. There are also more troubling findings on illegal discarding; more than a decade after the practice was banned under EU law, there are reports of trawlers discarding six times more fish than they land. I would welcome an assessment from the Minister of how discard rules are being policed.

I want to be clear that the transition to sustainable fishing must work for the people who fish for a living as well as for the ecosystem. Vessels under 10 metres make up more than 80% of the British fleet. These small operations are often family businesses and the economic backbone of the harbour towns they sail from, including in my home county of Kent. If we ask the industry to change how it fishes, we owe it investment in skills, in lower-impact gear and in a genuine transition plan, as opposed to simply handing down a new set of rules with no support attached.

There is an anomaly in our law that I do not think gets enough attention. If a company pollutes land in this country under the Environmental Protection Act 1990, there are no limits to the fines that the courts can impose. Sentencing guidelines allow courts to fine large numbers of organisations amounts running into many millions of pounds, scaled to the seriousness of the harm and the means of the offender. But for those who pollute the sea, the picture looks very different. Fines for illegal discharge of oil were historically capped under the Merchant Shipping Act 1995, and even where caps have been raised over the years, marine pollution offences have not often been brought into full alignment with the uncapped regime that applies on land.

Campaigners have documented the practical result. Over the past five years, there have only been two recorded convictions or fines for oil pollution breaches around our coasts, and one of those fines was as little as £7,000. The rate of inspection of offshore oil and gas infrastructure has fallen from a quarter of sites to fewer than one in six. I struggle to see the logic in treating a spill into the Irish sea or an ocean more leniently than the same spill into a field or other terrestrial habitat. Marine ecosystems are, if anything, harder to clean up and slower to recover than land is. A tanker or platform operator that calculates that the maximum possible fine is a rounding error against its annual turnover has very little reason to invest properly in prevention. I ask the Minister to set out whether the Government intend to bring marine pollution penalties in line with the uncapped regime for pollution on land.

Stopping damage is necessary but not sufficient on its own. Passive recovery—simply removing the pressure from trawling and dredging—can allow habitats to bounce back if the damage is not too severe, but we have lost more than 90% of our seagrass meadows since the 1930s, and salt marsh in the south-east of England continues to erode at about 40 hectares a year. Habitat loss on that scale will not reverse itself; we need active restoration of seagrass, salt marsh and native oyster reefs, delivered in partnership with local communities so that it creates jobs and skills locally. It should be something done not to a place, but with it. Blue carbon habitats matter for the climate as well as for nature, and restoring a meaningful share of them by the end of the decade should be treated as seriously as any land-based nature target that we set ourselves.

I want to end on a hopeful note. This country has genuinely led on the international stage. The UK’s ratification of the biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction agreement, or the UN high seas treaty, was a significant moment, because for the first time there was a legal framework for protecting biodiversity on the high seas—the two thirds of the ocean that sit outside any nation’s territorial waters. Until that point, it was outside the law. The UK was among the states that pushed the hardest to get the agreement over the line, and I pay tribute to the Department and Ministers for their diligent work on it.

The same is true of the global plastics treaty. I understand that the negotiations have not been easy, and the talks in Geneva last year did not deliver the agreement that many of us hoped for, but the UK has led as part of a coalition of more than 100 nations pushing for legally binding limits on plastic pollution. That is the right side of the argument to be on. I hope the Minister will update the House on when negotiations are expected to resume and what the UK’s position will be when they do.

Then there is the science. If they have not already done so, I ask colleagues to look at the work of our outstanding universities, including the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, which I and many Members of this House have had the pleasure of visiting. We lead on oceanographic science. I have met a number of researchers who are mapping deep-sea ecosystems that most of us will never see, tracking how the ocean absorbs and moves heat and carbon, and building the evidence base that underpins almost everything that we are discussing today, from stock assessments and blue carbon to the physical behaviour of the deep sea floor. That expertise is a genuine national asset, and it deserves long-term, stable funding.

We have real strengths in this country to build on, including a strong domestic marine science base, genuine international credibility on ocean treaties, and a public who, by a wide margin, want our seas to be better protected. What is missing in some cases is the follow-through—the stage 3 decision. Trawling continues inside sites that we call protected, and fines for marine pollution remain a fraction of what the same offence would attract on land. These are not difficult things to understand, and none require significant new pieces of legislation to fix. They require political will and a timetable. In the words of David Attenborough,

“We can now destroy or we can cherish. The choice is ours.”