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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent assessment he has made of the effect of plastic pollution on flora and fauna in oceans.

A five-year-long Defra-funded study found that microplastics can cause harm to marine life. In response to this evidence, we introduced one of the world’s strongest microbead bans. We are continuing to look at other sources of microplastics, and have a monitoring programme running looking at microplastics in sediment and biota.

The UK has a widely respected UK Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme in place. This scheme investigates the causes of death of stranded cetaceans around the UK coast, improving our understanding of, and ability to tackle, key threats. In the UK, ingestion of marine litter has been implicated in the death of one individual (a Cuvier’s beaked whale in 2015) since the inception of the UK strandings programme in 1990 (this covers the examination of 3586 individuals over that time period).