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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what plans his Department has to protect harbour porpoises from being trapped in gillnets.

The Government is working closely with stakeholders including the UK fishing industry to find ways to tackle this problem together. In March, we held a UK bycatch workshop to look at ways to effectively mitigate this problem, and over the coming months we will be working hard to develop and test practical solutions to this critical issue.

The report from the workshop will be published at the end of May. It will include a set of recommendations for tackling this problem and an outline of how Defra, working with stakeholders, intends to take these forward.