Marine Animals: Fishing Catches
(asked on 9th September 2025) - View Source
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask His Majesty's Government what estimate they have made of the number of marine mammals that have been caught by fishing vessels in UK waters in 2023 and 2024.
Answered by
Baroness Hayman of Ullock
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
The Bycatch Monitoring Programme is currently producing the 2024 report on marine mammal bycatch estimates and is expected to be published by the end of the year.
According to the UK Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme there were twenty cases of cetacean bycatch and entanglement in 2023 and fifteen in 2024. This data is taken from necropsy data only and does not include data collected on beaches/at sea by volunteer schemes from non-necropsied animals.