Formal Consultation – MMO management of fishing activity impacts in marine protected areas – Stage 3

Overview

Guidance (Please read before completing the survey)

Before providing any responses, the documentation below is available to familiarise yourself with the Stage 3 formal consultation and the steps involved in the creation of the site assessments. Referencing specific pages and paragraphs in your response will help us fully understand your comments and give them the greatest value. 

There are several options, you can provide;

• a general response under the ‘General comments’ section; or
• a general response to a specific region under the relevant ‘region – regional comments’ section; or
• a response to a specific site.

You do not need to provide a response on every section, it is possible to respond only to the points of interest.

We have provided below, recommended questions you may wish to address in your response:

1. Do you have any additional information about the location, condition, or sensitivity of the designated features?
2. Do you have information on the type, location, frequency, or intensity of fishing activity within the MPAs?
3. Do you agree or disagree with the proposed management measures? Do you have any suggestions for other management measures?
4. How would the proposed management measures affect you? Or those you represent?
5. What impacts, if any, do you anticipate the proposed management measures will have on UK fishing vessels, operators, or supply chains?
6. What impacts, if any, do you anticipate the proposed management measures will have on non-UK fishing vessels, operators, or supply chains (including those from the EU)?

7. What other impacts could the proposed management measures have? For example, on fishers, the wider fishing community, coastal communities, employment, upstream and downstream supply chains, people with protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010, fish stocks, the marine environment.

If you have evidence to support your response, please provide this to better enable us to consider any comments.

You can save your response as you go so that you can return to it later. Or you could write up your response in a separate document and copy and paste your response into the survey.

All documents highlighted in bold below can be accessed in the related documents section.

Stage 3 interactive maps

To support the formal consultation on management measures for Stage 3 marine protected areas (MPAs), MMO have developed interactive maps called WebApps.

We have also produced a WebApp guidance document on how to access and make the most of each WebApp, to help users provide informed consultation responses.

Background

The Marine Management Organisation (MMO) is seeking views on assessments of the impacts of fishing on, and proposed management measures for, 43 marine protected areas (MPAs) as well as a de minimis assessment (DMA), which captures the rational for, and the predicted costs and benefits of, the proposed byelaw. This will support our analysis and subsequent management of the impacts of fishing activities on important seabed features within 43 MPAs offshore of 6 nm. This consultation will run from 9 June to 1 September 2025. The Stage 3 consultation document summarises the consultation material. A Stage 3 site assessment methodology document has been prepared to outline the process involved in the development of the Stage 3 site assessments.

This consultation is part of Stage 3 of the MMO project to manage fishing in all English offshore MPAs. Stage 3 focusses on managing the impacts of fishing on all seabed features in MPAs not already protected by existing MMO byelaws. Stage 3 MPAs cover an area of almost 31,000 km2.

This latest consultation follows a call for evidence on draft gear-feature interactions documents which ran from 17 January to 28 March 2023. Following consideration of responses, these documents, along with a call for evidence decision document, have now been finalised and are available to view in the related documents section below.

Four byelaws are being proposed;

• North Sea;
• Eastern Channel;
• Western Channel and South west; and
• Irish Sea.

They cover 43 Stage 3 sites and also incorporate existing Stage 1 and 2 measures for consistency and ease of compliance. These proposals will therefore impact 47 sites in total.

The survey has been structured according to the four proposed regional byelaws and their associated MPAs.

The table below highlights which MPAs fall within each of the byelaw regions. Please see the separate site sections of the survey to access the MPA fisheries assessments for individual sites.