§ Mr. WrayTo ask the Secretary of State for the Environment if he will list, for each year since 1987, all the monitoring controls for eutrophication carried out on the coasts of the United Kingdom.
§ Mr. Heathcoat-Amory[holding answer 13 March 1990]: As a consequence of the second North sea conference in London in November 1987, the Department of the Environment and the Scottish Development Department wrote to water authorities in England and Wales and river purification boards in Scotland to establish if evidence of eutrophication could be found in coastal waters. Similar surveys were made by the Department of Agriculture for Northern Ireland. These surveys have shown that evidence of eutrophication is confined to a handful of small, localised inshore locations.
For this reason no regular and formal monitoring of eutrophication—algal blooms—is conducted or planned in the United Kingdom. Attention instead is being focused on trends in nutrients levels in coastal waters and detailed examination of fluxes of nutrients through estuaries. A regular monitoring programme is maintained by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food along the eastern coast of the United Kingdom for paralytic shellfish poisoning in mussels. This is caused by blooms of certain algal species which produce natural toxins. The occurrence of paralytic shellfish poisoning on this coastline has a long but intermittent history and is not believed to be linked to eutrophication.