WHAT WE DOWe licence, regulate and plan marine activities in the seas around England and Wales so that they're carried out in a sustainable way.
This helps the government achieve its vision for clean, healthy, productive and biologically diverse oceans and seas.
WHO WE ARE
We were created by the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009 and are now a team of almost 300 people. We combine our Newcastle upon Tyne and London operations with a local presence around the English coastline in North Shields, Scarborough, Grimsby, Lowestoft, Harwich, Hastings, Shoreham, Poole, Portsmouth, Brixham, Plymouth, Penzance, Whitehaven and Preston.
OUR RESPONSIBILITIES
We’re responsible for:
- managing and monitoring fishing fleet sizes and quotas for catches
- ensuring compliance with fisheries regulations, such as fishing vessel licences, time at sea and quotas for fish and seafood
- managing funding programmes for fisheries activities
- planning and licensing for marine construction, deposits and dredging that may have an environmental, economic or social impact
- making marine nature conservation byelaws
- dealing with marine pollution emergencies, including oil spills
- helping to prevent illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing worldwide
- producing marine plans to include all marine activities, including those we don’t directly regulate
- enforcing wildlife legislation and issuing wildlife licences
OUR GOALS
Our goals to 2030 are:
Goal 1 - Work with partners to restore functioning marine ecosystems introducing increased levels of protection and improvement to our marine environment.
Goal 2 - Manage a responsive and widely owned English marine planning framework that prescribes the strategic priorities for using and managing our seas, integrating terrestrial planning policies across the range of marine sectors.
Goal 3 - Ensure MMO is recognised as a world leader for the marine management activities it regulates and the services it delivers across England, UK and Internationally.
Goal 4 - Manage an agreed framework for a culture of compliance through leadership, co-management and earned recognition leading, where appropriate, to self-regulation.
Goal 5 - Support global marine protection by example and through sharing our expert marine management services.
Goal 6 - Assure the sustainable and transparent management of fishing opportunities to achieve a resilient and increasingly viable fishing sector.
Goal 7 - Maximise value from the use of evidence and data while ensuring effective specification, capture, integration and sharing of marine data and information.
WORKING FOR MMO
We recruit people across a wide range of roles at all levels of the organisation. This may be in a support related area like finance, core-related activity such as policy implementation or in very specialist areas related to the marine area and fisheries industry.
