House of Commons
Wednesday 21 February 1996
The House met at half-past Nine o'clock
PRAYERS
[Madam Speaker in the Chair]
Ferry Safety
[Relevant documents: The Fifth Report of the Transport Committee of Session 1994-95 on Cross Channel Safety, (House of Commons Paper No. 352) and the Government reply thereto published as the Fifth Special Report of Session 1994-95 (House of Commons Paper No. 642).]
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.--[Mr. Wells.]
Mr. Paul Flynn (Newport, West):
We have had dreadful proof of the mighty power of the sea, the tide and the wind, and of how puny our efforts are to deal with mother nature at her worst. I refer to the unfolding catastrophe of the Sea Empress, which is relevant to this debate because the problems at Milford Haven are similar. All hon. Members pay tribute to the heroic work of the tireless salvers. We must look for the cause of this tragedy, which is the same as the threat to ferry safety.
This is an incredible, sorry story of Government complacency towards the compliance of the maritime industry. This is a story of an industry that has, over many years--with the Government's help--pursued minimum safety standards in search of maximum profits.
This debate is in my name as a Back Bencher, but it was also sought by the Transport Select Committee.It was the first time in the history of Parliament that the Committee had sought a debate. I shall concentrate on the work of the Committee, on which I have the great honour to serve.
Mr. Graham Allen (Nottingham, North):
Does my hon. Friend accept that had the Government implemented the Donaldson recommendations on adequately powerful tugs--one tug in the western approaches--and that had the two tugs that are in position been called from Scotland and southern England and put into place at Milford Haven, what has sadly been an accident could have been prevented from becoming a disaster on the coast of Wales?
Mr. Flynn:
We are all conscious of the remarkable complacency of just two days ago, when we were told that all but 17 of the recommendations of the Donaldson report had been put into place. My hon. Friend the Member for Pembroke (Mr. Ainger), who is currently at Milford Haven--he had hoped to participate in the debate--is very knowledgeable about sea safety because he worked in the industry for many years. He is convinced from his research that the power of the tugs was hopelessly inadequate--the vessel was pulling the tugs, rather than the tugs pulling the vessel.
This was a key recommendation of Donaldson after the Braer disaster, and it has not been implemented. These matters will be investigated. The Government must demonstrate that they will make a far greater effort to support the marvellous work of the salvers. Unfortunately, the equipment that they have is not up to the massive job before them.
The Select Committee decided to investigate cross-channel safety because it was concerned about the potential danger of the channel tunnel--a new road was to go under a large stretch of water, and that had never happened before. The Committee--which had no axe to grind and no interests in these matters, other than to serve the cause of safety--came out with a different view.We were reminded that crossing the channel is nothing new. Fifty years before the birth of Christ, Julius Caesar twice took an army back and forth across the channel, as he recorded in "De Bello Gallico". He states:
Those wonderful words can, I am sure, be understood by all those who have had the benefit of a comprehensive education in good Labour-controlled authorities. But for the victims of public school education perhaps I had better explain that Caesar wrote triumphantly that, of all those ships--he brought across 800--and in all those voyages, not a single ship carrying troops in that or the previous year was missing. That was an incredible achievement and surely now, 2,000 years later, when we have become so sophisticated, we should be able to relax and feel entirely happy about taking a journey across the channel.
The story that we, as members of the Committee, heard unfold in the evidence was not that the channel tunnel was dangerous--in fact, we concluded that the statistical evidence showed that the channel tunnel was 600 times safer than the M4. As a result of what we heard, three members of the Committee said that they would never take their families on board such ferries again until major improvements had been made. How has the ferry industry got away with it for 13 years?
The rule for all other forms of passenger transport is failsafe. When something goes wrong, when a weakness is identified, measures are taken to ensure that if the systems fail again, they will do so in a safe condition.But the condition of channel ferries is such that if catastrophic flooding occurs, they will not fail in safe conditions, but will fail lethally and catastrophically. When we heard the evidence, the shipping industry's patronising attitude was alarming. Those in the industry said that we had nothing to worry about because the men in suits, with titles such as admiral and sir, would not do anything that was unsafe, and nor would the Government. They told us to trust the Government and said that we had nothing to worry our little heads about--it has ever been thus.
The extraordinarily influential shipping lobby is as powerful now as it was in the last century, when the merchant shipping legislation of 1850, which had been a major improvement, was abandoned by Parliament under pressure from the profit-hungry shipping companies of the time. That lobby still commands the unique backwater, where safety rules are archaic and primitive when judged by the standards of other passenger safety. The families involved in the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster said:
But 13 years after the sinking of the first British ro-ro,no plans existed when we made our report--although they are being introduced now--to correct fully the design fault that threatens 2,000 deaths in a single incident.
A ferry has been in difficulties for 18 hours in the English channel. In the past week a ferry ran aground on a journey from Germany to Scandinavia. In the past month a ferry capsized in Indonesia in two minutes.All the publicity surrounding that incident involved the two survivors and the Government told me that they would not even be investigating the incident. They were not interested because it was not a British ferry and it was not in British waters.
Very few people are aware of the first disaster in Britain, although the warning bells should have been heard at that time. The disaster involved the capsizing of the European Gateway, a freight ship, in 1982. It left no lasting imprint on the memory of the British people because only six people died. A collision with another vessel caused the flooding of the Gateway's car deck. The Royal Academy of Engineering warned that the cure for the fundamental fault had not been implemented for pre-1990 ferries and only peripherally for some post-1990 ferries. A collision will be the most likely cause of the next roll-over accident. In the past three years there have been 15 significant collisions in St. George's channel,35 in the English channel and 58 in the North sea. None of them was serious, but British ro-ros were involved in 15 of them.
After the Zeebrugge disaster, Baroness Thatcher rightly said that she
Some 48 hours later the Government said something different. Presumably having been got at by the ferry industry, the then Secretary of State for Transport said:
It is a disgraceful indictment of the Government that they should try to build confidence in something that is inherently dangerous. As with most ro-ro ferry disasters, it was caused by a combination of two factors. Human error causes 73 per cent. of all marine accidents and the remaining accidents are caused by other faults. However, in the case of the ro-ro ferry, the Government--in the form of the Prime Minister--were originally right to identify the problem as a design fault, but they then decided to change their reaction, under pressure from the ferry industry.
9.34 am
"Uti ex tanto navium numero tot navigationibus neque hoc neque superiore anno ullo omnino navis, quae milites portaret desideraretur."
"Of all forms of transport where an organisation is responsible for the safety of customers, RoRo ferries represent the highest risk to the user."
21 Feb 1996 : Column 283
The Royal Institute of Naval Architects had an even starker warning. It said:
"A collision with one of the new fast ferries and a tanker would create a disaster of enormous consequences."
"understood that it was a fundamental design of these vessels that was the problem, and that something would have to be looked at very quickly to reassure the public."
"The loss of the Herald was not due to design problems. It was entirely due to operational error."
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