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Mr. Lee Scott (Ilford, North) (Con): This is a Bill of only a few pages, yet it has the potential to make a significant increase in the level of financial compensation available in the event of a large oil spillage from a ship. It will also allow the United Kingdom further to control emissions from ships.
 
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Most of the goods and food imported or exported to and from Britain travels by sea. Britain is surrounded by major shipping routes and the English Channel is the world's second busiest international waterway. In the main, transporting goods by cargo ship is an environmentally friendly form of transportation. However, when it goes wrong, it can go spectacularly wrong.

The United Kingdom's miles of coastline are at high risk from spills from tankers, and three of the world's worst oil spill disasters have occurred in UK waters. We need only remember the Torrey Canyon off the Isles of Scilly in 1967, the Braer off Shetland in 1993, and, as we have heard, the Sea Empress off Milford Haven in 1996, to illustrate how damaging such an incident can be. Oil slicks do not respect maritime national boundaries, so it is only through co-ordinated international action that we can arrive at a successful solution to that type of pollution.

This Bill will bring the United Kingdom into line with international efforts to tackle the appalling effects of oil spillages. It will allow the UK to implement two important international treaties: the first greatly to improve the compensation for oil pollution and the second to take measures to reduce air pollution from ships.

Over the years, we have seen graphic television images of the effects of oil spills on the environment, on wildlife and on local people. Sadly, the effects can be very long term, and they can wipe out species in an area and destroy local livelihoods. Marine oil pollution can have devastating effects. The television pictures of disasters, such as the Exxon Valdez incident that took place in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1989, made us all too familiar with the dreadful images of polluted coastlines, oiled sea birds and mammals and the other damage caused to wildlife. The local coastal communities lost their fishing and tourism industries to this major oil spill. The sinking of the Prestige in 2002 saw the discharge of 63,000 tonnes of oil, and fishermen, local hoteliers, restaurant owners and others along the Portuguese and north Spanish coast were all badly affected. In the Torrey Canyon incident off Land's End in 1967, it was quickly clear that the then existing arrangements for compensating those who suffered damage were woefully inadequate.

It has to be recognised that the recent figures from the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation show that the number of oil spillages has reduced by around one-third since the 1970s. Large spills have reduced dramatically. Most spills from tankers result from routine operations such as loading, discharging and bunkering. These most often occur in oil terminals or ports, and most result in an oil discharge of less than 7 tonnes. Incidents in which the tanker collides with another ship or harbour facility or when it runs aground are what normally lead to the larger oil spills. Almost 20 per cent. of these result in spills where more than 700 tonnes of oil are lost.

The one third improvement in reducing oil spills is explained by the introduction of better crew training, improved terminal handling facilities, better technology and, most significantly, by the introduction of double-skinned hulls for tankers. Unfortunately, numbers of older singled-hulled vessels still operate, many under flags of convenience. Inspection shows that one in 12 of
 
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the foreign vessels inspected in the United Kingdom are unseaworthy and have to be detained. This is a disgrace. Elsewhere in Europe the situation is worse, with almost three quarters of ships inspected found to be suffering from severe deficiencies.

I am concerned that some countries have not yet announced plans and a timetable to sign up to the supplementary fund protocol. A number of these countries are flags-of-convenience carriers or open-register countries and have significant registered tonnage. Most are party to the old fund regime, but not to the new one. It would be common sense for those countries that join the new protocol to deny access to their waters and ports to ships from countries that do not sign up to the scheme by the deadline date. If this is not done, tanker operators from the countries signed up to the protocol will be working at a competitive disadvantage.

Given the greater risk of catastrophic oil spillage from a singled-hulled tanker, these should certainly be banned from entering European Union waters. There was discussion some time ago on this matter, and I would like to know from the Minister whether the Government would support such a ban.

The Bill also enables the UK to reduce air pollution from ships by implementing measures to control emissions. Ships are getting ever larger, as are their engines, and they produce a great deal of sulphur and nitrogen emissions. Some improvement can be made by reducing the sulphur and nitrogen content in marine fuel, but more innovative ideas are being tried by firms such as P&O. It has fitted a device to one of its Dover-Calais cross-channel ferries called an eco-silencer—a "scrubber", in effect. This is designed to cut sulphur emissions by 95 per cent. and nitrogen oxides by 80 per cent. I understand that many other companies are considering similar proposals.

A number of ports in the USA and Canada have introduced revised structures that allow ships in harbour to draw electrical power from shore. This has the great advantage that it enables the ship to turn off its engines in port while it loads or unloads, thereby reducing pollution in the port and the surrounding area.

There are two other areas of ship-produced pollution that I would like to discuss. The first is the improper disposal into the sea of rubbish and human waste. The second is the transportation of non-native species in the ballast water of a ship that is then disposed of at sea thousands of miles away. These exotic newcomers can then become a serious threat to native plants and animals. These issues are covered, as is oil pollution, by international laws, rules and agreements. However, in too many cases, the polluter is not prosecuted or even identified. I seek an assurance from Ministers that this is an issue that they will look at.

Like my colleagues, I fully support the Bill and welcome it.

2.35 pm

David T.C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con): I am grateful for the opportunity to speak and perhaps I should declare an interest. I worked for several years in a shipping company that is owned by my parents. I have no financial interest whatever in it at the moment. Perhaps I should also come clean and say that I suppose
 
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that it could be argued that, because of some of the things that I saw going on there, we have contributed directly in a very small way to pollution for reasons that I shall come to shortly.

The other side of the coin is that perhaps I have a unique perspective on the issue. At the time that I worked for the company, I would also leave at about 4 o'clock, travel down the coast and go surfing off the coast at Porthcawl. I would do that week in, week out for most of my 20s. On one occasion, we were ordered not to go into the water by the police because of a spillage that had taken place. I can therefore say that I have been both a contributor to, and victim of, maritime pollution.

There is a lot of good news and, in commending the Bill, it is worth picking up on the statistics that were mentioned earlier. I do not want to undermine anything said by my hon. Friends, who are quite correct about the problems that exist. However, there is a lot of good news and, in a spirit of consensus, we should pay tribute to this Government and previous Governments going all the way back to the 1960s. There has been a growing realisation of the importance of better standards of maritime cleanliness.

When one talks to people who have worked in the industry for years, they will speak about some of the bad practice that has gone on, but has now largely been stopped. I refer to the emptying out of tanks and bilges. That was absolutely commonplace a few years ago. It may still happen—I do not deny that—but much of it has been stopped because of the good work of organisations such as the International Maritime Organisation and the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. They are able to go on board ships to check logbooks and to ensure that ships docking at UK ports make use of the facilities that have been put in place to clean out tanks and bilges.

Collisions are now less of a risk because in busy sea lanes, such as the Dover straits, there are clear shipping lanes that ships must go up and down. They cannot just set their compass and go anywhere they want. As the Minister has said, there is now an ongoing programme to phase out single-hulled tankers and to bring in double-hulled ones. We have certainly come a very long way; there is a lot of good news.

I do not, however, think that we should be too complacent. Headline-grabbing disasters still take place and, as I saw in the office when I worked for the company, many smaller incidents of spillage and pollution happen regularly. We used to find that we were regularly told that containers coming into the UK for which we had responsibility had been washed off a ship as a result of bad weather. I said that we were responsible for a bit of pollution, but the containers for which we were responsible contained only tea. Presumably, that does not do a lot of damage. Nevertheless, many nasty things are carried around in containers, and it is not uncommon for them to be washed over the sides of ships. Perhaps the Minister will bear that point in mind and confirm that the fund, if it is ever needed, will also apply to such small-scale incidents that could turn out to be very expensive if the wrong types of goods are washed overboard.
 
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There are two reasons for the problem. The first is bad weather, and I appreciate that there is not much that the Minister can do about freak weather conditions and tidal waves. We do not expect him to stand there like Moses with his staff, ordering the storms to calm down and the waves to part. However, I sometimes think that his leader thinks that he could probably do that.

One issue that the Minister could consider is training. The comments that have been made about levels of training, particularly on flagged vessels from certain countries, are very relevant. Tragically, within the past fortnight, a seaman was killed on a ship that was leaving the port of Newport where I used to work. I know something about that incident, but I will not say much while it is under investigation. Suffice it to say, however, that basic safety procedures were not being carried out at the time. The Minister must agree that the issue of training arises over and over again, and it is particularly pertinent to flagged vessels. I hope that he will look into that.

When ships come into UK ports, they must take on board a pilot for many of those ports unless the master can get the exemption licence. To do that, he would have to undergo some tests within the UK. I am told informally that many of the masters tested, from certain countries, are found to have such a poor sea knowledge that not only will they not qualify for the exemption, but had they taken the test in the United Kingdom they would never be allowed to be put in charge of a UK-flagged vessel. Clearly, training is a real issue in relation to some of the vessels coming in. I will not specify any country in that regard, because some of the countries mentioned today have taken steps to raise their standards. The Minister will be aware, however, that not all such countries have done so, and that overall training levels can be poor.

On air pollution, I echo the comments of those who pointed out that whatever problems are sometimes caused by ships, shipping is one of the greenest ways of moving goods from A to B. It is of great concern to me that, at the moment, much of the freight destined for the United Kingdom on ocean-going vessels goes straight into one of two ports, usually Felixstowe. Sometimes Felixstowe is skipped altogether and it goes into Rotterdam. From there, UK forwarding companies must arrange the delivery of vast numbers of containers to their final destination by lorry. I know that rail freight services are available, but without going into too much detail, they do not operate as efficiently as one would hope. Many movements take place by road, which results in additional expense for the consumer, the environment suffering and the roads getting clogged up.

Much greater use of the current facilities around the United Kingdom would be desirable, and it should be fairly easy for the Minister to do that. I will not stretch your patience, Mr. Deputy Speaker, by talking about the amendment that I tabled but that was not called. It would be completely wrong to do so. Suffice it to say that the Minister can do a lot to help the environment by ensuring that more of our goods are moved around by ship.

I recognise that there are problems, and that the Minister recognises that we do not live in a perfect world. Things sometimes go wrong, and that is what this Bill is all about—putting in place a mechanism for dealing with something that, we hope, will not take
 
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place. I wish the Bill God speed, and I hope that it sails through Parliament's legislative channels as easily as a supertanker through the straits of Dover.

2.43 pm

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