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4.40 p.m.
Lord Campbell of Croy: My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister for the very clear explanation that he gave in introducing the Bill. I am also exceedingly glad to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Donaldson, who mastered the subjects involved in this very wide maritime field. Soon after his report was published, I presided over a very large meeting of the Parliamentary Maritime Group at which he spoke on his report and answered most effectively a penetrating range of relevant questions.
The Bill is mostly concerned with the recommendations in the Donaldson report, which was published in May 1994. The Donaldson inquiry was established after the "Braer" incident in January 1993, but it was a general inquiry. I make that point because there has been misunderstanding in the media and elsewhere to think that it was just looking into the "Braer" incident. It was a much wider inquiry. I congratulate the noble and learned Lord and his team, whom he mentioned, on what they have done. Since the publication of that report, the "Sea Empress" accident occurred in February. That disaster underlined the need for most of the Donaldson recommendations to be acted upon soon. I welcome the fact that a place has been found for the Bill in this shorter than usual Session of Parliament. The Government have accepted the large majority of the Donaldson recommendations.
The virtue of a Second Reading debate is that one can consider those recommendations which are included in the Bill and also recommendations which are not in the Bill. It seems that most of the recommendations which require legislation are in the Bill. I note that the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, made use of this Second Reading debate to make a wide-ranging speech about the international shipping industry in general. He made use of this valuable opportunity.
In the Bill I welcome the proposals for powers to be granted to the Government to establish temporary exclusion zones and to extend the scope for intervention by the British Government both in general and on occasions when pollution incidents have occurred. As my noble friend Lord Goschen and other noble Lords will recall, in the Bill there are two particular subjects which have been raised by me in debates and at Question Time. The first is about improving at ports and terminals reception facilities for waste, and not only oily waste. The principle has been generally accepted. What is now needed is a comprehensive system which is then made obligatory. We also need to encourage foreign ports, especially in western Europe, to adopt similar arrangements.
The second subject is the application of fines for marine pollution offences. In the Bill (Clause 7) the maximum is increased fivefold. My noble friend the Minister gave me a foretaste of that in response to my questions a few months ago, and again I welcome it. But what I pointed out and about which I complained was the low level of fines that in practice have been imposed. The average fine recorded in annual figures has been derisory compared with the maximum. I accept that this is a delicate matter and the Government cannot
dictate to the courts or interfere. That is a principle that we all respect. The decisions are for the magistrates to take in the circumstances of each different case. But I hope that after the Bill is enacted the Government will ensure that the new maximum fine is made widely known to all concerned.Most of the pollution of the seas, originating at sea rather than from rivers and land sources, is the result of deliberate discharges at sea or in or near ports. Pollution which is most difficult to police is not near land but where winds and currents can distribute it along our coasts. It includes garbage as well as oily wastes. In Recommendations 15 to 28, the Donaldson report made excellent suggestions in this field. Some have been accepted by the Government and others are under consideration. Monitoring, detecting, identifying and penalties are the essential parts of this deterrent operation.
I am glad that the Bill contains provisions for the fish factory ships, following Recommendation 77 in the Donaldson report. As has already been mentioned, these are known as klondykers. I remind your Lordships that their main function is to be at anchor receiving fish caught by local fishermen. In the United Kingdom most of them have been stationed on the coast of the Scottish West Highlands at Ullapool, for more than 20 years; more recently they have been stationed at Lerwick in Shetland. They have provided a very useful secondary market for our fishermen, especially when there is a surplus of fish being caught. In the United Kingdom they deal mostly in mackerel.
The klondykers have come from eastern Europe and beyond, not from within the European Union. They themselves do not fish in European Union waters. For them it was a time of crisis when the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union were breaking up and after that period. Some of them had inadequate insurance, if any, and Clause 15 should help deal with that in the future. Some were simply substandard rust buckets. I hope that as the countries of eastern Europe settle down, following the disappearance of the Iron Curtain, only ships in a good state and properly insured will come to the United Kingdom. They are needed by British fishermen and those foreign seamen are, on the whole, popular in the maritime areas of Loch Broom and Shetland, where they are anchored for weeks or months. I raise the question--the matter can be pursued in Committee or at Report stage--as to whether stronger powers should be granted to our Government and Parliament to control those klondykers in the future.
Points of interest in the Donaldson report but not matters for legislation are, for example, the suggestion in Recommendation 20 for the worldwide use of the English language in maritime affairs. That is in order to improve safety. That is accepted in principle by the Government, but I see that there may not be international approval for it, particularly from the French, who are always possessive about their language.
Another recommendation is for the use of transponders by wider categories of vessel. They are automatic ways of identifying vessels from the land and there should be a programme for introducing
them internationally. The Government accepted that in principle. It is not a matter for legislation but I draw your Lordships' attention to that excellent recommendation.Recommendation 61 on routeing and navigation off North-West Scotland is of particular interest to me. I am glad that the Government accepted that and will support it through the IMO.
The noble Lord, Lord Callaghan--I am an old-timer in these matters, having been in both Houses of Parliaments for nearly 40 years--was the founder of an organisation known as ACOPS (Advisory Committee on Pollution of the Sea, now called the Advisory Committee on the Protection of the Sea). That was a far-sighted act and I must declare an interest because for two periods I was chairman of that organisation. We must pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Callaghan, because that was the first organisation in the United Kingdom to monitor and record oil pollution and make recommendations as to how it should be dealt with.
Lord Clinton-Davis: My Lords, I omitted to declare my own interest in that regard and offer my apologies to the House. I am currently chairman of the organisation and I pay tribute to the work that was done in the past by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, in supporting my noble friend Lord Callaghan.
Lord Campbell of Croy: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for making that comment. It indicates that this is a measure on which there is all-party support and we ought to make sure that the Bill proceeds through Parliament quite quickly, though we make the points we want to make about improvements or future measures that can be taken to follow it up.
As a somewhat light-hearted postscript perhaps I may point out that the clearing of the beaches in Wales this year after the "Sea Empress" episode was carried out with great industry and efficiency. But two days ago it was reported in the press that some areas had again been polluted by oil--this time it was 4,000 bottles of suntan oil unintentionally dislodged from a cargo vessel at sea. That confirms the intention of the Bill to cover all possible, even unexpected, sources of pollution.
4.53 p.m.
Lord Chorley: My Lords, this is the second Second Reading this week of a Bill which is of importance to the National Trust, and once again we warmly welcome the Government's proposals. The reason it is important to the trust is simply that we protect for the nation, mostly through ownership, around 600 miles of coastline. That is a lot of coast and comprises nearly 40 per cent. of what is officially designated as Heritage Coast. Almost all of that coast is open to the public and is enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of visitors, mostly for its superb scenery and wildlife.
A pollution disaster like that of the "Sea Empress" grounding off St. Ann's Head was a traumatic shock for us, not least because St. Ann's Head is in the trust's ownership, as is much of the Pembroke coast and the Gower, all of which were affected. Mercifully, the oil
slick stopped just offshore of Lundy island, just off the North Devon coast. That was literally providential. Nevertheless, along the South Wales coast our staff and hundreds of volunteers worked around the clock seven days a week on the big clean-up. I do not need to go into that in any detail except to remark that our visitor numbers are 10 to 15 per cent. down, bookings of our holiday cottages suffered and the coastline at our Stackpole education centre was badly affected.Like a major fire or a break-in of a country house, pollution disasters are the kind of thing one hopes will not happen. When it does it is traumatic. It is for that reason that we regard this as a timely Bill. As has been said, it is also a technical Bill and I confess that I do not understand all its detail. I shall therefore restrict my remarks to just a few points.
The essence of the Bill is to implement the great majority of the excellent recommendations of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Donaldson of Lymington, and his team, whose report was published in 1995. The Bill before us does not deal with two of the recommendations, Nos. 59 and 85, both of which were referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, in his opening remarks. The first concerns the marine environmental high-risk areas and the second the need for adequate provision of salvage tugs at strategic locations.
I do not need to add to what the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, said, except perhaps to remark that it has been stated that if there had been a proper salvage tug in Milford Haven last February, the worst of that disaster might have been avoided. I am aware that both recommendations are under consideration and I accept that neither needs legislation. I note also that they are part and parcel of the raft of necessary measures required to protect our coast adequately and both are in urgent need of progressing.
I turn now to the Bill itself. In general terms, it will do a lot to improve the protection of our shores. In particular, we welcome the provisions relating to port reception facilities (Clause 5) to which I shall return in a moment. We also welcome the realistic fines which are proposed. In that connection, am I right in believing that the quantum of fine can be altered--for example, to take account of inflation--by Order in Council or by some other simple method? I should know the answer to that, but perhaps the Minister (who knows all these things) can confirm whether that is right. The provision in Clause 10 for powers to move ships is important, as is the power to inspect and detain vessels in Schedule 1.
I turn to two aspects--I believe I speak for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds as well as for the National Trust--which need to be tightened up. I want to make a third point also relating to clarification. First, in relation to waste management plans (Clause 5), the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, said all that needs to be said. We support him over the need to make the harbour authorities prepare plans rather than making it the responsibility of the Minister to start the relevant process.
Secondly, a similar point arises as regards the making of regulations in respect of the transhipment licences--the Klondykers. There again, the noble Lord,
Lord Clinton-Davis, probably said all that needs to be said. He also included in his remarks the suggestion that such licences should also require adequate third party insurance or other security. In that respect, Clause 15 is perhaps not quite sufficient.Finally, and following on the last point, it appears that the present position of third party losses is currently unsatisfactory if our experience of the "Sea Empress" case is anything to go by. I refer to the difficulty of fully recovering our clean-up costs and business losses. It is probably the case that Clause 15 will now deal with this situation in future in a more satisfactory way.
There is the further point as regards damage to what I believe are termed "non-use resources"--that is to say, resources to which a monetary value cannot readily be ascribed. The obvious example is the destruction of wildlife; for example, birds. I understand that in the United States liability for such damage is now provided for under the Oil Pollution Act 1990. I shall be most interested to know either today or through a letter what the Government's thoughts are on that matter. As I see it, Clause 15 does not go into it. I accept that this is a very difficult area, but the losses incurred are nevertheless very real, albeit difficult to estimate.
I suggest that these three points--waste management, transhipment licences and insurance cover--can best and most easily be examined in Committee. In the meantime, I congratulate the Government on bringing forward this measure and I wish it a speedy passage.
5 p.m.
Lord Murray of Epping Forest: My Lords, I join my noble friend Lord Clinton-Davis in thanking the Minister for bringing forward the Bill. I also commend him for the other ways in which he has sought, perhaps not always successfully, to improve maritime safety. I and my colleagues in the National Union of Marine, Aviation and Shipping Transport Officers, of which I am a trustee and in which I declare an interest, wish him success, not least in his arguments with the Treasury.
A measure of the importance of the Bill is that some 6,500 foreign ships visit our ports every year. There are some 80,000 ship arrivals annually in the United Kingdom of which 32,000 are tanker movements. Increasingly, cargoes carried by ships are potentially hazardous or polluting, as we have heard. Those pollutants include oils, chemicals and gaseous mixtures. So Clause 13, which brings into effect the 1996 convention on hazardous and noxious substances is welcome.
As has been emphasised, shipping accidents are increasingly likely to cause immense environmental and economic damage, long-term damage to marine life and devastation to fishing and tourism. Oil pollution is simply the most visible form of environmental damage caused by shipping accidents. Some of the chemical cargoes carried in ships are so noxious that they can still be toxic in large concentrations of water as, for example, in the case of the flag of convenience cargo ship "Perentis" which sank in the Channel in 1989. It carried
six tonnes of the chemical Lindane, which is toxic to the nervous system and used as a pesticide. It is banned in many countries. The container has never been found and is lying at the bottom of the sea, presumably waiting to break up and discharge. It is one of the many environmental time bombs in our waters.The waters around the United Kingdom contain some of the world's busiest and most dangerous sea routes, requiring the highest standards of shipping and, I emphasise, as did the report of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Donaldson, seamanship. So Britain has a vested interest in marine safety. But, increasingly in our waters, we are seeing substandard ships, which are poorly maintained, poorly operated and crewed by seafarers many of whom are only there because they are prepared, or are forced, to work for coppers.
As the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, said, the Minister has shown a welcome awareness of the dangers inherent in the situation. Therefore, we welcome the adoption of the Standards of Training, Certification and Watch-Keeping Convention 1995, which should come into effect next spring. The decision to invite the noble and learned Lord, Lord Donaldson, to undertake the inquiry was far-sighted, as demonstrated by the results.
The Bill is a partial response to the report and in itself can provide only a partial response to the critical needs of the situation. I hope that the Bill will be improved in detail and that it will be backed up through executive action by the Government. National legislation cannot provide the whole response. On the one hand, owners, seafarers and their unions, charterers and insurers all have their part to play as well as the Government. On the other hand, as has been emphasised again and again, co-operation in setting and enforcing standards at the international level is critical.
In their report the noble and learned Lord, Lord Donaldson, and his colleagues looked beyond the "Braer" grounding and drew attention to the impact of the depression suffered by the shipping industry. We, too, must look beyond this Bill and see it in the context of our failures of over-tonnaging, debilitating competition and an increasing rate of exodus to the flag of convenience registers. Many of those registers lack the ability or the political will, or both, to police effectively, if at all, the standards of the ships on their books. Many have little or no connection with the country whose flags the ships fly. The Bill seeks to grapple with the rise in the number of such registrations, which has been matched by a decline in worldwide shipping safety standards. Flags of convenience now account for some 40 per cent. of the world's fleet, but they account for 60 per cent. of the world's shipping losses. These are the ships sailing into our ports and now carrying more than twice the volume of UK deep sea trade carried in United Kingdom registered ships. That is why we need to take action to deal with them.
What the Minister said about the importance of international co-operation was emphasised by both employers and seafarers' unions at this year's maritime session of the ILO, which made some welcome, agreed progress on hours of work, minimum standards and labour inspection. The Minister and others have paid
tribute to the IMO. I would like to pay tribute to the determined leadership given by Mr. Bill O'Neill, secretary of the International Maritime Organisation, in the drive towards improving shipping safety, notably through better implementation of IMO agreements by flag states, which again is reflected to some extent in this welcome Bill.However, merely improving our capacity to monitor and deal with the substandard and dangerous foreign tonnage, which is infesting and, as we have heard, often polluting our waters, is not enough. We have to deal with the root causes. If we are going to deal effectively with them, it means that, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Donaldson, has reiterated time and time again, we have to make it more expensive for owners and managers to run, and for charterers to hire, a dangerous ship. The OECD study on the competitive advantages of the non-observance of international standards, published earlier this year, showed that shipowners can more than halve their costs by flouting internationally agreed safety rules.
Clause 12 of, and Schedule 2 to, the Bill seek in part to address that point. But the danger is that they may be a move in the wrong direction or at best a wrong move in the right direction. In the port state control context, charges or even fines are less likely to reduce sub-standard operation than punitive detention. I would like to see the Government affirming their support for the principle of punitive detention in appropriate cases and working for agreed action on an international basis by all port state control states.
Even if it is accepted that charging may be part of the answer, it would in my view be wrong to impose on all shipowners blanket charges for a range of services such as port state control, the investigation of marine accidents, search and rescue, and emergency towing. That would, according to the compliance cost assessment, impose charges of some £20 million to £30 million a year on the maritime sector as a whole and good owners would be subsidising substandard operators.
I took note of the caveat expressed by the Minister and of his hope that we should not find it necessary to impose such charges, but I suggest that to put such provisions on the statute book would be a constant temptation, if not to him, then to the Treasury. What we should be doing is punishing the malefactors. While port state control costs about £1 million a year to operate, barely £60,000 a year is generated by charges for second inspections of ships failing checks. Such charges do not provide a sufficient deterrent to substandard operators. They should at least be increased to a generally punitive level and, where appropriate, be complemented by punitive detention. That would begin to make some of the rust-bucket operators sit up and take notice.
But are the Government prepared to address their mind to ways of penalising other parties who contribute to the survival and operation of substandard ships, including classification societies, cargo owners and charterers? Are the Government prepared to address their mind to ways of encouraging good practices? There is in particular ample evidence that many
classification societies completely fail to establish and enforce satisfactory safety standards. Too many of the ships failing port state control inspections are "in class", as demonstrated on occasion by their masters producing faxed certificates of safety provided without any actual inspection.Insurers, too, have a responsibility. Perhaps in the spirit of the comment made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Donaldson, the insurance market might suggest to the Liberian authorities that unless they mend their ways--and their ships--their ships and cargoes will not get any insurance. If that is regarded as too draconic, how much more open to criticism is the owner who deliberately sends a ship to sea in a condition which endangers the lives of its crew? And how much more reprehensible are the governments and classification societies which actively connive with him in doing so? Perhaps, as an alternative, we should, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Donaldson, has been heard to suggest, require owners to travel on their ships.
What I hope your Lordships will resist is any attempt to introduce charging into this area as a means of raising revenue for the Treasury--in effect imposing a new tax on those who operate safe ships. I echo the suggestion of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Donaldson, that any revenue so raised should be ring-fenced. Any revenue which might accrue from selective and punitive charging should be applied to enforce standards of safety and, in particular, to reverse the cuts in expenditure imposed by the Department of Transport on the two major maritime safety agencies, the Coastguard Agency and the Marine Safety Agency. Those cuts are ill advised, reduce the ability of the front-line agencies to combat the increasing problems around our coast and, indeed, run counter to the purported direction of the Bill.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Donaldson, practically opened his report with the statement:
- "It is generally accepted that human error is the cause of about four fifths of marine accidents".
- "We are surprised that the figure is so low: we believe that human error, at some stage ... is the root cause of virtually all accidents".
A third-world crew can be employed for around one-third of the rate of a north-west European crew. What owners are buying for that is inexperience, poor training, inadequate or non-existent certification and language and communication problems--in short, they are buying unsafe ship operation. What we are getting are hazards on our seaways and in our ports, pollution, environmental contamination and deaths at sea. The revised STCW convention and the new international safety management code will do something to address poor operational standards. What they will not in themselves do is make good the shortages of skilled and experienced officers or counter the continuing fall in cadet recruitment to which your Lordships, among others, have repeatedly drawn attention and to which my noble friend Lord Clinton-Davis referred today. Only if we get that right will the main provisions of this useful Bill and the international conventions to which it seeks to give effect secure the objectives of improving maritime security and increasing the safe operation of the world's merchant fleet.
5.16 p.m.
Lord Boyd-Carpenter: My Lords, as one who over 30 years ago was Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation. I very much welcome the Bill, which deals with a number of very important issues. It was lightheartedly described by my noble and learned friend Lord Hailsham as a "rag-bag of useful changes". Characteristically of him, that is probably an accurate description. I rise mainly to say how glad I am that Her Majesty's Government are tackling possible changes which could improve the position of British shipping.
Although very little has been said about it in the course of the debate, we are considering the Bill against the background of a serious and alarming decline in the British Merchant Navy. Many of us find it sad to see how British commercial shipping has diminished. Not only is that sad; it is also dangerous. Not only is it economically damaging for the country, but it could be a military danger. If we were ever involved in a war--I hope that we will not be, but we may be--it is possible that we might be blockaded and shipping from other countries might not be able to reach us. I hope and believe that it is the intention of the Government to reverse that alarming decline in the British Merchant Navy.
The reduction in the number of British ships has undoubtedly affected the matter and it is to remedy that position that a good many of the Bill's provisions are being brought forward. I very much hope that they will be effective. I shall refer to only one or two matters in a Bill of which, generally, I fully approve and which I enthusiastically support.
I turn first to Clause 7 which covers the penalty for discharging oil in certain UK waters. The amount that can be imposed by way of fine in respect of that matter is very much increased. The figure is multiplied by five. I ask my noble friend the Minister why a limit is being imposed at all. If damage in excess of £250,000 is inflicted, why should those responsible not pay for it? Given both the increasing size of tankers and the price of oil, it is more than possible that a disaster may occur in which considerably larger amounts will be involved.
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