Marine Navigation (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Lord Eames and Lord Berkeley

Friday 1st February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, in moving this amendment to the Motion, I would like to refer the House to its wording at the bottom of grouping sheet, which has somehow been printed at the bottom of all the amendments to the Bill. This is what I am speaking to now. It is unusual to put down an amendment to a Motion such as this, but we are in slightly unusual times—as we come up to the end of the Session—because we had two days’ notice of the Committee stage today. I had a useful meeting with the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, and her officials on Monday, where I said it was particularly important that we should see a reply to the letter which we had all been sent from Brian Simpson MEP, chairman of the Transport Committee in the European Parliament, to the Secretary of State for Transport. I said that I needed to see that reply before we discussed it in Committee. Once I knew what the date was, I put the amendment down on Wednesday night and, miraculously, the letter appeared on Thursday morning. That was good news, but it gave us just 24 hours to consider it. As it did not answer the main question that Mr Simpson had asked, I felt it was reasonable to ask for a week’s delay to the Committee, which is what my amendment is about.

As I said, the letter did not answer the concerns that Mr Simpson raised concerning the qualification of the pilots, an issue I have discussed before. I declare an interest as chairman of the UK Maritime Pilots Association, as well as being a harbour commissioner in the port of Fowey in Cornwall. It appears from Mr Simpson’s letter to the Secretary of State, from which I will read a short bit, that it causes him and his committee in the European Parliament some concern, since,

“this clause would appear to be in contravention of the STCW regulations of the IMO which have now been enacted into EU law”.

I will show in a minute that I think those regulations are already in EU law. It seems very odd that in this Bill we have a definition of the management, qualifications and experience required for a PEC holder when there is already one in EU law, which I believe has already been transposed into UK law. I am not very sure, because I have not had time to check it, but since it started about 10 years ago I think it has.

There is also a new directive coming out. Very quickly, this refers to the standards of training, certification and watchkeeping for seafarers from 1978, which were amended on 3 August 2010 by the IMO. They cover the management and operational levels and define those two levels, while giving:

“Mandatory minimum requirements for certification of officers in charge of a navigational watch on ships of 500 gross tonnage or more”,

and the minimum knowledge. I could read the whole thing out but I am sure that noble Lords will be pleased to hear that I will not. The important thing is that this defines, under Section A-II/2, the qualifications, competence and experience that masters and first mates have to have; those have to be applied to PEC holders.

It is pretty extraordinary that we were not told about this at a previous stage of this Bill because it directly relates to the debate that we had at Second Reading, and which they had at many stages in the House of Commons, about the qualifications for pilotage. For the record, the latest reference for this is in European directive 2012/35, which was completed on 21 November last year and will be presumably be brought in by regulation within two years. However, it is already there from the last version; this was the Manila version.

It is rather sad that the Minister, Stephen Hammond, did not in his reply mention that or answer any of the questions. He ended up by saying on page two of his letter that it is for,

“the Master or First Mate”,

to decide whether a PEC holder is qualified. That seems a quite extraordinary misinterpretation of the rules. It is not up to the master to change the requirements for training or seniority of a person to allow him to become a PEC holder, because the convention we are talking about lists three specific cases in which penalties are to be applied. If the master is found to have allowed unduly qualified persons not holding the right certification, et cetera, to perform a function, he is liable to be fined, as is the company. Of course, the person concerned may also get fined.

I will be very interested to hear the Minister’s response as there seems to be a serious conflict on the management, levels and skills required for a PEC holder between the legislation that came from the IMO, through Europe, to here and what is in the Bill. Can the Minister say whether this conflict was known about? I presume that it was and I am sorry that noble Lords were not told about it earlier. I suggest that the Minister and the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, bring forward a suitable amendment on Report, if it can be done, to link the existing regulations in the directive with the relevant parts of Clause 2 because there will otherwise be court actions coming out of people’s ears. When people find out that they have two regulations, and that one works for them and the other does not, they will all be going to court—and the ports, the pilots and everyone else will be the losers. It is very important that this matter is resolved and I beg to move.

[Lord Eames]

My Lords, in supporting the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, I declare an interest as a member of the Royal Yachting Association. I cannot imagine a greater recipe for the lawyers of our knowledge than the conflict that the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has exposed before us today. The question of qualifications, training and their wedding with experience is a very sensitive area in the maritime world. We are not dealing simply with a technical matter. We are dealing with one of the most sensitive issues, which concerns people who are transported, people within the marine industry and people with an interest in our ports. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has put his finger on one of the most sensitive issues—this is not a technical attempt to restrain the legislation or prove difficult about it—which has to be given the closest possible attention because there is a conflict in places between these two edicts. The conflict, in my experience, will lead to an open charter for many months and years to come unless we are satisfied as a House that every possible examination has taken place of the difficulties between these two approaches.

I am also convinced that where there is any question of conflict, not only does it raise issues of a purely legal nature, but it puts into contempt the sort of respect that people ought to have of the whole industry. For that reason, I too will be very interested in what the Minister says about what examination has been made of this conflict. Has it been given the attention that it deserves?

I also regret the way in which the legislation has been produced today, on a Friday, with so little notice to many of us who come a great distance to attend the House. At this early stage, I ask that very serious consideration be given to the Bill by the Minister, for whom I have the highest regard and who has always been most helpful when I have raised issues with him. However, in this instance I believe that the full import of what the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, says has yet to be realised by the Government.