Coastguard (Maritime Incident Response Group)

Angus Brendan MacNeil Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Louise Ellman (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab/Co-op)]

I welcome the opportunity to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell, and to debate the Select Committee on Transport’s second report on the coastguard service since the 2010 election. I pay tribute to the nation’s coastguards—both professional staff and volunteers—who provide an essential emergency service, protecting life and limb at sea throughout the year in all weathers.

Last year, Her Majesty’s Coastguard dealt with 2,859 incidents—a 23% increase on the previous year— including rescuing swimmers, divers and people falling off cliffs, cut off by tides and endangered by boat failures. The changes are wide-ranging and involve the maritime rescue co-ordination centres, search and rescue and the maritime incident response group, which deals with firefighting and chemical hazards. I am concerned about all those aspects of the service, and I know that there are ongoing issues, in particular about arrangements for emergency towing vessels.

Today, however, I will focus on changes to the maritime rescue co-ordination centres, which handle calls for assistance and co-ordinate rescues. Reform has been discussed for several years, and the current proposals date back to 2010. The proposals raise major concerns, which is why the Transport Committee has paid close attention to them. We published our first report in 2011 and followed it up in 2012, and we are raising the issue again here today.

In 2010, there were 18 centres spread around the UK coastline, of which the Government proposed to close 10. Their work was to be taken over by the two new 24-hour maritime operations centres in Aberdeen and the Solent area. Five co-ordination centres would remain open during daylight hours only. Under those plans, the number of coastguards would fall from 596 to 370 by 2014, a reduction of 38%.

The main rationale for the changes was the claim that individual co-ordination centres were largely independent of each other and that, as a result, the system as a whole lacked resilience. If a centre was affected by a power cut or overwhelmed by work, we were told, other coastguard stations could do little to help. The proposed maritime operations centre would be able to deal with incidents all around the country and would be able to allocate work to remaining co-ordination centres to iron out peaks and troughs in work load.

The proposals unleashed a storm of protest. There was alarm about the potential loss of crucial local knowledge, particularly in parts of Wales and Scotland where local landmarks can have more than one name in different languages. Local knowledge includes awareness of place names, dialects, tides and currents, geography and the volunteer rescuers available in the area for which the coastguard is responsible. Claims that such local knowledge could be replaced by technology were met with incredulity.

There was alarm, too, about the concept of daylight-only coastguard stations. Would it really be safe to hand over co-ordination of a major incident to new staff, perhaps hundreds of miles away, because it was time to finish work for the day and nightfall had come? Redundancy plans unsettled staff, as did talk of redefining roles, grades and terms and conditions. Many coastguards faced a choice between accepting a new role at a new maritime operations centre in a different location or leaving the service.

In our original 2011 inquiry, we visited coastguards in Falmouth, the Clyde and Stornoway and spoke to coastguards from many other co-ordination centres. We shared many of their concerns about the original plans. In particular, we asked the Government to reconsider introducing daylight-only co-ordination centres, because of the difficulty of handing over rescues. We also highlighted concerns about the loss of local knowledge and the limitations of technological alternatives. I will return to that issue shortly.

The Government published a revised plan in July 2011, which took account of some of our concerns. That plan is now being implemented, but disquiet remains. There will be one maritime operations centre in Fareham, backed up by a co-ordination centre in Dover and eight other co-ordination centres. Eight centres will close; Clyde, Yarmouth and Forth have already shut down. The remaining centres will be open around the clock. The Government have abandoned the concept of daylight-only centres, and I welcome their change of mind.

[Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

The hon. Lady is making a good speech, highlighting the Government’s indecisive “suck it and see, make it up as you go along” approach to maritime coastguard stations in 2011. The same thing is happening to the emergency towing vessels. In the report’s conclusion, the Transport Committee asks the Government to explain how an emergency towing vessel stationed in the Northern Isles can serve the west coast effectively. Is that not a mirror image of what the hon. Lady outlined in respect of the coastguard stations?

[Mrs Ellman]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments. He highlights a crucial issue causing major concerns that have not yet been resolved.

To return to coastguards and co-ordination centres, under the revised proposals, the number of professional coastguards will fall to 436. The new maritime operations centre was due to be operational by April 2014. That has now been delayed until September 2014. Co-ordination centres at Solent, Portland, Brixham, Liverpool, Swansea and Thames are due to close after that.

We published a second report on the revised proposals in December 2012, and we continue to receive deeply disturbing information from coastguards about staffing and morale in the service. It is to those issues that I now turn. The Committee accepted that there is a case for a national maritime operations centre to manage particularly large or difficult incidents, which could overwhelm an individual co-ordination centre or two centres working together. However, we remain unclear about what coastguards at the national centre would do at times when such an emergency was not taking place. Coastguards giving evidence to us said that they had no idea how the new maritime operations centre and the co-ordination centres would work together.

In their reply to our report, the Government spelled out in more detail what they saw as the main responsibilities of the maritime operations centre, particularly in co-ordinating the work of coastguards across the country. The recent agreement on the roles and responsibilities of coastguards under the new system might also bring greater clarity in this area. Will the Minister explain how the new system will work—not just during a major incident, but at quieter times?

We heard strong criticism of the decision to close three maritime resource co-ordination centres before the new system is in place. For example, Shetland coastguards explained that they had to use their own time to gain local knowledge of parts of the northern Scotland coastline for which they would be responsible after the closure of the Forth station. There have been continuing concerns that some co-ordination centres are now severely overstretched.

We were told in March this year that, already, staffing at Belfast co-ordination centre had been below the risk-assessed staffing level on 124 occasions out of 158 shifts. At the same time, Yarmouth co-ordination centre, which has since closed, was moved to daylight-only operations because of staff shortages. It is testament to the professionalism of the service that the closures have been accommodated without major incident.

It was widely believed that ministerial statements and Maritime and Coastguard Agency documents had given a commitment that the maritime rescue co-ordination centres would not be closed until the new system was put in place. This was denied, but the language used by the Minister’s predecessor in the House and some of the documents published by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency back in 2011 were at best ambiguous.

One key area of the dispute is the importance of local knowledge. Coastguards emphasise its importance in their work, and they are tested on their local situational knowledge. Knowing that a particular rock or headland has three names in two languages can help to ensure that assistance reaches people in distress as quickly as possible. The Maritime and Coastguard Agency discounted its significance, considering that local knowledge could be stored electronically, so that it could be used by any coastguard based anywhere. Indeed, when we heard evidence from the chief executive of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, he seemed to disregard the importance of critical local knowledge, which is about geography, tides and currents, language and dialect, and the availability of additional volunteer sources for rescue in the area concerned.

Coastguards remain concerned about the issue. They challenge whether the knowledge built up over many years by experienced coastguards working in their areas can be replaced by databases. Coastguards taking on new areas of responsibility will still be assessed on their understanding of local factors, although it is hard to see how this will apply to the coastguards in the new marine operations centre. Perhaps the Minister will explain what importance he attaches to coastguards having local knowledge and how it will work under the new system and be tested.

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[Mr Alan Reid (Argyll and Bute) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. I congratulate the Transport Committee on its report and on paying close attention to so important an issue, as well as on securing this debate. I join the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman), in paying tribute to both professional and volunteer coastguards—the professional rescue services and the volunteer lifeboat crews, who devote a huge amount of time to rescuing people from the waters around our coasts.

The Scottish Affairs Committee, of which I am a member, has investigated the implications of the changes for the coastguard service in Scottish waters. The Forth and Clyde coastguard stations were the first to close, with their functions being transferred to Aberdeen, Belfast and Stornoway. During its inquiry, the Scottish Affairs Committee found that the Government had clearly failed to carry public opinion with them on changes to the coastguard service, and recommended that the Government

“do more to provide reassurance to seafarers who may need to contact the coastguard in an emergency.”

The lack of public confidence in the changes has not been helped by the fact that Belfast, Stornoway and Aberdeen have consistently been understaffed since the closure of the Forth and Clyde stations. In response to a question from the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil), the Minister placed in the Library a table showing the number of coastguard watches that were staffed below risk levels during the year from May 2012 to May 2013. The table makes uncomfortable reading, particularly in relation to Belfast. From December 2012, when the Clyde station closed, to May 2013, Belfast was staffed below the risk assessed level 71% of the time, which is extremely worrying. During the same period, its partner station, Stornoway, was understaffed 17% of the time. The table does not tell us how often Belfast and Stornoway were both understaffed at the same time, but the figures show that that must inevitably have happened on several occasions.

For the east coast, the figures are slightly better, but they are still worrying. From the closure of the Forth station in September 2012 to May 2013, Aberdeen was understaffed 52% of the time. The only bright note is that its partner station at Shetland was hardly ever understaffed.

[Mr MacNeil]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for highlighting those figures, which are in the Library. The conclusion that I draw from them is that confidence in Maritime and Coastguard Agency management is not what it should be. I lack confidence in it, as I think do people in my community, due to the very figures that he mentions.

[Mr Reid]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the community does not have confidence in the new system. The seafaring community was very nervous about the closure of the Clyde station, particularly because of the loss of local knowledge. When figures show that Belfast, which has become responsible for most of the Clyde area, was understaffed 71% of the time during the six months following the closure of the Clyde station, that clearly increases the seafaring community’s lack of confidence. I hope that the Government will address that point.

More positively, I am not aware of any incidents since the closure of the Forth or Clyde stations in which understaffing at coastguard co-ordination centres has caused a problem in responding to incidents. That is a tribute to the professionalism of the coastguard staff, but we cannot be complacent. As my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) said, the system will be put to the test when there is a major incident. We all hope that there will not be one, but one will inevitably happen at some point, and that will test the system. I hope that the co-ordination centres are all fully staffed before that happens. The Government have undertaken recruitment programmes, and I hope that the Minister will report that they have been successful and that understaffed watches are a thing of the past.

Concern about the loss of local knowledge was one of the main reasons why seafarers were not convinced about the reorganisation of the coastguard. I hope that both new recruits and existing staff now covering a different area will have been trained and tested on their knowledge of the area for which they are responsible. I hope that the Minister will reassure the House on that.

I am pleased that the Government have listened to the concerns that were expressed and have arranged for two emergency towing vessels to be available in Scottish waters. However, there is concern on the west coast that both vessels are based in the northern isles, and that one is no longer based in Stornoway. I note from the Government’s response that in moderate sea conditions it will take approximately eight to nine hours for an emergency towing vessel to arrive at a position between North Minch and the Little Minch and, in heavier weather when an incident is more likely to occur, it will take about 11 to 12 hours. It will take even longer for the emergency towing vessel to get to the southern Hebrides in my constituency. I hope the Government will have another think about basing an emergency towing vessel in Stornoway and bear in mind the extreme environmental damage that an oil spill would cause. They should compare the costs of a clean-up with the costs of an emergency towing vessel based in Stornoway. After all, prevention is better than cure.

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[Mr MacNeil]

Iceland, which has suffered major financial trauma in the past five years, has actually gone in the opposite direction from that taken by the UK Government in northern and western Scotland. Does the hon. Gentleman not feel that a huge error has been made here and that the calculation that should be done is the ongoing cost versus the cost of any incident that could occur? I have a terrible feeling that the Government are spoiling the ship for a ha’p’orth of tar and that we really should have that emergency towing vessel in Stornoway now.

[Mr Reid]

As I have said, prevention is definitely better than cure. It is important to stress that there are two emergency towing vessels in Scottish waters—the same number as there were before—so the Government clearly listened to the concerns that many of us expressed. None the less, the hon. Gentleman makes the important point that one of the vessels should be based in Stornoway to cover the west coast.

[Mr MacNeil]

The hon. Gentleman says that there are two vessels, but it is their location and what they are actually doing that is the problem.

[Mr Reid]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that it is not the number of vessels that is the problem but the location. There is no vessel based in Stornoway to cover the west coast, and I hope that the Government will take that on board.

I also note that funding for the emergency towing vessels is only guaranteed until the end of the current spending review period in 2015, which is not far off, so I hope that the funding will be guaranteed on a permanent basis. The seas around the west coast and islands provide the basis for much of the local economic activity. Preserving lives and the environment is vital, as is reassuring seafarers that rescue will come quickly if they get into difficulties. Our coastguards, both professional and volunteer, and the professional rescue services and volunteer lifeboat crews do a tremendous job. They deserve to be backed up by a properly resourced system of co-ordination and emergency vessels. I hope that the Minister will be able to give us some assurances on the issues that I have raised today.

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[Mr Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure and privilege, Mr Rosindell, to serve under your chairmanship and to speak for the first time as the Front-Bench spokesman with responsibility for this area. Like others, I pay tribute to the work of the coastguards. Both the regulars and the volunteers do a fantastic job, as do the other sea rescue agencies that they work with.

I am conscious of the fact that this area is both complex and difficult and one to which I am new. Having served as a Parliamentary Private Secretary in a range of Government Departments and sat on two Select Committees, I know that there are no easy answers, either political or administrative, in such issues. However, the business of Government can be improved by three things: evidence-driven policy, wide consultation with stakeholders and using Select Committees as a critical spur to challenge too many paper or computer-driven scenarios.

Evidence-driven policy has often been lacking, as the Select Committee discovered after much prodding and probing over the past two years. The deficiencies in the process are clear. As the Select Committee pointed out, there was no thorough public consultation and the original proposals were deeply flawed. To their credit, the Government responded to those points, but it is concerning none the less that, even at this stage, the Select Committee, two years on from the original proposal, still has some specific concerns about the direction of responsibility.

There are big issues around greater local interoperability and they seem to have been ignored or ducked. In many cases, the Government seem to have put the cart before the horse, closing MRCCs before the maritime operations centre is fully operative, and there are widespread woes, as we have already heard this afternoon, that local knowledge is being spurned and not transferred.

We know that the day-today co-operation between MOC and the centres is soon to be replaced by the coastguard operation centres. The Government say that coastguard officers will be trained more broadly and extensively, making them more flexible. We have already heard about how local knowledge can be shared between local coastguards. However, I have a question, which echoes what the Chair of the Transport Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman), said—how can local knowledge be shared when so little time has been allowed for handover between the closing of MRCCs and the neighbouring centres? Also, how will staff in the MOC gain this information for all their areas? I understand that on one occasion the Department for Transport spokesperson said that they could use social media, but the Minister must be aware that there are very strict conventions within the maritime service about how social media are used, so perhaps he would like to examine that issue or comment on it.

The Government have also said that the MOC will oversee a range of services, including search and rescue, but do more resources need to be put aside for it also to manage the introduction of a newly privatised search and rescue service and to have the capacity to adapt to the longer term search and rescue solution? I ask the Minister, specifically, what confidence he has that Dover, as a back-up to the Fareham-based MOC, will be far enough away from Fareham to provide an effective back-up, so that a serious event could not result in both centres being incapacitated at the same time?

At the close of the second consultation, at the end of November 2011, the then Minister—the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning)—admitted that concerns had already been expressed about having both an unmanned centre and back-up in the south, when they should perhaps be more geographically separated.

Of course, there are also wider issues of collaboration here. If the Government boast that this change is a thorough overhaul of the service, why has there been no broader assessment at any stage of the relationship between the coastguard and the MOC, and the other traditional rescue services—the beach patrols and lifeguards that local councils run, the fire and rescue services, and crucially the relationship with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, which is not only about central administration but local volunteers?

Recently, I have put a couple of written questions to the Minister on that issue. I will just quote from the reply to one of them:

“The RNLI, like coastguard rescue teams, independent lifeboats, rescue helicopters and other rescue facilities, are not affected by these changes.”—[Official Report, 15 October 2013; Vol. 568, c. 661W.]

I submit that if anyone ever wanted to see an example of silo mentality in a Department, there it is. I invite the Minister to comment on why I received that written response.

[Mr MacNeil]

Will the hon. Gentleman take this opportunity to state whether he believes an emergency towing vessel should be based in Stornoway? Indeed, will he commit to such a vessel being based in Stornoway in the future?

[Mr Marsden]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He and his colleague, the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Mr Reid), have already raised that issue and I will return to it later in my speech.

How do the Government expect fire and rescue services in particular to develop proposals for an at-sea presence without direct central funding, at a time when local budgets are more stretched than ever? I know that there is, of course, a piecemeal arrangement along the south coast, but so far as I am aware that does not extend elsewhere.

In response to the Select Committee, the Minister has produced positive scenarios about the interaction of MOC staff and MRCC staff, but the Committee has rightly pressed the Government on major incident scenarios. If we look at the Government response, we see that page 7 contains a list of actions that superficially seem impressive. I came to this brief from looking at further education funding. In that sector too, there are wonderful diagrams about the process of money and the process of communication, and I am sure that if the Minister got his officials to produce a complicated diagram of the various steps that are listed on page 7 it would be even more impressive. But the crucial question is how long it would take the complex chain of command detailed on page 7 to operate and respond. That will be the determination of how effective the MOC is, and raising that issue underlines the continued concerns and disquiet that members of the Committee and other hon. Members have expressed today about emergency vessels.

I turn now to the issue of staffing, because that has already been talked about in considerable detail. The demographic profile of coastguards is highly skewed towards older employees. The Minister’s own figures, from the Government response to the Committee, show that, for example, in Falmouth 14 of the 33 coastguards are over the age of 50 and in Humber 16 of the 27 coastguards are over 50. So those valued employees will probably be leaving the service during the next five to 10 years and taking their experience with them, at the same time as there is major upheaval in coastguard operations. In addition, there is currently a growing loss of valuable expertise in the service. For example, only one of the London coastguards has more than 20 years of experience. Therefore, the emerging picture is that no replacement generation of coastguards is coming through with the extensive service that is needed both to replace those who will soon leave and to oversee the introduction of the new system.

In 2011, the Government proposals estimated a total reduction in staffing numbers from 596 to 370, with coastguard numbers falling from 491 to 248. Therefore, there will be an increasing reliance on volunteers, with the number required rising from 80 to 105. We have already heard today about some of the problems with volunteers, so could the Minister give more up-to-date figures on the assessment of job losses as a result of this reorganisation?

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[Mr Marsden]

That is a nice try, but the hon. Gentleman knows that we cannot make commitments to future funding until we have seen the books, after the next election. He also knows that the first step in making decisions in this area is to do a proper analysis, which the Government have failed to do.

When the Government responded, initially—

[Mr MacNeil]

Will the hon. Gentleman explain the difference between his position and the Government’s? He seems to be talking about investigations tomorrow. There is no firm commitment whatever to looking into the real, pressing need, as identified in the Select Committee report. It is fluff we are hearing from the hon. Gentleman.

[Mr Marsden]

I regret to say that the hon. Gentleman would do better to stick up for his constituents, rather than play party political games. He knows perfectly well that the real issue is whether there will be support in the short term, and that is an issue for the UK Government, so perhaps he will turn his attention to that in future, rather than play political games.

[Mr MacNeil]

What is the difference?

[Mr Marsden]

I am not taking another intervention from the hon. Gentleman.

There was an airy response from the Department in October 2010, when it announced why the process would proceed as set out. It said:

“ship salvage should be a commercial matter between a ship’s operator and a salvor.”

In my view, that shows that the Government do not get it. What about the pollution issues, in respect of which ETVs have been proposed as a solution?

We were told in the original assessment that the removal of a commitment to ETVs would save £32.5 million over the spending review period, but, for example, we heard the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) mention her concerns about the length of time it might take for an ETV from the south coast to come and deal with an incident in her area. I have already talked about the problems and deep concerns on the east coast about tanker-to-tanker oil transfers. If a major pollution incident were to take place, how much of that alleged £32.5 million saving would be swallowed up in cleaning costs? This decision is based on an assumption that the private sector would pick up the tab. However, outside Scotland, where, I gather, specific commitments have been made recently, there is no evidence that it will do so. The Transport Committee was right to label this, in June 2011, as potentially a dangerous situation.

The Government’s response to this issue over the past two years has been a curious mix of detailed response to the Select Committee’s excellent report and prodding, and dangerous complacency. It is quite clear that, throughout the process, emotional intelligence and a sense of the need for co-operation from the work force has been severely lacking.

The end of the Department’s most recent response to the Committee’s report slipped back into a Maoist view of permanent revolution, which will do little to assuage the concerns of coastguards and coastal communities, about services that liaise with the general public. The Department dismissed the comments about the future, saying, “You can’t make decisions for a generation.” Of course, no Government can guarantee no further change, but it is important to respond in a considered, thoughtful way to a Select Committee report, rather than arrogantly.

Generations are normally considered as periods of 30 years. Earlier this year, I attended a moving unveiling ceremony in Blackpool on the 30th anniversary of three police officers losing their lives in a sea incident. That brought home to me the need for all emergency coastal services, whether voluntary or statutory, to co-operate and collaborate. That is what we should be looking for out of this process—as well as answers to the detailed questions that the Transport Committee has still to receive.