Merchant Shipping (Fire Protection) Regulations 2023

Baroness Randerson Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenway (CB)]

My Lords, I think this is the first occasion we have had to welcome the Minister to her new post as Shipping Minister. My mind goes back nearly 40 years to when it was almost de rigueur for the Shipping Minister to reside in this House, so it is extremely welcome to have a Shipping Minister back with us again.

These draft resolutions are extremely important, as has been pointed out by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott. Fire, as she said, remains one of the major areas of disaster at sea. Ships, thank God, are not usually built of wood any more but they carry all sorts of noxious substances that burn like hell if they catch fire and there have been a number of notable examples recently even of car batteries catching fire and sinking ships.

I should say we are almost here again. Every time we have one of these regulations coming forward, we say the same thing: why has it taken so long for this to be incorporated into British law? The original fire protection regulations were in 2003 and almost immediately there was a change in 2004. As we have heard, there have been about 20 such changes since then. Why has it all suddenly come into one thing nearly 20 years later? It hints, dare I say it, at a certain amount of sloppiness in the department that these things have not been dealt with more promptly.

Our standing is still, thank goodness, very high in the International Maritime Organization but things like this cannot help in due course. I know we do not have the merchant fleet we had many years ago but we are still an important player in the maritime scene and I think we should be acting more promptly to agree new regulations.

The “ambulatory reference” provision is most welcome because I hope it will put an end to all this complaining about delay because when new regulations come out of the International Maritime Organization it will be automatic in future.

I certainly have a lot of sympathy with the noble Baroness, Lady Scott. The performance of this country has not been up to scratch in these maritime matters, but I welcome the fact that everything should be sorted out by the end of this year.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I start by thanking my noble friend for tabling her amendment and giving us the opportunity to raise these important issues. I also thank the Minister and acknowledge her efforts to tackle this backlog which is of such concern to us all. I want to mention here the role of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, of which I recently became a member. I have often referred to its excellent work in making sure that our attention is drawn to these important lapses.

As others have said, this SI relates to a total of about 20 IMO resolutions which successive UK Governments have so far ignored. Some of these, as has been pointed out, date back 20 years. The Minister referred to resources and I think that reveals to us how hopelessly beyond the Government’s capacity are their plans for the future revocation of EU law. If they cannot manage 20 year-old IMO regulations on fire, they are not going to manage several hundred transport-related pieces of legislation.

All of this relates, of course, to fire protection and, as has been pointed out, fire is one of the greatest dangers faced by mariners and their passengers. It is important to remember that these regulations relate to passenger vessels. That means that there will be people on board who are not professionals, not trained in how to respond if a fire breaks out, and not familiar with how things work or the layout of the ship; in other words, there are lots of people on board—the passengers—who are an additional risk, so it is not just mariners and their status we should be concerned about.

Some of these 20 regulations are about fire detection—the design of extinguishers and storage arrangements. As the Minister said, they are very technical. But some of them are about the basic design and construction materials of the ships concerned. So we could be talking about a maritime version of the Grenfell situation, where dangerous materials have been used. I have no reason to believe that that is the case, but I have no evidence, and neither do any of the rest of us, about whether there is a problem, because it has not been the subject of regulation.