Draft Hovercraft (Application of Enactments) and Merchant Shipping (Prevention of Pollution) (Law of the Sea Convention) Amendment Order 2022

Flick Drummond Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2022 General Committees

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Robert Courts)]

I beg to move,

That the Committee has considered the draft Hovercraft (Application of Enactments) and Merchant Shipping (Prevention of Pollution) (Law of the Sea Convention) Amendment Order 2022.

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Ms Rees. Hon. Members will be glad to know that the purpose of the order is to give the Government the powers they will need to apply the pollution prevention requirements in the international convention on standards of training, certification and watchkeeping for seafarers—which I will refer to as the STCW convention for brevity—to hovercraft, and to provide strengthened enforcement powers for breaches relating to the prevention of pollution. Those powers are needed as a result of the repeal of section 2(2) of the European Communities Act 1972, which provided the powers for the pollution prevention requirements in the regulations that currently implement the STCW convention, including the application of those requirements to hovercraft.

The order amends the Hovercraft (Application of Enactments) Order 1989 to apply the Merchant Shipping (Prevention of Pollution) (Law of the Sea Convention) Order 1996 and certain provisions of the Merchant Shipping Act 1995 relating to pollution prevention to hovercraft. In short, the order amends the 1989 order to apply the 1996 order and bits of the 1995 Act to hovercraft. I hope that makes sense to the Committee.

[Mrs Flick Drummond (Meon Valley) (Con)]

Will the Minister say exactly how many hovercraft the order is going to affect, and whether it will affect the hovercraft service from Southsea to the Isle of Wight?

[Robert Courts]

Yes, I can answer that question. I was alarmed at the intervention—I wondered whether my explanation thus far had not been clear. The only hovercraft that are operational in the UK at the moment are those that operate from Southsea, near my hon. Friend’s constituency, to the Isle of Wight. Those are not covered by the order because they operate only in internal waters. The order applies to external waters, and there are not currently any hovercraft operating in the UK that would be caught by it. None the less, it is important that we make the order so that future hovercraft would be covered by pollution regulations, for reasons we all understand.

The 1996 order provides powers to give effect in secondary legislation to the pollution prevention obligations in the UN convention on the law of the sea, or UNCLOS, with which we should all be familiar. Those obligations are often found in other international conventions, including the STCW convention, which sets out the standards that must be met for seafarers to obtain the internationally recognised certificates that are required if they are to work on vessels that operate internationally. The Hovercraft Act 1968 confers power on Her Majesty to make an Order in Council that applies any enactment relating to ships to hovercraft. The 1989 order serves that purpose, but it needs to be updated to include provision relating to the prevention of pollution.

The 1989 order, which is best thought of as an enabling order, contains some provision for the application of pollution prevention measures made under the Merchant Shipping Act, but it does not include the 1996 order, which is the relevant one for the purposes of pollution prevention. This order will fix that. It will ensure that the pollution prevention obligations in UNCLOS can be applied in full to hovercraft in the way that they already apply to ships. It will also bring some other measures up to date and apply them to hovercraft.