Merchant Shipping (Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping) Regulations 2022

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Greenway (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for outlining these new regulations that, as she has explained, implement amendments made to the STCW convention. I think we were all taken aback by the size of these regulations; in fact, if I took time to read right through them, it might take almost as long as these regulations have taken to reach this House. We are playing catch up again, but I am pleased that we are now getting on with it, and I have no real queries with the regulations.

I see that pleasure craft are included, and I think there are limits. I cannot remember what the length and tonnage is for pleasure craft, and I have not had the time to work it out, but could the Minister tell me if it brings the Thames Clippers operating on the Thames here into the remit of these regulations?

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I also congratulate the Minister and her officials. I think I should also congratulate the MCA, which has probably done most of the work and produced some amazing documentation; I think we are all very grateful to it. As the noble Lord, Lord Greenway, says, it has taken a lot of reading and I will not go through many of these things, but I have a couple of questions for the Minister.

First, concerning the heading “Application” in Part 2, the noble Lord, Lord Greenway, asked about the Thames Clippers. I saw that the minimum weight was 80 gross tonnes and the length 24 metres. Which ships on the Thames does this apply to, as he asked? We debated life jackets on ships some time ago and I trust that has all been sorted out.

I have another question on this section. We see that it does not apply to foreign- registered vessels, which we know, but in Regulation 5(2)(e) we get an exclusion for

“wooden ships of primitive build”.

Can the Minister say what a wooden ship of primitive build is? Does it have to be over or under 24 metres? Is it powered by sail or motor, and where does it go? The only criterion seems to be that it should have a UK flag, if it ever had one. I do not know about that, but I suppose my concern is that these regulations go into great detail. I notice that only 25 UK-registered ships are owned by small businesses, and you can understand why: if they have to plough through all this and comply with it, the answer is they probably will not. That is quite a worry.

I am not sure how much of these provisions will apply to foreign-registered ships in UK waters. Does anybody check on those? Do the other ports of registry for ships have similar requirements to this—let us hope they do—or will we have one law for the British ones and one law for the rest of the world? As the Minister said, we want to encourage UK-registered ships but if this is the only country of registration that requires 200 pages of documents to be gone through, that is hardly an incentive.

Finally, I have often raised the question of enforcement before on different things. The Minister mentioned human error in her introduction. There have been a couple of interesting accidents with ships this summer, including the MV “Alfred”, which seemed to hit an island in Orkney on 5 July. One has to question how, in broad daylight, that happened with safe manning. I am sure we will see the results of an inquiry into that. I hope that in implementing and enforcing these regulations, the MCA will be given enough staff and resources to do it properly—it will be largely down to them—so that we have a good reputation for following these regulations, rather than just publishing more bits of paper.

[Lord Jones (Lab)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness for her helpful introduction and exclaim, as others have, at the huge challenge that these pages offer to those who have little or no expertise on what is clearly a vital matter. This is a doorstep of regulations, Explanatory Notes and, shall we say, additional pages. Taking into account the principle that the Executive are to be questioned and held to account, which in this instance is virtually impossible by what might be called a Back-Bencher, I want to ask the Minister about the importance of training, which is now a priority for all Governments in succession.

I am looking at page 37 and its references to nautical colleges. Might the Minister say who reports to her department regarding assessment and inspection there? Does she know, or is her department able to say, how many nautical colleges there are? Is it possible for her to say what the number of students is in the average nautical college? Where might they be located?

On that basis of attempting, in principle, to question the Minister, I say that time is of the essence so I shall sit down.