Wreck Removal Convention Bill

Lord Boyd of Duncansby Excerpts

Friday 13th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Boyd of Duncansby]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on having brought this Bill to the House and so ably explaining it to us. She said that she was a novice; I believe that Dr Coffey is also a novice. It is good to see the Bill being piloted through Parliament by two such excellent novice pilots. To keep on this bad metaphor, I doubt that we are going to have a parliamentary shipwreck.

This convention is a welcome development in the law of the sea. I am not a maritime lawyer so I have to confess at the beginning that I am indebted to an article by Richard Shaw, senior research fellow at the University of Southampton’s Institute of Maritime Law for some background on this convention. The evolution of it goes back to the wreck of the “Torrey Canyon” in March 1967. As many noble Lords will remember, it came to grief off the Scilly Isles outside the then territorial limit of 3 miles. It hit a submerged reef, the Seven Stones, discharging slowly 115,000 tonnes of crude oil. The question was: how did the United Kingdom then deal with it? Eventually, it was dealt with by high explosives being dropped on the wreck, followed by napalm to set the oil alight. There were questions of the efficacy of such a procedure and of the legality of dealing with a wreck outside the territorial waters.

That wreck led to the 1969 International Convention on Civil Liability for Oil Pollution Damage and an International Convention Relating to Intervention on the High Seas in Cases of Oil Pollution Casualties. Yet under these conventions, the ability of the coastal state to intervene when faced with a major oil spill outside its territorial limits was severely limited. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982 created a new sea area, the exclusive economic zone, within which there are certain limited rights, including the protection of the marine environment under Article 56 but, crucially, not the safety of navigation. The need for this convention is illustrated by an incident in 1984, when the French ship “Mont-Louis” collided with a passenger ferry outside Zeebrugge and came to rest on a sandbar—again, outside the territorial limits. The Belgian authorities served a wreck removal order on the owners of the ship but it was unclear whether they actually had the jurisdiction to do that. Fortunately, the issue was settled amicably but it raised the real issue of how one deals with wrecks outside the territorial limits.

The convention follows three principles. First, there is a grant of rights to a coastal state to remove a wreck from its exclusive economic zone if it represents a hazard to safe navigation or to the marine environment. Secondly, there is strict liability on a ship owner for the cost of reporting, marking and removing a wreck if required to do so by a coastal state. The third principle is of compulsory insurance and, crucially in this respect, the ability to take direct action against the insurers or those giving financial security on the equivalent provisions in the 1969 convention.

I appreciate that there have been some concerns raised, in particular by the Chamber of Shipping, and I anticipate that some of those may be raised later in this debate. In evidence to the Transport Select Committee in the other place, the Chamber of Shipping, although it supported the convention, expressed reservations about the consequences for light-dues payers as a result of passing obligations on to the general lighthouse authorities. At this point, I suppose that I should mention an interest as a past commissioner of the Northern Lighthouse Board. I am sure that if this matter comes to Committee with amendments, we shall deal with those concerns in more detail at that time.

However, the question of where liability should rest is of course important. Should it be with the General Lighthouse Fund and thus the industry or with the Exchequer? At Third Reading in the other place, Dr Coffey referred to the “Lagik”, which was grounded off the River Nene in 2000. The result was that it closed the port of Wisbech for 44 days. She asked the other place, quite pertinently, to imagine the resulting disruption if that had been Felixstowe. Of course, there would have been consequences for UK trade but there are other ports to which some of the cargo could no doubt be diverted. The main impact, I suggest, would be on the industry and it is right that the taxpayer should not have to bear these responsibilities.

Yet it is also right that the impact on the industry should be minimised, so far as possible, which is done by two particular aspects of the Bill and the convention. The first, as we have heard, is for the compulsory insurance of all ships over 300 gross tonnage and the second is the provision to allow the state to claim for costs arising under the convention to be brought directly against the insurer, thus minimising any exposure to the General Lighthouse Fund. Both those aspects seem to me to be important elements. It is also important that the lighthouse authorities themselves believe that these provisions will in fact mean a diminution in the costs on the General Lighthouse Fund as a whole and therefore, in consequence, on light dues. Once again, I fully support the convention and look forward to debating the Bill further in this House.