Marine Navigation (No. 2) Bill

Lord Chidgey Excerpts

Friday 18th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Chidgey]

My Lords, noble Lords may be a little surprised to find me straying from my usual area of interest in international development policy to join this Second Reading debate, but I have three reasons for doing so: first, a long association with some major ports and with the Royal and Merchant Navies; secondly, historic family ties with the development of pilotage and coastal shipping; and finally, the content of the Marine Navigation Bill itself. By the end of my speech noble Lords may wish that I had stuck to my preferred policy area. Nevertheless, I shall plough on, or perhaps “sail on” is the right expression to use.

In my younger days, I had the good fortune to win a place with the Admiralty as a student engineer based in Portsmouth Naval Dockyard, home to Nelson’s HMS “Victory” and in its heyday the largest industrial complex in the world. There I spent my formative years studying and training in a naval shipping environment. Noble Lords who are familiar with the south of England will know that just along the Solent lies the commercial port of Southampton, famous for its ocean liners connecting the United Kingdom to North and South America, Africa and the Far East. Cunard, P&O, Union Castle—all the great shipping lines sailed out of Southampton and through the Solent with its two tides a day, mixing with the warships out of Portsmouth, the submarines out of Gosport, the ferries to and from the Isle of Wight, France and Spain and, during the summer months, mingling with literally hundreds of pleasure craft on a daily basis.

The skills you learn during your formative years seem to embed themselves more readily, and the grounding I gained in marine engineering from the Admiralty—when we had an Admiralty, that is—together with an awareness of the procedures of sailing, particularly small craft in busy sea lanes, are not entirely forgotten. I believe that they may have some relevance when it comes to examining this Bill.

My second reason for contributing to this debate is in recognition of my forefathers who for generations earned their living as master mariners on the west coast of England and beyond. The family business was running a fleet of coasters under sail down the Bristol Channel and beyond to Wales, Liverpool and Ireland. They sailed out of Watchet, an historic port on the north Somerset coast. Along that coast the tide rises and falls by more than 40 feet and bars were built across harbour entrances to retain sufficient depth of water to keep ships afloat at low tide. At other times harbour bars created a navigational hazard which added to the constraints that needed local pilotage knowledge and skilled deckhands to bring ships under sail safely into port. Coastal ketches and sloops that my ancestors sailed generally had a crew of four or five when under sail at sea. To sail them into or out of Watchet harbour, however, needed extra hands provided by the local community. They were known as hobblers. “Hobbling” is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as ad hoc unlicensed pilotage. Some might say, “Those were the days”.

Hobbling was lucrative and thus became a competitive occupation. Hobbling families vied with each other to glean advance information of shipping movements ahead of their rivals and secure hobbling work. They would race out to ships in the channel in their rowing boat, put a pilot aboard if the skipper did not have local knowledge, and then sail the ship into its moorings. Inevitably, violence broke out among the three Watchet hobbling families until, in 1864, the landlord of the London Inn, himself a master mariner—one George Chidgey—brought them together and thrashed out agreements to share the work and responsibilities in a sensible manner; thus was formed the Watchet United Sailors Benefit Society and for the first time the long established Watchet Hobblers’ pilotage was regularised as a precursor to the pilotage system we are debating today. Some time during this period, a family ketch, the “Florrie”, was sunk in a storm off Land’s End with the loss of all hands, who all came from several generations of Chidgeys, and thus effectively brought to an end my family’s engagement in merchant shipping.

That brings me to my third reason for speaking in the Second Reading of this Bill. Alerted by the various depositions from organisations affected by the Bill, I took the time to study what proved to be an excellent briefing pack provided by the House of Lords Library. As noble Lords will know, this is not a new Bill. It started under a previous Administration and has been recycled as a Private Member’s Bill. There is nothing wrong with that. However, reading through the briefing pack, I found that issues being raised now in your Lordships’ House seem to have been raised previously and, to a degree, debated in another place in a previous Parliament. Therefore, I take it that the outcomes then, which involved tweaking of elements of the Bill, particularly Clauses 2 and 5, as the noble Baroness has mentioned, have not entirely laid to rest the concerns expressed. Therefore, I welcome the opportunity to debate this further in this House.

I refer specifically to concerns regarding pilot exemption certificates being awarded to crew members other than masters or first officers, who are, of course, also known as mates. For example, Alistair Singleton of the Liverpool Pilotage Service Ltd, by his own reckoning an authorised pilot with 36 years’ experience in the shipping industry, has written to me about his concerns. He tells me that the proposed amendments to the Pilotage Act 1987 give him a great deal of concern, pointing out that pilotage in the UK is, first, a public service whose development over time should be carefully weighed before making changes. Mr Singleton says that,

“it demands that the highest standards are maintained for the protection of the environment and the safety of life at sea. Their relaxation for profit is not appropriate”.

I cannot help thinking that that is a sentiment with which my ancestor George Chidgey, master mariner and latterly landlord of the London Inn and founder of the Watchet United Sailors Benefit Society, could do nothing but agree.

Noble Lords may well have received a four-page letter from Captain Cockrill, chairman of the UK Maritime Pilots’ Association. In it, he comments on the proposal to deregulate pilotage exemption certificates and, in a covering letter together with a six-page analysis of the impact assessment in the Bill, he argues that Clause 2 should be deleted in its entirety. I noted that, in evidence to the Transport Select Committee, Captain Cockrill was particularly concerned over this issue and by the fact that, as he claimed, no risk assessment statement had been provided.

Furthermore, I have heard from Mr Tim Nuttall, another Liverpool pilot, who has called into question the belief that competent harbour authorities would not issue pilot exemption certificates to unqualified individuals thus compromising safety of navigation. He cites his experience of a case at the port on the Humber, where the services of well over 100 experienced pilots were dispensed with to be replaced with unqualified, inexperienced mariners from around the globe—this is a serious claim. The outcome was claimed to be a litany of serious accidents, collisions, groundings and near misses, keeping the marine accident investigators extremely busy for a decade—something that I am sure can be checked.

Finally, I have received a letter from Gus Lewis, head of legal and government affairs for the Royal Yachting Association. This association is the national body for a whole range of recreational and competitive boating. Its headquarters are in Hamble and were opened by the Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal while I was the constituency MP. In due course, I took as my life peerage territorial title the Saxon village of Hamble-le-Rice. I therefore take more seriously than some the issues that it has raised with me, in particular its concerns that Clause 5, on harbour directions, would effectively grant lawmaking powers to harbour authorities, as it argued in its briefing paper.

While there may inevitably be an element of self-interest in the representations made, safety at sea leaves little margin for error. As my ancestors established, effective organisation and legislation are essential to establishing and maintaining the highest standards in seafaring. They are principles that we must not lose sight of.