Seaborne Freight

Lord Rosser Excerpts

Monday 11th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rosser (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. On 8 January, my noble friend Lord Tunnicliffe was told by the Government:

“With Seaborne, the proposal was subject to technical, financial and commercial assurance”.—[Official Report, 8/1/19; col. 2127.]


What were the financial assurances received and from whom? Were the financial assurances given specific, firm, unqualified and in writing, or were they only in the form of an intention or a consideration of giving financial support, as the Statement suggests?

Why was no reference made in the Statement of 8 January to the extensive involvement on the financial side of the Irish company Arklow Shipping? The Government said it was for commercial reasons. What commercial reasons were so important that they overruled the public interest and transparency on a Brexit issue? Perhaps instead it was because the Secretary of State was so determined to have the involvement at all costs of a British shipping company, to avoid the embarrassment of having to rely exclusively on European companies to help us out of a no-deal mess, that he reached this questionable agreement with Seaborne Freight without competitive tendering and then knowingly did not disclose in the Statement that even British Seaborne Freight was dependent on financial backing materialising from an EU-based Irish company? If that is not the case, why was the agreement not reached directly with Arklow Shipping, one of Europe’s largest shipping companies and clearly the intended real power behind Seaborne Freight?

[Baroness Sugg]

My Lords, we have listed the checks carried out as due diligence on the operational suitability of all the bids submitted as part of the department’s procurement of additional freight capacity. They were director searches and basic counterparty financial solvency checks, with technical support provided by Mott MacDonald. Two high-level technical reviews were completed. The first related to the ferry tender and submission compliance within the DfT evaluation process and the second to the technical feasibility of the tendered ferry intervention. Financial analysis was carried out by Deloitte to assess the financial robustness of operators, and price benchmarking by Deloitte to examine the prices offered to DfT in comparison with market rates to enable the assessment of value for money as part of the procurement process.

I explained earlier in the Statement the reasoning behind not mentioning Arklow before. It was for commercial reasons. It would have adversely affected the cost of ships in order to procure the contract. We contracted directly with Seaborne because it was the company that had been working for over a year to provide the service between Ramsgate and Ostend.