Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, when he was informed that P&O Ferries redundancies would lead to service disruption.

On 16 March, under the terms of commercial confidentiality, the P&O Ferries Chief Executive informed a small group of senior officials in DfT of their intention to serve redundancy notices to 800 seafarers. This was to take effect on the morning of 17th March and gave the Government no time to engage.  Ministers were not told the full scale of P&O’s plans, nor the manner in which they would be carried out, in advance.

As part of this exchange with senior officials, P&O claimed suspended services would last for approximately ten days while they train new crew.