Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how many statutory harbour authorities in the UK are (a) private, (b) municipal or (c) trust ports.

Port ownership models are not subject to frequent change. The most recent comprehensively collected data on this topic, from 2005, estimates there to be 181 private ports, 170 municipal ports and 75 trust ports in the UK. It should be noted for that this data is not collected on a regular basis and it is possible this number has slightly altered since the data was last collected.