Merchant Shipping (Cargo Ship) (Bilge Alarm) Regulations 2021 — House of Lords, 2021-07-13
Topic: Transportation
Anthony Gueterbock (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in this short debate and of course to the Minister for her response. It has been a very interesting debate—I was really surprised and enthused by some of the comments. The noble Lord, Lord Patten, talked about the voiceless seafarer and admitted that he had not been in the bilges; going into the bilges is not a thing you would want to do unless you really had to. Both he and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, talked about the crews and the fact that they need looking after. Many of us thought that they were probably suffering, particularly during Covid My noble friend Lord Rooker asked six really excellent questions. I have to say that I do not think the Minister answered many of them, but I am sure she will be writing to him and we will all see copies. However, the delays are still there. The noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, also talked about the delays and mentioned the word "disproportionate". I think there are many, including in the Department for Transport, who think that this is not that serious: they are small regulations and do not matter very much. I hope I am not right My noble friend Lord Rosser also asked a number of questions, including another version of whether this is being done just for administrative convenience. The Minister was interesting in her response, because she said that the guidance on these issues had been published in 2010 and I think she liked to believe that most of the ships involved in this category would have already fitted bilge alarms. If that is the case, and she has not presented any evidence for or against it, why have the Government brought these regulations at all? It has taken 10 years, but if the guidance has forced or encouraged all the shipowners involved to install bilge alarms, why do we need regulations My gut feeling is that for ships like this—I have seen quite a few of them—for whatever reason the shipowners do not like doing things they do not have to do. One can understand it. I may have got the price of a bilge alarm of £100 wrong, compared with the Government’s estimate of £2,500—you could probably spend £500,000 on one if you wanted to. The noble Lord, Lord Patten, suggested that there should be online alerts to the MCA, which probably would cost about that, but the point is that, in terms of the cost to the operators, it is not great I go back to my noble friend Lord Rooker’s comments about when he was involved in creating the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act, and the ALARP principle—as low as reasonably practicable. I would suggest that installing a bilge alarm, whether for £100 or £2,500, it is certainly something that could be done to comply with the ALARP principle, on which on all our safety regulations, as my noble friend said, have been based I am afraid we did not really get an answer from the Minister on why there were so many delays to the legislation. There were lots of them—some caused by Brexit, some international and some domestic. I know of one situation, drawn to my attention by a Cornwall council that wanted to create a new harbour authority there to look after all the little harbours that nobody else owns. It is not big job but it is very important. It has been waiting several years for this to go through, so that it can do things with the harbour to help the local economy I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have added to the discussion of these regulations. We need to put more pressure on the Department for Transport and the Government to provide resources—to give the MCA resources—so that we have no more of this. It may affect only a few people. Do they matter much? I believe they all matter, but there is a view that they are just tramp steamers going around the coast and nobody sees them much, compared with an airline or anything else. We have to change the attitude. I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken, but I would like to test the opinion of the House on this Motion.