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Mr. Matthew Banks: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Allen: I will give way to the hon. Member because he served on the Select Committee.
Mr. Banks: I shall be as brief as I can.
I recognise that the Select Committee unanimously agreed the recommendations in our report, but too much time has been spent on Donaldson and not enough on the issues that this debate was meant to cover. I recognise that the Leader of the Opposition got rid of all the Opposition Front-Bench transport team and replaced them with the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen). I am delighted that he is taking a serious interest, but I hope that he will recognise that, after the Select Committee report was published and we expressed our concerns publicly and sensibly, the Government and my hon. Friend the Minister for Transport in London have led the way in the International Maritime Organisation discussions. The Government have led the way for the world in trying to toughen safety standards. As we have a new Opposition team--
Madam Deputy Speaker:
Order. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, but interventions should be short and we are especially short of time this morning.
Mr. Allen:
I will not join the hon. Gentleman in criticising the inexperience of the Secretary of State for Transport, who is obviously attempting to learn the job, as I am in my new position.
We have supported the proposal for the hotel-style star rating. A one-to-five rating would give companies a commercial incentive to tighten safety standards as quickly as possible, but the Government have refused to implement such a system, using the excuse that it did not include factors such as crew competency. The Government are in danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water by asking for everything to be tied up before starting such a scheme. They should augment those proposals if they believe them to be inadequate, rather than rejecting them outright.
Similarly, the Government have weakened the recommendation that passenger information should be included in publicity material, and they have fobbed the public off, as my hon. Friend the Member for Newport, West said, with a hotline for inquiries. Passengers should have a right to know and they should be clear about which
safety regulations the ship that they are boarding has met. They should not have to contend with another Government hotline.
In order to allow the Minister some time, I will not go into my views about the farce that occurred at Dover.The very fact that the hon. Member for Dover has defended it so ardently makes my case.
Timing is a crucial issue. The Government should issue a clear timetable for implementing any new measures: "As soon as possible" just is not good enough. We must ensure that we have international and European co-operation on ferry safety standards, and not just lip service to it. In all those areas, enforcement is just as important as getting the rules and regulations right. If the deliberate decline in Marine Safety Agency personnel continues, the regulations, whatever they are, will be enforced less effectively. At the moment, the MSA is losing people and vacancies are not being filled. The MSA polices the regulations and inspects ships to make sure that they are adequate and safe.
I hoped that the IMO conference on ferry safety last November would make progress, but it failed to make the agreements for which we had hoped. The north-west European agreement outside IMO is welcome because it commits European countries to apply the safety of life at sea 1990 standards--SOLAS 90--to ferries, but in practice that is not making ferries safer because implementation is not required until 2007. We were let down again in January when further European talks to agree legislation on ferry safety standards came to nothing.
Ferry safety will return to the agenda again on29 February, when European Governments meet in Stockholm to try to agree finally on standards. The Danish Government have already proposed a compromise solution for a new method of calculating the amount of water that should be allowed on car decks without the vessel capsizing. I support the request from my hon. Friend the Member for Newport, West for the Government's response to that proposal and their expectations for the next round of talks.
We must have improved ferry safety standards, at the very least within the United Kingdom, as soon as possible, and as part of a well-thought-out long-term strategy. The need for a firm commitment is urgent. I hope that the Government will reconfirm today their commitment, announced on 20 November 1995, to act unilaterally to improve safety standards on ro-ro ferries' operations from UK ports if the next round of talks at the end of February fails.
Ferry safety concerns every hon. Member, not only those with coastal constituencies and those who worked so assiduously as members of the all-party Select Committee on Transport. The relevance of ferry safety was emphasised by the terrible scenes that we witnessed at the weekend--scenes that, with prompt action in taking up the Donaldson recommendations and on Friday in bringing the appropriate equipment to bear, could have been prevented. Such action could have prevented some of the scenes that, sadly, we shall witness over the coming weeks and months. Let that be another lesson.
The Minister for Transport in London (Mr. Steve Norris):
One of the great advantages of opposition is the opportunity to criticise without the slightest sense of responsibility. It has often been asserted that the less knowledge of a subject an Opposition Member has, the better he is able to set out an array of irrelevancies tangled together to form some basis of an argument. That is what we heard from the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen). His speech could be summarised by the glorious phrase, "As soon as possible just is not soon enough." It is the sort of phrase of which the Opposition are extraordinarily fond, and I let it lie on the record in all its ludicrousness for others to judge.
I have some experience of the hon. Member for Newport, West (Mr. Flynn) on safety matters. He is the sort of man who would terrify the average adult at the prospect of crossing a road, such is his fixation with turning any incident into a crisis, any crisis into a drama and any drama into a political event.
Mr. Flynn:
Will the Minister give way?
Mr. Norris:
No, I shall not give way. The hon. Gentleman spoke for well in excess of 40 minutes.He and his hon. Friends have left me precisely eight minutes in which to respond to their remarks. In the circumstances, I shall not be give way to the hon. Gentleman or to any other hon. Member.
The hon. Member for Newport, West does the House no service. He is intelligent yet he frequently, on this and other issues, turns his back on logic and on the facts when they clash with the convenient stance that he would like to take, which is to be utterly cynical about passengers who intend to travel on ferries that operate out of Dover, which is represented, of course, by my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Mr. Shaw), and from other ports.He has not the slightest regard for the fact that 50 million passengers travelled on ferries last year alone. He is prepared to scare them unreasonably when he has no evidence on which to base his assertions. He is prepared to distort the conclusions of the Select Committee on Transport in a way that I consider to be unacceptable.
There was an argument between the hon. Member for Newport, West and my hon. Friend the Member for Dover about the Estonia. It is clear that it is not my hon. Friend who is incorrect in saying that the design of the Estonia was quite different from that of other vessels. It is the hon. Gentleman who is wrong to suggest that the design of the Estonia was immaterial. The reality is that the Estonia's bow doors consisted of a complex mechanism of inner and outer doors, which had a structural interaction. In other words, damage to the bow door interacted with the inner door, hence opening both doors after the failure of the outer bow door. I can confirm that no British ferry is designed with that interaction. Indeed, the Marine Safety Agency would not permit such a design to be implemented. My hon. Friend the Member for Dover speaks straightforwardly for his constituency, as every hon. Member should, and was quite right to say what he did about the Estonia.
The reality is that the United Kingdom Government take the issue of passenger ferry safety extremely seriously. It was the Government who led the campaign within the International Maritime Organisation for higher damage survivability standards to be applied to all ro-ro ferries. It was the Government who led the campaign to reach the SOLAS 90 standard, even though, as my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (Mr. Banks), who is a member of the Select Committee on Transport, will understand, we have long accepted that SOLAS 90 was not of itself sufficient and that we needed to go further.
In November 1995, the IMO convened a diplomatic conference to consider amendments to the safety of life at sea convention. In some respects, that conference was a great success. A wide range of measures was adopted, including improvements to life-saving equipment and improved evacuation arrangements. Belatedly, the conference endorsed the view that SOLAS 90 should be applied to all ro-ro ferries, including those built before 1990, but did not agree to a further enhancement of the standard whereby ro-ro ferries should meet the 1990 standard and should be able to cope with a significant influx of water on the car deck without capsizing.
We were disappointed that the conference was unable to agree to a global application of the higher survivability standard, but we achieved a significant concession. The conference adopted a resolution allowing those countries that wished to do so to enter into regional agreements to apply the higher survivability standard to ro-ro ferries operating between their ports. The Government are involved in negotiations with our European neighbours and other interested Administrations to develop such an agreement, which would apply to all ferries operating to and from our ports.
Our position in the negotiations has been that the agreement should apply the highest practicable standard in the best achievable time scale. I hope that we shall be able to announce the conclusion of a satisfactory agreement shortly. That would be a major achievement.
My hon. Friend the Member for Southport did the House a service in confirming that throughout the process it has been the United Kingdom Government who have led the drive for higher safety standards. It should be said that in many other areas the United Kingdom takes its safety responsibilities seriously.
In the extraordinarily inadequate time that is available to me, I shall say a few words about the survivability exercise. The hon. Member for Newport, West appears to criticise the exercise because not enough volunteers were drunk, pregnant or lost. He complains that the exercise was not carried out in a force 9 gale in the middle of the Baltic sea. In other words, he complains that the exercise was not intended to replicate all the circumstances--the worst circumstances--in which an incident might take place. That is a ludicrous criticism of the operation.
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