18 JUNE 2003  

MR DAVID JAMIESON MP, MR STEPHEN REEVES AND MR ANDREW BURR

  Q474  Chairman: Minister, may I ask you to identify yourself and your colleagues.

  Mr Jamieson: Good afternoon. I am David Jamieson. I am still the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Transport. I have survived the eviction from the Big Brother household. I am still here.

  Mr Burr: Andrew Burr from Ports Division.

  Mr Reeves: Stephen Reeves, Head of Ports Division.

  Q475  Chairman: I have to say we are delighted to see you. Long may you survive the nights of the long knives. Did you have something you wanted to say to the Committee?

  Mr Jamieson: Yes, if I may. In this inquiry you have been following there have been three changes of name in the department in that time but the one consistent thing in this inquiry seems to be you and I.

  Q476  Chairman: I hope this is going to be a long-standing relationship.

  Mr Jamieson: I hope so too. Firstly may I say that we welcome a further opportunity to discuss government policy for the ports industry. As the Committee knows, our strategic aim is to promote a successful and competitive ports industry, high safety standards and good environmental standards. When I appeared before the Committee in July last year, I reported on a number of these initiatives and today I am pleased to be able to tell the Committee that we are continuing to make good progress. May I briefly cover some of those points. As the Committee knows, one of the challenges we face is to ensure the industry can meet the demand for additional port capacity, particularly in the South-East of England, to handle growth in the shipping of containers. Several major proposals for additional port capacity have been put forward and are now the subject of public inquiries. Public inquiries into two of these proposals are either already completed, as in the case of the Dibden Bay terminal near Southampton, or nearing completion in the case of the London gateway on the lower Thames. We expect to have reports from these two inquiries by the end of the year and we shall be making decisions on them after weighing up all the relevant factors in the balance. As the Committee knows, the ports industry has some structural differences from other industries in other countries in Europe and the proposed directive on the market access to port services highlighted these real challenges. Following very intensive negotiations—I think we had been negotiating a matter of a week or so before I last appeared at the Committee—we achieved major achievements in last year's council on the common position text. Since then the European Parliament has proposed some amendments, some of which we do not find helpful. We are continuing to negotiate firmly with the aim of defending the gains we made earlier. Another area presenting real challenge for United Kingdom ports is security. The remit is to be extended and the new security code will result in a global security framework for the maritime industry. A European Union regulation will transpose these requirements into European law and should help to establish parity amongst Member States, thus providing enhanced security and assisting the competitiveness of our maritime industry. Safety too is vitally important and we welcome the creation of the Ports Skills and Safety Ltd because it represents a real commitment by the port operators. We also welcome the decision by the industry's national health and safety committee to extend its remit to skills and to standards. The Health and Safety Executive is working to help the ports improve dock safety. Lastly, we have successfully promoted a new approach to safety management in ports through the port marine safety code with all sides of the industry. Every significant port undertaking and many of the small ones too have implemented it by doing risk assessments and by developing safety management systems. The environment is inevitably an important issue for ports and many harbour authorities are committed to their environmental responsibilities. Our European partners have agreed to apply the same standards and it is very much in our interests to see that they do so. We have expressed our concerns to the Commission. They have supported our approach and we are now taking a close interest in some other states. The port industry feels that the new environmental regulation has become a burden and I hope to be ready to make an announcement before the recess on the review of development in coastal and marine waters started last summer. We shall of course consult widely on the details. Modern Ports comprises a comprehensive package of measures and I believe it is broadly the right package for the needs of a modern ports industry. The government is helping to ensure that the industry is in good shape to face the future, the challenges and the opportunities. We look forward to your questions and even more look forward to your report in the future.

  Chairman: That shows a great degree of confidence and I hope it will not be misplaced. We shall want to ask you for some quite considerable details about some of the developments, particularly in relation to the European directives.

  Q477  Mr Randall: In the White Paper it states that the government cannot make predictions of port demand in the way that it can and does do for other sectors, notably aviation. Why is that?

  Mr Jamieson: There is a profound difference between port services and the provision of air services. The ports in this country have been run commercially for a long time now and they have met market demands. We identified a shortfall a few years ago in the container sector for the international trade and that shortfall is being filled by the four applications which have come in for extension to container ports, in other words the market has reacted to a shortfall. In the case of airports, it is clear that the demand for air services is growing and growing, but it looks as though there could be a shortfall in provision. We know already that Heathrow is very much stretched and so are the other major airports in the South-East. The difference here is that the market would not fulfil this. The other difference, if I may say so, is that even though some of these ports proposals are very expensive—for Dibden Bay somewhere in the region of £600 million has been quoted—a new airport development would cost very substantially more than that. The other thing is that the environmental impact and the impact on people is very much greater with airports than it is with ports.

  Q478  Mr Randall: I appreciate all that but you are saying that you cannot make a forecast that there will be an increase in demand for any particular container or freight port, which is what we are talking about mostly; you say you cannot do that, it is not possible, so you will just wait until it happens and then hope somebody comes along and builds a port.

  Mr Jamieson: I was not trying to imply that. I was saying that a few years ago we had identified that there was a need for extra provision of sea ports, particularly for containers, but what happened at the same time was that these proposals came forward from people running ports to increase the capacity. Had that not happened, had those proposals not come forward, then we would have had to have a different view.

  Q479  Mr Randall: It is the forecast part of it I cannot quite understand. I understand what you said, you identified that something had come along, but what I cannot quite understand is that you do not make a forecast as to whether there will be more in the future. One of the things the government is doing with the aviation thing is to say that we cannot just hope something happens at the right time, we have to forecast. I would have thought for ports that the same thing should be done.

  Mr Jamieson: It is very difficult to forecast because although we know that over 95 per cent of the weight of our trade goes by sea, it is very difficult to forecast exactly where that trade will grow, which sectors will actually decline or will increase. It is very difficult to predict all that at governmental level, because it is very much a market. For example, the transport of certain goods has declined; the transport of other goods has actually increased. The market has actually picked up the shortfall there, whereas in the air policy consultation paper we have put out now we did not actually make a definitive forecast. What it does is put up various scenarios.