18 JUNE 2003  

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

  Q540  Mr Stringer: It is 35% of their total port costs, not their operating costs.

  Mr Reeves: In some circumstances, but it must depend on the size of ship and the type of traffic.

  Q541  Mr Stringer: I presume it is an average. It would not be the same for every one. We are beginning to get into the detail. All I am suggesting is that it has taken a long time when the industry is concerned that there is a competitive issue here. I am concerned that it was brought to your attention 12 months ago and what I wanted to know was why it has taken so long.

  Mr Jamieson: After the wide-ranging consultation there were many polarised views. We did give very, very careful consideration as to the way forward and what we did bring forward is these particular studies to look at the charges and in particular we would look at any further evidence which came before us. At the moment we do not have evidence.

  Q542  Mr Stringer: How many of the 160 responses were in favour of the status quo?

  Mr Reeves: It was not as simple as that.

  Q543  Mr Stringer: No, but it is a simple and straightforward question.

  Mr Reeves: We asked them a range of questions and we did not especially ask that question. We asked a range of questions and the general flavour of the responses was, if I may paraphrase, someone other than myself should pay.

  Q544  Mr Stringer: So it is probable that none of them wanted the status quo.

  Mr Reeves: Yes.

  Mr Jamieson: If I recall, very few said they would like anything to stay as it is. What all the respondents were saying was "Please charge someone else, not us". The big operators were saying "Charge all the small users". The small users were saying "Charge all the big users" and that was the difficulty with it. No real consensus emerged from it.

  Q545  Mr Stringer: May I ask a couple of questions about competition, referring to previous statements you made? You said earlier on that you would value the transparency of the subsidies that go into foreign ports. The last time you were before the Committee you said that if money were being made available to ports in other countries and that was affecting competition, then you would not hesitate to take that to the Competition Commissioner. From what I understood you to say earlier, you now accept that there is state aid. Are you on your way to the Competition Commissioner?

  Mr Jamieson: No. This is an area which is very difficult to unpick because the ports are owned in different ways in other European countries. It is very difficult to see where the actual aid goes in because the structure is entirely different and the ownership is different. That is a very difficult matter to unpick. What we are pleased about is that the Commission is now looking at the matter to make sure that there is fair competition between the ports within the European Union. We have not had any major concerns raised by the ports in this country on the issue. If they had brought them to our attention, then we would have reacted and looked into them most carefully.

  Q546  Mr Stringer: In response to Mr Stevenson, when he was talking about widening the gauge of the route to Felixstowe, we understood a little more about that. Is it correct that the gauge to the port of Southampton will not be increased to the W10 standard?

  Mr Jamieson: What Mr Burr was saying was that in the short term, even if the proposal got the green light, there would not be the need immediately for the improvement in the gauge, but that would be a matter, depending on the outcome of the public inquiry, depending on the decision which is made on that, that would be a matter then for the SRA to examine with the port in the coming years.

  Q547  Mr Stringer: Surely it is government policy to support competition between the different ports within this country and Southampton, which handles 25% cent of the freight, will be at a competitive disadvantage, will it not, if it does not have the enhanced gauge when Felixstowe does?

  Mr Burr: What the SRA explained to the Department this morning was that they had had an ambitious plan for the route from Southampton to the West Coast Main Line which included flyovers and various things of this sort. They are now re-scoping that project with the specific objective of safeguarding the existing traffic they have out of the port, bearing in mind that it is going up to the requirement for nine-foot six-inch boxes. That is a much less ambitious project than they were working on before and the less ambitious it is, the more hope they would have of being able to get it. The SRA is very firmly committed to hanging on to their nine-foot six-inch box traffic out of Southampton, so it would be a priority for them, just as much as it is for the port.

  Q548  Mr Stringer: Are both ports going to get the enhanced gauge?

  Mr Burr: No decision to increase the gauge on the Southampton route.

  Q549  Clive Efford: Have you talked to the industry about ways to improve statistics in terms of the review which was undertaken recently and issues around employment, health and safety, transhipment and gathering of statistics around that sort of thing?

  Mr Burr: Yes, we have established a working group with the industry and HSE. The difficulty, which we have discussed with the Committee before, is that it is difficult to measure trends with accidents unless you know how many people are employed; what the accident is a proportion of. There is a separate problem in that a lot of the accidents in ports do not happen to port workers, they happen to visitors to the port. If the Committee remembers, for example, the linkspan collapse at Ramsgate; all the people killed were visitors. Sadly it is often the case that it is lorry drivers and people like that. That exercise is now being carried forward actively and at the moment we are at the stage of evaluating work that the industry has already done in different localities to try to get a handle on this question, firstly to define what is a port worker and then to count them.

  Q550  Clive Efford: When you gather those statistics, do you take into consideration the type of employee who might be involved in an accident, whether it is a casual worker, somebody who has been through the proper basic training, somebody who is engaged in self loading, or are they classified as visitors?

  Mr Burr: No, if someone is engaged in work in the port, they would be classed as a worker in whatever status, temporary or on the payroll or whatever it might be. I am not calling them visitors. Passengers and lorry drivers and people like that might be visitors. Then of course a lot of ports have tenants on their estates.

  Q551  Chairman: Could you identify the difference between a casual worker and a core worker? Are you looking at that?

  Mr Burr: Yes. We are trying to do a much better job on port statistics and one of the things PSS are doing is analysing where the incidents concentrate. For that purpose, they will need to analyse individual incidents and, for example, whether they cluster on casual workers or they cluster on transport workers or they cluster on a particular type of incident. Then, for the sake of their target, they want to target where the worst incidents are. For that purpose, they will be doing analysis and they have set up a special working group with HSE helping them.

  Q552  Clive Efford: What progress have you made on getting information or statistics about the economic impact of ports?

  Mr Burr: Not much, I would say. We have put the project on manpower first basically and we would hope perhaps from that to work out how many jobs are also dependent on the port, which is part of the economic footprint. You would work out how many people are in the port and then the next stage around that would be to work out how many jobs the port activity supports.

  Q553  Clive Efford: So it is your intention in the future to carry out that sort of review and gather those statistics.

  Mr Burr: Yes.

  Q554  Clive Efford: May I go back very briefly to this self-loading issue? In terms of the directive, is it the government's position on principle that this should be allowed or is it something the government is dealing with in terms of trying to improve safety? We heard earlier on that there are concerns about where people who are involved in self loading are mixing with workers from the port and that there could be an issue there about safety.

  Mr Jamieson: We are not opposed to self handling as such. What we want to ensure is that all those involved in handling the goods do it safely, both for goods which may present a danger and of course for people themselves. My concern is that we have to find that balance between allowing a more liberalised approach to handling input. At some of the ports the self handling is done by a discrete part of the port, where they have their own cranes, they have their own equipment and their own workforce. There is no problem there because the workforce ashore are self handling but they are in fact a permanent workforce of that particular company. My concern is particularly with a ship which may not be UK flagged, it may have a foreign crew on it, it may have people who do not have a command of English and they may not have the training. It would concern me very greatly if those people were self handling to the detriment of the safety of people both shoreside and on the ship.

  Mr Reeves: May I just underline what Mike Fell said when he was sitting before you about an hour ago. What he said in a nutshell was that it is really going to be for the port authorities to make sure that this activity—and it is not a new activity, plenty of it goes on now—is done safely. There is an issue in that respect in the context of the proposed directive on the matter of authorisations. In the common position that the Council adopted, Article 6, the authorisations mention maritime safety and the safety of the port, installations, equipment and people as relevant criteria. It left the issue of authorisations as a permissive one: the phrase was "Member States shall ensure that the competent authority may require" etcetera. One of the amendments from the Parliament is actually"... that the competent authority shall grant prior authorisation" and that is an issue that we continue to look at in this context.

  Q555  Chairman: I must ask you about one of the other directives which you have not mentioned this afternoon and that is the Waste Directive. Are you happy with the present wording of the directive?

  Mr Burr: Yes, the waste reception facilities. The directive is in force and we are a bit late in doing our transposing regulations and that is because we are wrestling with getting the wording of those regulations right. We had a meeting last month with the ports industry and we have reached a position where they can accept what the regulations now have to provide to transpose the directive.

  Q556  Chairman: That does not sound like the sort of evidence they are giving us. You feel you have now reached an agreement with them.

  Mr Burr: The ports do not like the principle that there is any interference in their charging regime and the charging provision in the directive is messy because it was a last minute change round in the negotiations. In a sense we do not have much choice now but to put that directive into UK legislation and that is on the point of being done.

  Q557  Chairman: What will ports need to do to implement the new IMO International Shipping and Port Security Code and how much is it going to cost them?

  Mr Jamieson: That is going to be a very difficult question to answer. We do not know what the cost is. What we do know is that if we do not implement the security code, the cost could be very great indeed to the ports. How we want the security code implemented is that we want it commensurate with realising the security in a particular port, which will differ from port to port, but to meet the needs of that port, and also to make sure that the goods do keep flowing. In other words, the action we take should be proportionate to the risk.

  Q558  Chairman: Is it realistic to expect it to be implemented by 1 July 2004?

  Mr Jamieson: It has to be implemented by that time.

  Q559  Chairman: I asked whether it is realistic. Do you think the EU's own processes will be finished in time for you to make the regulations to implement the code?

  Mr Reeves: That is an issue about the method by which it is implemented and the EC has come forward with a regulation which will be directly applicable. It would implement the IMO framework plus making one or two elements of it additionally mandatory. There is also a proposal in that draft regulation to accelerate the implementation. We do not think that is achievable, but we certainly think 1 July next year is achievable and TranSec is working very hard with the industry to achieve that.