My Lords, I declare my interest as honorary president of the UK Maritime Pilots’ Association and a former harbour commissioner for the port authority in Cornwall.
In moving Amendments 1 and 2 I will reflect on the purpose of the Bill. Although it was created, as Ministers have said, to avoid a repeat of the frankly disastrous attempt by P&O Ferries earlier this year to change all their seafarers, it was the process that I felt was abhorrent. Clearly, the purpose of this Bill is to ensure that the national minimum wage legislation applies to all seafarers when working in UK waters but not within the UK.
We debated the two issues in Amendments 1 and 2 in col. GC 102 of the Grand Committee on 12 October. I would like to start on Amendment 1, which is linked to Amendment 2. The question is: what is a harbour?
My Amendment 1 would leave out the words “the harbour” and insert
“a harbour in the United Kingdom”.
We understood what the Minister told us in Committee, but then it got a bit confusing. She kindly wrote a long letter to us, which was helpful, but she said in the letter:
“A service is defined … as being ‘for the carriage of persons and goods by ship, with or without vehicles, between a place outside the United Kingdom and a place in the United Kingdom’”.
The word “a” is interesting. If it were “the”, as in the Bill, that would be just one harbour, but my argument is that “a” place can be any harbour. This comes into the scope of whether the Government are trying to protect all seafarers who are, shall we say, based in the UK—those who work in UK waters but are not necessarily employed on UK land—or whether this provision just sorts out the P&O Ferries problem. It is my contention that as the Minister referred in her letter to “a” place, that is what should be in the Bill.
I also want to explore why this needs to be confined to Dover to Calais. Many noble Lords will recall that a previous Secretary of State for Transport, Chris Grayling, created a new ferry service between Ramsgate and Zeebrugge to try to sort out the traffic jams at Dover. Of course, that ferry service did not actually exist; I discovered that the head office was in an office owned by a very large manufacturer of construction equipment in the City, but there was no ship or ferry. But Ramsgate is a perfectly good ferry terminal and I can see that ferries might operate between Dover and Calais one day and between Ramsgate and Calais the next; it could effectively be the same service. It is not right to confine the service included in the Bill to just one service, when ships can go round the country. I believe that the seafarers, in all these things, need similar protection.
We then move on to the question of having 52 or 120 days a year where the ship would have to come into a UK port in order to be included under the Bill. Ministers have said that the key is that the service must
have close ties to the UK. I suppose I would question how you can define close ties—it is a bit of a woolly concept. I am not going to give any examples, but if you are a seafarer and want to be included, you might wonder whether the company employing you has those close ties. It is a difficult question to answer.
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I am grateful to the RMT trade union for some information it has sent to me and, I expect, many other noble Lords. There are two issues here. Is there a need for this when you are operating a ferry service to a close member state of the European Union such as France, the Netherlands or the Republic of Ireland, where maybe the national minimum wage is higher than what we pay here? The argument may be that it is not really important. But this is legislation that could be on the books for many years and most countries could change their policies, so it is as well to make this applicable to many countries—member states and other reasonably close places—rather than saying that we do not need to bother with France because its pay is high anyway.
More interestingly, rather than just talking about Dover/Calais, the RMT has given me a list of services and vessels which go to and from the UK and could well meet the 52-visit figure I am proposing; the Government would rather have 120 visits. I have counted and there are 34 vessels and routes, not just one or two. I shall not read them all out. There are probably seven or eight different operators: P&O is a big one and there are DFDS, Stena and Cobelfret. We all know them. Some pay very well and, according to the RMT, some pay very badly. The lowest I have seen is Condor Ferries, which pays £2.40 per hour. That is a little bit below the national minimum wage, is it not?
It is difficult and dangerous to try to limit this legislation to services which are a bit like Dover/Calais. If you are a seafarer on many of those 40 or so services, the same comments and worries apply to you all. This applies only within UK territorial waters; what happens outside is a separate issue. That is why I have tabled Amendment 2: to reduce the number of visits of a ship or a service from 120 to 52. We can debate whether 52 is the right number—that is one a week on average—but it means that we can include a much greater range of services for which seafarers deserve to be treated properly. That includes cruise ships. Why should people on cruise ships not get paid a national minimum wage? I shall not go into detail—there is another amendment that could have come in—but the key is that the 52 visits a year can be measured. That can be controlled and I think it is a much better number than the 120 in the Bill.
In moving and speaking to these amendments, I look forward to the Minister’s response to Amendment 1 on whether option A or option B on harbours is favoured. It will be very interesting but I think the key is the 52 visits in Amendment 2. I very much look forward to what the Minister has to say and then I will decide whether to seek the opinion of the House. I beg to move.