My Lords, I support both my noble friend Lord Berkeley’s amendments. They make it more likely that operators will not be able to evade their obligation to pay at least the national minimum wage equivalent. The behaviour of P&O Ferries in March this year is the very reason for the Bill, and that behaviour shows the lengths to which operators will go to save money on seafarers’ wages. The Bill should bend over backwards to narrow every opportunity for operators to evade their very modest obligation to pay seafarers the national minimum wage equivalent and prevent such behaviour.
It is not just P&O Ferries. The effect of allowing ship operators to evade the national minimum wage equivalent is that they undercut their competitors, which then join the race to the bottom and put at risk the jobs of some 2,000 UK-resident ratings and officers. Like my noble friend Lord Berkeley, I looked at the table provided by RMT. Perhaps he will forgive me giving a correction: he said that the lowest rate was £2.40, paid by Condor Ferries. However, according to the table, the lowest rate is P&O Ferries on the “Pride of York”—a vessel registered in the Bahamas—on the Hull-Zeebrugge route, which pays €2.04 per hour for cooks of Lithuanian extraction. There are a number of other low rates. For example, DFDS’s “King Seaways”, going from Newcastle to Ijmuiden, is on the Danish international ship register and has Polish, Ukrainian, Romanian and Filipino crew, and it pays $2.63 an hour for a cabin steward. I will not read any more examples, but this appears to be a perpetuation of nationality-based discrimination on pay which this legislation should be tight enough to avoid.
I hope the Minister will forgive me for asking before I sit down for her to clarify a point raised in Committee—namely, whether a harbour in one of the Crown dependencies is a UK harbour or whether it will become subject to a national minimum wage equivalent corridor. I did not understand the answer she gave in her very kind letter of 21 October. If it is to become the subject of a corridor, can I ask how negotiations are progressing, and whether they involve the social partners?