§ [Relevant documents: The Fifth Report of the Transport Committee of Session 1994–95 on Cross Channel Safety, (House of Commons Paper No. 352) and the Government reply thereto published as the Fifth Special Report of Session 1994–95 (House of Commons Paper No. 642).]
§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Wells.]
9.34 am§ Mr. Paul Flynn (Newport, West)We have had dreadful proof of the mighty power of the sea, the tide and the wind, and of how puny our efforts are to deal with mother nature at her worst. I refer to the unfolding catastrophe of the Sea Empress, which is relevant to this debate because the problems at Milford Haven are similar. All hon. Members pay tribute to the heroic work of the tireless salvers. We must look for the cause of this tragedy, which is the same as the threat to ferry safety.
This is an incredible, sorry story of Government complacency towards the compliance of the maritime industry. This is a story of an industry that has, over many years—with the Government's help—pursued minimum safety standards in search of maximum profits.
This debate is in my name as a Back Bencher, but it was also sought by the Transport Select Committee. It was the first time in the history of Parliament that the Committee had sought a debate. I shall concentrate on the work of the Committee, on which I have the great honour to serve.
§ Mr. Graham Allen (Nottingham, North)Does my hon. Friend accept that had the Government implemented the Donaldson recommendations on adequately powerful tugs—one tug in the western approaches—and that had the two tugs that are in position been called from Scotland and southern England and put into place at Milford Haven, what has sadly been an accident could have been prevented from becoming a disaster on the coast of Wales?
§ Mr. FlynnWe are all conscious of the remarkable complacency of just two days ago, when we were told that all but 17 of the recommendations of the Donaldson report had been put into place. My hon. Friend the Member for Pembroke (Mr. Ainger), who is currently at Milford Haven—he had hoped to participate in the debate—is very knowledgeable about sea safety because he worked in the industry for many years. He is convinced from his research that the power of the tugs was hopelessly inadequate—the vessel was pulling the tugs, rather than the tugs pulling the vessel.
282 This was a key recommendation of Donaldson after the Braer disaster, and it has not been implemented. These matters will be investigated. The Government must demonstrate that they will make a far greater effort to support the marvellous work of the salvers. Unfortunately, the equipment that they have is not up to the massive job before them.
The Select Committee decided to investigate cross-channel safety because it was concerned about the potential danger of the channel tunnel—a new road was to go under a large stretch of water, and that had never happened before. The Committee—which had no axe to grind and no interests in these matters, other than to serve the cause of safety—came out with a different view. We were reminded that crossing the channel is nothing new. Fifty years before the birth of Christ, Julius Caesar twice took an army back and forth across the channel, as he recorded in "De Bello Gallico". He states:
Uti ex tanto navium numero tot navigationibus neque hoc neque superiore anno ullo omnino navis, quae milites portaret desideraretur.Those wonderful words can, I am sure, be understood by all those who have had the benefit of a comprehensive education in good Labour-controlled authorities. But for the victims of public school education perhaps I had better explain that Caesar wrote triumphantly that, of all those ships—he brought across 800—and in all those voyages, not a single ship carrying troops in that or the previous year was missing. That was an incredible achievement and surely now, 2,000 years later, when we have become so sophisticated, we should be able to relax and feel entirely happy about taking a journey across the channel.The story that we, as members of the Committee, heard unfold in the evidence was not that the channel tunnel was dangerous—in fact, we concluded that the statistical evidence showed that the channel tunnel was 600 times safer than the M4. As a result of what we heard, three members of the Committee said that they would never take their families on board such ferries again until major improvements had been made. How has the ferry industry got away with it for 13 years?
The rule for all other forms of passenger transport is failsafe. When something goes wrong, when a weakness is identified, measures are taken to ensure that if the systems fail again, they will do so in a safe condition. But the condition of channel ferries is such that if catastrophic flooding occurs, they will not fail in safe conditions, but will fail lethally and catastrophically. When we heard the evidence, the shipping industry's patronising attitude was alarming. Those in the industry said that we had nothing to worry about because the men in suits, with titles such as admiral and sir, would not do anything that was unsafe, and nor would the Government. They told us to trust the Government and said that we had nothing to worry our little heads about—it has ever been thus.
The extraordinarily influential shipping lobby is as powerful now as it was in the last century, when the merchant shipping legislation of 1850, which had been a major improvement, was abandoned by Parliament under pressure from the profit-hungry shipping companies of the time. That lobby still commands the unique backwater, where safety rules are archaic and primitive when judged by the standards of other passenger safety. The families involved in the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster said:
Of all forms of transport where an organisation is responsible for the safety of customers, RoRo ferries represent the highest risk to the user.283 The Royal Institute of Naval Architects had an even starker warning. It said:A collision with one of the new fast ferries and a tanker would create a disaster of enormous consequences.But 13 years after the sinking of the first British ro-ro, no plans existed when we made our report—although they are being introduced now—to correct fully the design fault that threatens 2,000 deaths in a single incident.A ferry has been in difficulties for 18 hours in the English channel. In the past week a ferry ran aground on a journey from Germany to Scandinavia. In the past month a ferry capsized in Indonesia in two minutes. All the publicity surrounding that incident involved the two survivors and the Government told me that they would not even be investigating the incident. They were not interested because it was not a British ferry and it was not in British waters.
Very few people are aware of the first disaster in Britain, although the warning bells should have been heard at that time. The disaster involved the capsizing of the European Gateway, a freight ship, in 1982. It left no lasting imprint on the memory of the British people because only six people died. A collision with another vessel caused the flooding of the Gateway's car deck. The Royal Academy of Engineering warned that the cure for the fundamental fault had not been implemented for pre-1990 ferries and only peripherally for some post-1990 ferries. A collision will be the most likely cause of the next roll-over accident. In the past three years there have been 15 significant collisions in St. George's channel, 35 in the English channel and 58 in the North sea. None of them was serious, but British ro-ros were involved in 15 of them.
After the Zeebrugge disaster, Baroness Thatcher rightly said that she
understood that it was a fundamental design of these vessels that was the problem, and that something would have to be looked at very quickly to reassure the public.Some 48 hours later the Government said something different. Presumably having been got at by the ferry industry, the then Secretary of State for Transport said:The loss of the Herald was not due to design problems. It was entirely due to operational error.It is a disgraceful indictment of the Government that they should try to build confidence in something that is inherently dangerous. As with most ro-ro ferry disasters, it was caused by a combination of two factors. Human error causes 73 per cent. of all marine accidents and the remaining accidents are caused by other faults. However, in the case of the ro-ro ferry, the Government—in the form of the Prime Minister—were originally right to identify the problem as a design fault, but they then decided to change their reaction, under pressure from the ferry industry.When the Estonia went down, the Government's reaction was even less excusable. I can remember the event vividly as I was in the Baltic at the time, at a harbour at Klaipeda. The weather conditions were dreadful. We all remember the awful tragedy of the Estonia when a minor mechanical failure caused nearly 1,000 deaths—people had no chance. Our Government's disgraceful reaction was transparently dishonest: they 284 tried to blame Johnny foreigner. A pantomime was played out at Dover in the presence of the then Secretary of State for Transport. Hoses were played on the sides of the vessel where the door shut in order to illustrate that there was no leak. Any roll on/roll off ferry with such a small leak could reach port easily; no disaster could or has taken place because of such leaks. It would take a much larger ingress of water to cause the ro-ro to capsize. What took place at Dover where, to add credibility to the claim that our ships were superior to others, water from hose pipes was splashed on to the door—with the authority of the then Secretary of State for Transport—was a meaningless public relations exercise. It was meant not to inform the British public, but to deceive them into believing that there was no dangerous design fault. No ro-ro accident could, ever has or will result from such a leak.
It is sobering to remind ourselves that the Estonia complied with the best safety of life at sea standards, known as the SOLAS 90 standards. Three quarters of our ferries that operate from British ports do not comply with the standards that the Estonia achieved. It is clear that the Estonia was safer than three quarters of the ferries that come out of our British ports. That message should have been conveyed to the British public by the then Secretary of State for Transport.
§ Mr. David Shaw (Dover)Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the Estonia was a totally different design? He said that there were design problems. The bow door of the Estonia opened upwards right into the water. No British ferry that I am aware of has a similar arrangement of the bow doors, and certainly no British ferry sailing out of Dover.
§ Mr. FlynnThe hon. Gentleman is entirely wrong when he says that the design is totally different. The architecture of the bow door on the Estonia was different from the design of other ferries, which may have had a contributing effect—we do not have the full report on the Estonia yet. Nevertheless, the reason why the ferry went down was not mechanical failure or the different shape of the bow door. The ferry flooded and capsized catastrophically because it had a flat car deck, which, when flooded with water, forces the ship to list, capsize rapidly and sink to the bottom. That is common to every roll on/roll off ferry.
Many other unfortunate events might have affected the Estonia. If there had been a collision, the water would have got in, regardless of the shape of the bow door. The hon. Gentleman is drawing attention to a detail. I shall discuss those matters later.
In the Select Committee, we were all bemused when the Secretary of State told us that he thought that it was plausible that 2,000 passengers could be evacuated from a doomed ferry in 30 minutes.
I pursued that matter with many parliamentary questions, which revealed an even more alarming position. They revealed that no evacuation exercise involving more than 500 people had ever taken place. The Health and Safety Executive said that such an exercise, with 2,000 people, would be "very dangerous".
On the ferry the Pride of Hampshire, 600 passengers were expected to shin down rope ladders to escape. In one exercise that was held, some Wrens—able-bodied and fit—were too frightened to use the dangling ladders 285 at the side of the boat. What on earth would happen in a real-life emergency? How would a boatload of panic-stricken, frail humanity cope? That is everyone's nightmare.
In the exercises, the evacuations took a couple of hours for 200 people; in real-life emergencies, on the Lakonia and the Achille Lauro, they took several hours. We were told that the International Maritime Organisation is likely to resist attempts to increase the SOLAS 90 evacuation times to 30 minutes even though new, faster ferries can carry up to 2,000 passengers.
The Government's Marine Safety Agency shared our gloom. It said that many of the 145 countries that make up the IMO have
different agendas. The flags of convenience countries seem to use their shipping registers as a source of revenue rather than a mechanism for international standards, with a consequent impact on safety standards.
§ Mr. Tony Banks (Newham, North-West)Ferries encourage people to drink a large amount of alcohol while they make the trip. Getting as many bevvies down as possible is part of the fun. Many people taking part in an evacuation will therefore be inebriated, making it even more difficult. Perhaps the ferries should be dry.
§ Mr. FlynnMy hon. Friend is absolutely right. I shall illustrate the difference between the artificial evacuation and a real-life situation, because there are many other problems. The basis of the safety case for those ferries is hopelessly flawed, for the reason that my hon. Friend suggests and for many others.
The shipping industry repeatedly rubbished our report even before it was published. When that unanimous report was circulated, the industry claimed that its vessels complied with international standards—but international standards are deplorably low. The ferry that went down in two minutes off Indonesia complied with international standards.
We suggested that the only way to ensure that customers had knowledge with which to make a choice was for the MSA to inspect every ship and give it a hotel-type star rating, from zero to five, so that if we arrived on the quay or booked a ferry crossing we would know whether the ship was a one-star, two-star or five-star ship. Those stars would be given on the basis of buoyancy, survivability and evacuation procedures.
The MSA said that it was interested in that classification when we suggested it, but it was slightly alarmed when we gave details of the type of rating we meant—because at present, three quarters of ferries operating from British ports would get no star. The rest would have a single star for reaching SOLAS 90 level—the same level as the Estonia. Four stars would be given in future for vessels that would stay upright in the water long enough to evacuate all their passengers and crew in a credible future incident. Five stars would go to those which added sound evacuation techniques to that, but we are many years away from that.
We sounded a loud blast of warning about ro-ro vessels and we accepted comments that our report was frightening in many ways. The reason was that we were genuinely alarmed by the evidence that we heard. I am sure that the relatives of the 1,100 people who died in the Herald of Free Enterprise and Estonia disasters would be grateful to 286 any parliamentarians who sounded a warning before those events, and the people of Milford Haven will be grateful to their Member of Parliament for having sounded loud notes of warning three months ago, when another vessel went aground off St. Ann's head.
The distinguished naval architect, Professor Rawson, said that
nothing has really changed since the Herald went down".With the Government as its willing accomplice, the British shipping industry has proved that it cares more for its profits than for its passengers.I shall try to clarify my argument for the hon. Member for Dover (Mr. Shaw), because he will try to dismiss it with the usual obfuscation produced by the Government. The cause of the Estonia tragedy was that the bow doors failed structurally, but the reason for the 900 deaths was that the ship capsized and sank so rapidly that very few could be evacuated, and the reason for that was an inherently dangerous vessel. The design was the problem.
The cause of the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise was that the open bow doors allowed water to sweep in. The reason why so many people on board died—193—was that the vessel capsized and sank in 90 seconds because it had an inherently dangerous design.
The cause of the sinking of the European Gateway was a collision that allowed water on to the vehicle deck. The reason for the loss of crew and cargo was that the vessel capsized and sank rapidly because it had an inherently dangerous design.
I hope that that is clear enough even for the hon. Member for Dover to grasp.
The Government responded to our report, but it was a woeful response. We said that ferries should remain upright long enough for passengers be evacuated and that, if the IMO disagreed, we should act immediately, not wait for the next century. The Government said that they could not guarantee buoyancy but that they would seek IMO agreement, and seek regional agreement if that failed. They were committed to the shortest possible timetable.
I pay a rare tribute to the Government, because they acted with greater speed than they have before, serious efforts are being made and the United Kingdom is in the lead in dragging the other European countries and the world towards safer standards. We are light years from approaching an acceptable safety standard, but the Government are doing something about that and we are grateful that they listened to the Select Committee's recommendations on that subject. Nevertheless we have those pious intentions without any specific commitments.
The Select Committee also asked for a trial evacuation of 1,000 passengers in order to test the Government's absurd belief that 2,000 people could be evacuated from a stricken ship in 30 minutes. The Government agreed in principle to our request, but they repeated the MSA's claim that a trial evacuation was "very dangerous". In the Government's words, the
possibility of injury cannot be ignored".If a trial evacuation in ideal conditions would be "very dangerous", a real evacuation of 2,000 panicking people in an emergency could involve many deaths. One trial evacuation of 210 people took more than four hours.
§ Mr. Andrew Mackinlay (Thurrock)Although television cameras were invited to film the practice 287 evacuation at Dover, the Transport Select Committee was not invited to observe it. That would have been the fair and sensible thing to do if the Government were confident about the efficacy and the success of evacuation procedures.
§ Mr. FlynnCommittee members were painfully disappointed that they were not invited to Dover that weekend. The Government must be very relieved that we did not witness the exercise, because it proved our point very vividly.
The Select Committee urged the Government to publish the safety surveys carried out by classification societies for the MSA. That is an important recommendation. However, the Government—who espouse free choice and open government—said that they will not publish the information because it is commercially confidential. That is an unnecessary denial of information on a matter of life and death.
§ Mr. AllenFurther to the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Mr. Mackinlay), is my hon. Friend the Member for Newport, West (Mr. Flynn) aware that I sought a meeting with the MSA and to accompany a ships inspector and surveyor in Southampton on 2 April? Such a meeting was perfectly in order according to the head of the agency, Mr. Robin Bradley, but when it was checked with the private office of Lord Goschen, the Minister for Aviation and Shipping, I was told that it would be wholly inappropriate for me to visit the MSA and to accompany a ships inspector.
§ Mr. FlynnThat is another chapter in the Government's history of cover-ups on that matter. The Government are attempting to conceal the truth.
The Government dismissed our request for a system of star ratings, saying that such a system would not be perfect as it could not take into account human error. That is a cop-out and an astonishing answer from a Government who introduced imperfect league tables for schools and who wish to monitor standards in every other sphere of life. Comparable standards of survivability for each vessel could be established scientifically—there is no problem with that.
The Select Committee claimed that the star system would give companies a commercial interest in improving safety standards. The Government replied that the firms already had a commercial interest in safety standards because of the disastrous effects of accidents on business. That is nonsense: the ferry trade has suffered no adverse effects as a result of recent disasters. The Government dismissed the Zeebrugge ferry disaster as "human error" and the Estonia disaster was blamed on Johnny foreigner. Zeebrugge was a cheap disaster for the ferry industry, costing only £90 million—which was shared in the industry—and the Government have conspired to build public confidence in an inherently dangerous ferry design. One should compare that cost with the £1 million a day that ferries can make crossing the English channel in summer.
The Select Committee requested that full safety information about each vessel be used in publicity material and displayed on each ship. The Government, hilariously, said that they would publish a list and create 288 a hotline for public inquiries. Presumably it will be like the cones hotline. The Select Committee recommended the publication of comparative safety assessments of new and bigger high-speed vessels. The Government said no and declared that they are happy with the present IMO and other rules. However, they will examine the safety of high-speed craft. The channel tunnel had to undergo a safety assessment—that is the only way of achieving proper safety standards. Bigger and faster vessels are being built, as we saw on television a few days ago. They will carry more people and there is the potential for even greater disaster.
§ Mr. MackinlayMy hon. Friend and I are interested in fair competition. Does he agree that there is disparity of treatment in this case? The operators of the channel tunnel were forced to adopt very strict safety standards—and they were proud to do it—but their competitors, the ferries, are allowed to get away with action that is commercially and competitively unfair.
§ Mr. FlynnMy hon. Friend is absolutely right and the Select Committee reached the same conclusion.
Safety has improved somewhat, but it has deteriorated as well. Evidence of that deterioration was provided by the sea safety group—a body of international shipowners, pilots and captains. It said that the money-spinning services were increasing to a worrying degree and that, by maximising facilities to boost profits, designers had created their own "Hampton court maze" on ships for passengers. The group asked: if professional sailors did not know how to find their way around the ships, how on earth would people be able to muster in the event of a disaster? It supported the Select Committee's report and argued for all the improvements that we suggested, including the star system.
Presumably in answer to our request for a practice evacuation involving 1,000 people, an exercise took place at Dover. The Government have stuck to their claim that it should take only 30 minutes to evacuate a vessel: that is their benchmark. The Dover evacuation involved a group of young, able-bodied people—some of whom pretended to be disabled. They knew what was to happen and the evacuation took place in daylight while the boat was tied to the quay. Instead of evacuating 2,000 people from the vessel in 30 minutes, it is reported that only 315 were evacuated in that time.
§ Mr. David ShawThat is total rubbish. Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
§ Mr. FlynnI shall not give way to the hon. Gentleman, as he can make his own speech. I refer to the only report that I have about the evacuation from The Mail on Sunday. It cited that figure.
§ Mr. ShawOn a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. That is total rubbish. I was there; the hon. Gentleman was not. It is absolute rubbish.
§ Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes)Order. The hon. Member for Dover (Mr. Shaw) knows perfectly well that that is not a point of order. However, it may be a point for debate and, if the hon. Gentleman seeks to catch my eye, I may be able to help him.
§ Mr. FlynnThe Mail on Sunday of 14 January said:
At the prescribed 30-minute point, when everyone should have been in the life-rafts, only an estimated 315 were clear of the ship".289 The chief executive of the Marine Safety Agency, who was monitoring the exercise, said:If this had been a matter of life and death, they would have gone down more rapidly".Would people move more quickly in the event of a real disaster? Rather than a group of fit, young people, passengers would usually constitute a mixture of humanity—the very young and the very old, the disabled, many who were fast asleep, some who were drunk, some who were pregnant. All would be terrified. Paramedics were on hand during that exercise, and all of those involved knew exactly what was occurring.Yet even in that useless and hopelessly artificial exercise, nowhere near 2,000 people were evacuated within 30 minutes. The disasters that the exercise was designed to mimic almost always occur on the open sea, at night and perhaps in storm conditions. There may be a fire or the boat may list or capsize in the water. The exercise at Dover was rigged and of no value—although it proved our point.
Ministers will make much of the recent negotiations. The experts who inquired into the Estonia disaster recommended that ferries be allowed to remain afloat with 50 centimetres of water on the car deck. The IMO rejected that recommendation, but it agreed to adopt SOLAS 90 standards worldwide for all ro-ro ferries. In preparing for the debate, I asked several independent bodies with expertise in the field for their impressions on the present position.
The Royal Institute of Naval Architects told me:
The assumption of 50 centimetres of water on the car deck has to be seen for what it is; a wholly arbitrary standard imposed in panic by the Scandinavians after the Estonia disaster.Who would know whether there was 51 or 49 cm of water on the car deck? The only real solution must involve sponsons, bulkheads, and longitudinal, transverse or increased buoyancy chambers on the boat.According to the Royal Institute of Naval Architects:
Some ferries … are unlikely to collect that amount of water (50 cm) except in unreasonably severe collision conditions…However,…many ferries could collect such water (50 cm) with a simple collision, suggesting that it is not enough!The Royal Academy of Engineering isnot satisfied that significant progress has been made:So there is already a compromise on safety standards.
- —there is no agreement that the evacuation time should be the criterion for the period that the ships remain upright
- —the basis for agreement, if reached on a Regional Basis…will probably invoke significantly smaller volumes of water than recommended by the Panel of Experts."
The Consumers Association, which has been studying the matter most productively for many years, said that
operators should be allowed a maximum of two refit periods to implement changes to existing ferries which would bring us to Spring of 1998. Events after that would be over three years after the Estonia disaster. The key point here is that precious time has already been lost: a decision must be taken urgently before more lives are sacrificed unnecessarily.I press the Government to rethink the star system and the survivability and buoyancy standards that the Select Committee requested. Will they unilaterally adopt the 50 cm rule, inadequate as it is, even if other European countries do not accept it? Will they provide a timetable for any modifications? The Consumers Association is arguing for spring 1998 at the latest. Do the Government 290 accept that? Do they accept the lack of a link between evacuation time and the survivability of ferries in SOLAS 90 and the new 50 cm proposal? That was a fatal flaw.My hon. Friend the Member for Pembroke made grave allegations about the Government. He said that their failure to implement the Donaldson report made them responsible for the catastrophe in Milford Haven. We all look on horrified and impotent as we witness an environmental catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. We know what it has already done to nature and the beaches there. On present damage, they will probably not be free of pollution for many years. The damage to the tourist industry is incalculable, but we know what happened in Brittany and Cornwall when the Torrey Canyon spilled its oil. It could be far worse in Milford Haven.
This is a disaster of enormous proportions. The reason for it must rest with the House and the Government. We were far too permissive with the billion-pound-profit oil industry—the most profitable industry in the world—when it wanted to cut costs by using inadequate, ramshackle vessels or new vessels of inadequate design. We have continually and permissively failed to impose a rigorous safety regime on all shipping. We now see the results of that in the Sea Empress disaster. We could well suffer another catastrophe such as the Estonia, the European Gateway or the Herald of Free Enterprise.
An accident involving a roll on/roll off ferry could cost 2,000 lives. We know that the marine industry is run at minimum safety for maximum profit. Roll on/roll off ferries do not fail safe. They fail lethally and catastrophically.
§ Mr. David Shaw (Dover)At present, my constituency of Dover is suffering because the roads have been cut off by snow. We heard on the news that 500 lorries and 200 cars were unable to get out of Dover yesterday and that the A20 had to be cleared. There is a lesson to be learnt here. Not only should we thank the emergency and other services for the way in which they reacted yesterday, but my hon. Friend the Minister should re-examine the delays in dualling the A2 into Dover. It is vital that there should be access to Dover via both the A20 and the A2 as access is vital to our ferry industry.
I also thank the emergency services for their work in Deal on the flooding in the high street and around the seafront. It has been a terrible time for many of my constituents.
I do not agree with the hon. Member for Newport, West (Mr. Flynn). I even disagreed with his Latin quotation. I shall not quibble about the accuracy of his Latin, but he tried to make out that Julius Caesar was one of the first people safely to cross the English channel. A bronze age ship was recently discovered in Dover, which suggests that people were crossing the English channel safely and landing at Dover 4,000 years ago. We have a longer history of safe ships in Dover than the hon. Gentleman suggested.
There is a cavalier attitude among Labour Members with regard to ship and ferry safety. Our ships, and Dover's ferry industry, have a tremendous record on safety and carrying passengers. In the United Kingdom, there are 50 million passenger journeys by ship each year 291 and some 20 million of them are on Dover ferries. The safety record has been extraordinary when one considers the time period. Even with the tragic disaster of the Herald of Free Enterprise, we have managed to create an industry that, in terms of passenger travel, is one of the safest in the world. This year, with the new ferry company, Sea France, joining P and O and Stena Sealink, we shall have some 20 freight and passenger ships—as well as hovercraft and Hoverspeed—operating out of Dover.
The ships are constantly checked and monitored. I pay tribute to the Marine Safety Agency, which does an excellent job of checking those ferries and ships. Sometimes, the ferry operators are pre-warned because the checks are exhaustive, thorough and detailed, but ferry operators are often not warned about the safety inspectors' visits. The safety agency staff take a ferry crossing without telling anybody and check the safety procedures on board. That is a powerful incentive to get the safety procedures right.
Our ships in Dover are modern ships fitted with modern safety equipment. Safety is regarded as absolutely critical for our ferry industry. I believe that ro-ro ferries are very safe indeed.
The 1986 Herald of Free Enterprise disaster had a devastating effect on my constituents. Many of them lost family members. Many of them knew or were friendly with families who lost someone. The tragedy was devastating in my area. I am afraid, however, that the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster was not caused by design problems. There was one simple, basic reason why it went down—alcoholism among certain members of the crew.
It is a tragedy to re-explore the matter, but there is a lesson that we have to learn. There was a terrible human error. The doors were not closed and no one checked. The procedures on board ship were a disaster and alcoholism was rampant among the crew. The House may wonder how that state of affairs came about and why there was such a lack of discipline. In reality, the officers were not in control—extreme left-wing trade unionists were in control of the ship.
§ Mr. FlynnThe hon. Gentleman has reduced the debate to a ludicrous level by suggesting that the disaster was political. Families of Herald of Free Enterprise victims gave moving evidence to the inquiry that the tragedy was not caused by human error. Although human error is responsible for 73 per cent. of accidents, the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster was caused by a combination of human error and the ship's design. There could have been drunken crews on other vessels, but they would not have capsized in 90 seconds.
§ Mr. ShawThe hon. Gentleman will believe what he wants to believe, even if it is totally untrue. Alcoholism caused the Herald of Free Enterprise to go down. People did not do their jobs because they were drunk. Before 1986, and in 1986, there was too much drinking by crews on board. P and O stopped that. Today, anyone found to have consumed alcohol while crewing a ferry is instantly dismissed. In 1986, extreme left-wing trade unionists would not allow the ships' officers to discipline crew members who drank alcohol on duty. Moderate trade 292 unionists were upset about that because they could see the problems coming and the difficulties that would result. The Herald of Free Enterprise disaster could have been foreseen, but not in the way that the hon. Member for Newport, West suggested. It could have been foreseen by the lack of discipline—a state of affairs enforced by the extreme left-wing trade unionists who were running the crews in those days.
The situation today is totally different. Management has taken control of the ships and the officers are in charge. Proper procedures are enforced at every level. Warning lights monitor the closing of bow doors and other key areas. Closed circuit television constantly scans the car decks and bow doors. The crew and officers make frequent checks on safety procedures and on seals around the bow doors. No alcohol is drunk by officers or crew before going on board or when on board, because that is banned. Today, we have superb officers and crew on ships in Dover. They are well-trained, able people who take safety seriously.
There are no ferries in Dover of a design similar to the Estonia. The bow doors on that ship were open, which of course was dangerous. In addition, they were not properly checked and the fastenings were deficient. Dover ferries are totally different from the Estonia.
§ Mr. FlynnIs the hon. Gentleman seriously suggesting that the Estonia was sailing with her bow doors open in the Baltic that night in September? Did I hear the hon. Gentleman correctly? Is he saying that the bow doors were left open after the ship left Tallinn?
§ Mr. ShawEither the fastenings were such that the bow doors were beginning to open, or the fastenings had failed and the bow doors opened as soon as the sea became rough. We know that the bow doors on the Estonia opened in a way that no Dover ferry bow doors can. It is impossible for a Dover ferry's bow doors to open in the way that the bow doors on the Estonia opened.
The hon. Member for Newport, West dismissed the SOLAS 90 test in a cavalier and irresponsible way. That test has been applied to a number of Dover ferries in model form in a tank. The models had a hole equivalent to 9 m put in their sides, from top to bottom, and the equivalent of 50 cm of water put in. The model Dover ferries did not sink in those circumstances. Water rolled out as much as it rolled in, and the tank model remained stable. New designs are being considered all the time, which might make further improvements possible. Higher decks, for example, will transform the current structures. Catamarans and other such vessels are being considered in Dover.
The constant improvements to safety are made possible by profits. Labour Members were knocking profits.
§ Mr. MackinlayWho was?
§ Mr. MackinlayI did not. I said that I was a defender of fair competition. The hon. Gentleman seems to have overlooked the fact that we have in the channel tunnel a modern transportation system whose safety standards are not applied comparably by its competitors, the ferry operators. That seems to be unfair competition. I want 293 competition in the interests of consumer choice, but there should be a level playing field in the interests of consumers and of shareholders in private enterprise companies.
§ Mr. ShawFerry safety standards are at least equal to those of the channel tunnel. I shall not get into a depressing argument about whether more people are likely to be killed in a channel tunnel disaster than in a ferry disaster. Both facilities try desperately to make their services as safe as possible. I may knock the channel tunnel in terms of its quality of service and financing, which has been diabolical—there is no fair competition when £8 billion or more of debt is effectively written off and no interest is paid—but on the issue of safety I would not be prepared to attack the channel tunnel unless I had substantial evidence. In different ways, ferry and channel tunnel operators make every attempt to ensure that their facilities are as safe as possible.
§ Mr. Matthew Banks (Southport)I know that my hon. Friend will be drawing his speech to a close in a few moments, because a number of other hon. Members want to contribute to this short debate. My hon. Friend is entirely right on at least one point. The hon. Member for Newport, West (Mr. Flynn) mentioned in his closing remarks—which I wrote down, because I was concerned about them—that ferry operators were paying minimum attention to safety, to maximise their profits. That was the broad thrust of the hon. Gentleman's argument. My hon. Friend was clearly right to draw attention to that nonsense.
§ Mr. ShawI thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I assure him that I am paying regard to the time, but the House is not as full as it has sometimes been for such debates.
I attended the safety exercise in Dover and saw the Stena ship evacuated. Labour Members did not.
§ Mr. MackinlayWe were not invited. They kept it secret.
§ Mr. ShawI do not know why the hon. Member for Newport, West was not invited, but if he knew about it, he should have written to the Marine Safety Agency asking to be allowed to attend.
§ Mr. MackinlayThey did not want members of the Transport Committee to witness the exercise.
§ Madam Deputy SpeakerOrder. Seated interventions are not acceptable to me.
§ Mr. ShawI had no difficulty getting to see the safety exercise, which I witnessed at first hand throughout. There is no doubt that 834 volunteers were successfully evacuated. I am sure that they would be flattered to hear themselves described by the hon. Member for Newport, West as fit and young. I would not want to denigrate the fitness or youthfulness of my constituents, but they were certainly not all in their 20s. The hon. Gentleman has received a wrong report of the exercise and would seem to have misled the House of Commons this morning.
The safety of the volunteers who took part was paramount, so speed was not given priority. Uppermost in everyone's mind was the wish that no one at Dover should 294 be injured or killed. I am amazed to find that the hon. Member for Newport, West thinks that the only worthwhile safety exercise would be one that involved pregnant women, inebriated passengers and people in wheelchairs and was conducted in mid-channel with a gale blowing. It sounds as if he will not be happy with a safety exercise until someone dies—a strange proposition.
The exercise took an hour. Only one person at a time was allowed down the chutes so as to ensure that no one crashed into anyone else. Of course, in a real incident at sea when people needed to be evacuated, more than one person at a time would have to go down the chutes and the whole exercise would have to be speeded up.
Moreover, only one side of the ship was used. It was moored in the harbour for the safety of the volunteers. At sea, six double chutes from both sides of the ship would be used. In Dover, only three double chutes from one side were used, but the safety exercise was valid nevertheless. Indeed, it showed that the half-hour timetable that everyone thinks desirable would be easily attainable in a real emergency at sea.
One problem was revealed during the safety exercise: although more than 20 life rafts were successfully launched, three of them failed. There were a number of spares, but a question mark remains over the three that failed. Everyone knows that, given a large number of life rafts, one or two may not inflate properly, but there is concern about the fact that these three failed, and I hope that serious consideration is being given to that.
Life rafts on board ship are regularly changed. It is therefore surprising that three relatively new rafts should fail. That certainly needs further investigation. In this regard, too, the safety exercise was a success because it pointed up one or two areas where checks could result in improvements. The bottom line is that the exercise worked. Labour Members call it a rigged exercise, which just shows how far from the truth they are prepared to stray. It is believed that this was the first ever safety exercise of its size not just in Europe but in the world.
Today we have heard another Labour conspiracy theory. The Opposition suggest that more than 800 volunteers, the Marine Safety Agency, the staff of the Dover port and harbour board, and the emergency services all combined in a conspiracy to make the exercise more successful than it really was. I do not subscribe to the idea that more than 1,000 people in Dover conspired in this way. The exercise demonstrated the safety of these procedures.
I am fed up with Labour's continual attacks on Dover's ferry industry. The leader and deputy leader of the Labour party have already said that they support public finance for the channel tunnel and would do down Dover's ferry industry. The Labour Member of the European Parliament for Kent East has attacked the safety exercise and Dover's ferry industry. The hon. Member for Thurrock (Mr. Mackinlay) has today revealed his support for the railways and the channel tunnel.
Labour Members do not visit Dover to announce their support for the channel tunnel, but plenty of them come to mislead the people of Dover about what they are really up to. Railway union-sponsored Labour Members come and tell us how to run our port and ferry industry, but they omit to tell the people of Dover that they receive £5,500 a year from the rail unions, which also pay for 80 per cent. of their election expenses.
295 The hon. Member for Newport, West said that I was wrong about the Estonia; then he admitted that I was right to say that the bow doors on that ship are of a totally different design from those on Dover's ferries. The fact remains that Labour Members and Labour Members of the European Parliament just want to attack Dover's ferry industry. I am proud to be able to defend it.
§ Mr. Graham Allen (Nottingham, North)It is apposite to hold a debate on marine safety today, given the events of the weekend. It is important to record that a gross misjudgment by the Government over the weekend has turned an accident into a disaster. Had they taken heed of Lord Donaldson's recommendations, the terrible problem at Milford Haven would not have degenerated into the environmental and ecological tragedy that is unfolding.
Lord Donaldson suggested that a powerful tug be placed in the western approaches, but his recommendation has been ignored. Under-powered tugs have been attempting to pull the Sea Empress off the rocks—to no avail. Furthermore, the two powerful tugs deployed around the coast were not summoned by the relevant Ministers on Thursday night or Friday so that they could make headway to the scene of the accident and pull the Sea Empress off the rocks.
This tragedy will have appalling consequences, and the Secretary of State for Transport and the Minister for Aviation and Shipping, who are responsible for both decisions, should reconsider their positions.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Newport, West (Mr. Flynn) on initiating this debate, and on his assiduous work on ferry safety, not to mention his excellent work on the Transport Select Committee—
§ Mr. Mackinlayrose—
§ Mr. MackinlayWill my hon. Friend extend his congratulations to Conservative Members serving on the Transport Select Committee, who form a majority on it? They include the hon. Member for Southport (Mr. Banks), who signed his name to the report that formed the basis of the criticisms levelled today by our hon. Friend the Member for Newport, West (Mr. Flynn). To his credit, the hon. Member for Southport went on television the morning the report was published to endorse its findings. We look forward to hearing from him later this morning, when doubtless he will reiterate his criticisms of the Government's stewardship of the ferry industry.
§ Mr. AllenAll members of the Select Committee are to be congratulated on their work. I am sorry that the hon. Member for Dover (Mr. Shaw) spoke so long, while saying virtually nothing and trivialising a serious issue, thereby forcing his hon. Friend the Member for Southport (Mr. Banks) out of the debate. If the hon. Gentleman wants to intervene in my speech, I shall be pleased to accommodate him in a way that his hon. Friend was not prepared to do.
296 I should also like to record the thanks of all in this House to my hon. Friend the Member for Pembroke (Mr. Ainger) for his fine constituency work at the weekend. It was a remarkable and fortunate coincidence that the constituency Member of Parliament was not only interested in the area, but had some expertise. His herculean efforts over the past 48 hours have drawn to the attention of the press and public the way in which the Government have defaulted on their responsibility and created an appalling catastrophe for the marine environment in south Wales. [Interruption.]
The Minister for Transport in London mutters from a sedentary position that it is all the Government's fault. I do not say that the accident was the fault of the Government, but the lack of prompt and speedy Government action on Friday and the failure to listen to the recommendations of Lord Donaldson over the past two years is their fault. They are liable in those circumstances. I hope that the people of south Wales will ask why the Government did not supply the correct equipment to tackle the problem over the weekend. The result of their inaction on Donaldson and their failure to supply appropriate powered tugs to the scene caused a tragedy when only an accident had occurred.
I am concerned that efforts to improve ferry safety, both in the United Kingdom and internationally, are stalling. I hope that the Minister can give us some good news this morning. We must ensure that domestic and international policy picks up speed so that the problems that have been outlined so eloquently by my hon. Friend the Member for Newport, West are tackled with expedition.
One problem is the decline in the merchant fleet. The number of third country-flagged ferries is growing, and those ferries—as my hon. Friend the Member for Newport, West rightly pointed out—are often crewed by non-British crews and commanded by non-British officers. They are crewed by people from low-cost labour countries. The decline in our merchant fleet has an immediate knock-on consequence for safety standards.
I welcome another member of the Select Committee on Transport to the debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Cunninghame, South (Mr. Donohoe). As he knows, all the figures show that British-flagged ships are safer than ships flagged out to other countries. By not using United Kingdom officers and United Kingdom crews, we are drying up the supply of expertise for the Marine Safety Agency, for future training of British crews and for the insurance and shipping industries. We are cutting off the life-blood of our future merchant fleet by failing to ensure adequate numbers of United Kingdom officers and United Kingdom seafarers.
The Opposition have repeatedly called for proper regulation to address the concerns highlighted by the Herald of Free Enterprise and Estonia disasters. We fully support the introduction of new safety measures, but further action is now needed. Too many opportunities have been missed. Pressure is increasing on ferries and, therefore, on ferry safety. Many operators have slimmed down their operations to achieve leaner crewing levels, involving redundancies, and have made radical changes in work practices—not least, faster turn-round times. All those factors put added pressure on crews and officers on ferries plying the channel and elsewhere.
Many of those issues, as my hon. Friend the Member for Newport, West rightly said, were addressed by the report of the all-party Select Committee on Transport. 297 It is a failing of this place that the House has not had time, that the Government have not made time and that Parliament has not insisted on time to debate fully that important report. That failing goes far wider, as the Select Committees are dislocated from the Floor of the Chamber so that key issues, which hon. Members put hours of valuable time into discussing, are never debated openly on the Floor of the House. We will need to address that when there is a change of Government.
The Government have failed to respond adequately to the Select Committee's report on cross-channel safety. Instead of making a commitment to firm safety proposals for cross-channel ferries, the Government have diluted the Select Committee's recommendations so that they are less effective.
§ Mr. Matthew BanksWill the hon. Gentleman give way?
§ Mr. BanksI 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 SpeakerOrder. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, but interventions should be short and we are especially short of time this morning.
§ Mr. AllenI 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 298 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 on 29 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 Braer disaster was a lesson that was not learnt by the Government. Let the Sea Empress lesson be learnt by the Government, not only in respect of oil pollution and 299 tanker safety but in terms of ferry safety. The lessons have been given and the work has been done; we need a Government who will listen.
10.50 am
§ 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. NorrisNo, 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.
300 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.
The operation was intended to test and demonstrate important safety procedures. In all, 842 people were safely evacuated from the ship. There is, of course, a huge difference between that sort of exercise and what would happen in reality. My hon. Friend the Member for Dover was entirely right to make the fundamental point that the safety of volunteers was paramount, which quite necessarily placed some constraints on the exercise that would not apply if, unfortunately, the exercise had to be carried out for real. As ever, the hon. Member for 301 Newport, West chose to try to make political capital in a most ludicrous and distorted way out of an extraordinarily valuable exercise.
Time prevents me from narrating in detail the extent to which the Government have continued responsibly to fulfil their role of pressing the issue of ferry safety within the international community. I am content, as I believe all objective hon. Members will be, that the Government have at all times acted with the interests of ferry safety as their paramount concern.
§ Mr. Matthew BanksOn a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Although, for understandable reasons, I was not able to catch your eye earlier, this is a genuine point of order.
The House knows the light touch that you use in dealing with our proceedings and that there are times when it is necessary to stick closely to the motion on the Order Paper. May I draw your attention to the fact—although I imply absolutely no criticism of you whatsoever; if there were any criticism it would be of Opposition Members—that earlier we debated ferry safety, when we heard far too much from Opposition Members on matters that relate to the Donaldson report and Pembroke but which have nothing to do with the subject of the debate initiated by the hon. Member for Newport, West (Mr. Flynn)?
§ Madam Deputy SpeakerThis is basically an Adjournment debate. Although topics are suggested, the Chair is not so strict in such debates.