Contribution
My Lords, I will first speak to government Amendments 200B and 200C. These amendments relate to Clause 54, which amends the Merchant Shipping Act 1995 to provide powers to make regulations giving effect to international agreements relating to maritime employment. Amendment 200B provides that such regulations cannot be used to bring into force an international agreement, or an amendment to an international agreement which requires ratification, before the UK has ratified it. By implication, the effect of this amendment is that such regulations can be made ahead of ratification of the agreement or amendment. For the UK to ratify an international agreement, it is usual for any necessary implementing legislation to be passed or made in advance of ratification, so the amendment helps ensure that the UK can fulfil its international obligations. Amendment 200C is simply a consequential drafting amendment.
Amendments 143A and 143AA, tabled by my noble friend Lord Davies of Brixton, seek to amend the requirements of the collective redundancy notification provisions to apply to services calling at a port in Great Britain at least 52 times a year, rather than 120 times a year. We are, as my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, related, yet again dealing with the appalling events surrounding the P&O dispute in March 2022. As with the Seafarers’ Wages Act, the frequency requirement of this measure was designed to ensure that it applied to those services with a close enough connection to the United Kingdom to justify it. Any broadening of the scope would require further consideration of the impact of bringing further vessels into it. I will come on to the proposed amendments to the scope of the Seafarers’ Wages Act, but we do not accept the proposal to amend the scope of those measures. We will apply a consistent approach to the proposed changes to the scope of the collective redundancy requirements, which has the same frequency requirement. Any change would require stakeholder engagement and full consideration of the impacts on industry. However, having listened carefully to my noble friend Lord Davies of Brixton, we will agree to meet the trade unions, as he suggests, where a number of the issues that he has raised tonight can be further discussed, including the requirement for a summary of the Government’s position before Report.
Amendments 200AA, 200AB and 200AC, also tabled by my noble friend Lord Davies of Brixton, seek to apply the measures under the Seafarers’ Wages Act 2023 as amended by this Bill to weekly services rather than those calling 120 times a year as drafted. The existing minimum frequency requirement for the new remuneration and safe working declarations is consistent with the requirements under the existing Seafarers’ Wages Act 2023, which was brought into force on 1 December 2024. It is important that this measure be limited to services with a close enough connection to the UK to justify intervention in their working practices; the current requirements in the Seafarers’ Wages Act and in the Act as amended in this Bill have been designed with this in mind. Extending the scope of this measure would require careful consideration of the international law implications of bringing into scope less frequent services to the UK, as well as the impacts on the market. With these considerations in mind, we think that the existing scope strikes the correct balance. It would also not be right to accept this amendment without undertaking a full public consultation, which cannot be done in the timescales required to make this change as part of the Bill.
Amendment 200AD and the consequential Amendments 200AE to 200AK would go beyond the existing powers in the Bill to make safe working and remuneration regulations. It would provide further powers to specify conditions relating to sick pay, holiday pay, pensions and other training, and to require harbour authorities to request the associated declarations from operators, following the approach taken by the Government in relation to the remuneration and safe working regulations.