The head of marine and aviation at the trade body which represents Lloyd’s of London insurers has urged the government to rethink the ethics and benefits of foreign ownership of national assets after what it called the pitiless treatment of P&O Ferries staff.
Neil Roberts, of Lloyd’s Market Association, whose members write about £36 billion of premiums every year, said that “UK plc must look at safeguarding itself” after 800 staff were sacked last week without notice or consultation, to be replaced with cheaper agency workers believed to be from overseas.
P&O, which is ultimately owned by the government of Dubai, has been warned by ministers that its actions may have been unlawful. Last night, Whitehall sources said P&O had yet to respond to a demand for assurances from Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, issued on Friday, that more redundancies were not on the way for P&O’s remaining 2,200 UK workers.
Roberts said that the Competition and Markets Authority, which examines acquisitions and takeovers, should apply a tougher standard on how foreign purchases affect the national interest. “It’s not just about consumer protection,” he said. “We see this time and again, the denigration of people at the expense of shall we say the profit margin. What happened at P&O is the ugly face of capitalism when it’s unchecked.” Roberts said that there had long been a tension in shipping between competition and safety, with insurers unable to blacklist vessels they considered unsafe because they could be sued by the owners for infringing their ability to do business. “It would be anticompetitive to do that, but actually, it’s sort of a public interest point.”
He said: “The world depends on shipping and the people who actually do the work, the seafarers, are very much undervalued and not very well-treated and almost a commodity.”
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From an insurance perspective, crew are vital. Roberts warned that the change of crew represented an underwriting risk that would need to be “swiftly assessed”, including if the ships would be considered seaworthy with a crew of unknown provenance who are unfamiliar with them.
He said that most crews are multinational and many ships have been built in Korea, or Japan, with instructions that are not in languages that everybody understands. “It’s ripe for confusions and it does happen. People paint over the instructions in the engine room, because it looks better.”
DP World, the state-backed transport and logistics company that owns P&O Ferries, has been warned by ministers that its role in the government’s freeport scheme is at risk after the treatment of ferry workers. However, Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, indicated yesterday that its investments in freeports would be treated separately from the P&O scandal. “I think there are two different things,” he told BBC One’s Sunday Morning programme.
DP World operates the London Gateway and Southampton shipping terminals, which are both in economic zones that have been awarded freeport status by the chancellor.
Asked about the treatment of P&O workers, Charles Hammond, chief executive of Forth Ports, a partner in the Thames Freeport, which includes London Gateway, said that he could not comment on individual cases. He said: “All I can say is that Forth Ports is committed to honouring UK employment law and would always follow UK employment law and respect all our workers’ rights and treat them fairly.”
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Asked if he was worried about the future of Thames Freeport, Hammond said: “The government need to take whatever action they feel is appropriate and necessary”. He was confident that the government valued ports’ contribution to the economy, and “that can be best seen through the operation of the freeports”.
