P&O below par in ‘operation of life-saving appliances’
P&O agency workers did not know how to use “life-saving appliances”, according to a new report
A total of 23 failures on Spirit of Britain were found by Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) inspectors.
Fast rescue boats were not properly maintained and oil filtering equipment was not working. There were also five deficiencies with working conditions, and five relating to fire safety systems.
Spirit of Britain was detained following the inspection on April 11, before being cleared to sail on April 22. The vessel was used by P&O Ferries to restart operations between Dover and Calais on Tuesday for the first time since the company sacked nearly 800 seafarers and replaced them with agency workers on March 17 to save money.
The 23 safety failures were listed without further details by the Paris Memorandum of Understanding, which is an alliance of 27 national maritime authorities including the UK. It stated there was a “lack of familiarity” with the “operation of life-saving appliances”.
Mick Lynch, the RMT general secretary, described the report as “further evidence that P&O is a capitalist bandit sailing in our waters”.
He said: “The lack of care and respect P&O clearly has for safety regulations – that are designed to save lives … is on a par with their appalling treatment of the loyal 800-strong workforce who were sacked last month.
“There can be no doubt that the public and haulage firms should boycott P&O Ferries on safety, security and moral grounds until the Government steps in and takes over the running of this rogue maritime operator.”
Thirty-one safety failures were found by the MCA on another P&O Ferries vessel, European Causeway, resulting in it being detained on March 25.
A total of eight P&O Ferries vessels will be probed by the agency following the mass sackings.
A P&O Ferries spokesman said: “The safety of our passengers and crew is our foremost priority and any suggestion that it is being compromised in any way is categorically false.
“It is clear that the safety inspections of our vessels have reached an unprecedented level of rigour and we welcome this additional scrutiny to help us come back even better than before.”