National Policy Statement for Ports

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Tuesday 14th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, it is back to the world of cold ironing. The UK Government have the opportunity to outline a clear road map with specific objectives and milestones for the deployment of charging facilities. A strategic plan should build on what we have been considering in this document to include short-term goals, such as the number of ports equipped with basic facilities, and long-term targets for full-scale electrification.

All the good intentions in this plan are meaningless unless we invest in grid upgrades. That means that the UK Government should collaborate with distribution network operators to upgrade grid connections now and ensure robust energy supplies. This may involve investing in new substations, transformers and high-voltage connections to handle the increased demand. Given the constraints on the public sector investment plans, this calls for a new PFI approach, one that balances risk between government and the private sector, learns the lessons from the past—not least over complex and bureaucratic contracts—and accelerates investment. In some ways, given its size and stand-alone features, it can be a test case for government, working with the Treasury and the private sector, as has been successfully done with the Thames Tideway project.

Finally, in all the work that we are doing, it is vital that we make our ports safe for employees, crews, passengers and the public.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

Before my noble friend sits down, although I do not want to disagree with a word he said about electricity, does he agree that any policy must keep an open mind as to all new forms of energy, in particular methanol-powered ships using clean-burning methanol, which is increasingly becoming a viable alternative to heavy crude oil? The policy needs to keep its mind open.

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I absolutely do have an open mind to that. We must not only be open-minded towards the challenges that are faced by battery technology and reducing the weight of batteries, for example, but look at all forms of clean energy that can benefit our international maritime trade. The point that my noble friend has made is absolutely accurate in that sense.

In my comments today, I wished to concentrate very much on the current direction of travel that is occurring in the industry because it is vital when it comes to designing a policy for ports and making sure that we are ready to take on the challenges that we already see embedded in European Union legislation. That is important for ports in Wales and on the west coast of the United Kingdom, for example, when it comes to ferries going to Ireland.

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[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I want to lay out my involvement in global ship-borne trade, terminal operations and the associated professions. My private business trades from two terminals—the Port of Sunderland, a council-owned deep-water port, and Great Yarmouth, which is a trust port. Both are on the east coast. Through a joint venture I bring tankers of liquid nitrogen fertiliser up to 50,000 tonnes deadweight to Sunderland. A YouTube video of one of our most recent shipments has had over 50,000 views, which I am very pleased with. I received the draft bill of lading for my latest shipment last night, so I know what the global shipping trade is all about.

The draft policy starts from the premise that developments in trade should be underpinned by commercial principles and should be market led. That is absolutely right, but if only it were that simple. Not all ports operate on the same statutory or capital structure, so the purity of that market-led approach is not quite what the policy would have you believe—mainly because it fails to recognise that particularly the trust ports, the largest cohort, are constrained in their ability to borrow, which constrains their ability to expand. I was with the chief executive of the Port of Dover last week and he made that point very powerfully; his credit card is maxed out. The policy needs to have regard to the particular needs of trust ports as opposed to the other operators.

That should not be a problem but the capital and structural differences between the ports have led to an oligopolist situation. It was just referred to by my noble friend who said that the top 20 operators have 80% of the market. That is resulting in a lack of competition where, by any measure, UK ports are uncompetitive against our near continental neighbours. This is important to the point about trans-shipments made by the noble Lord, Lord Mountevans.

I asked a colleague in my industry trade body to provide me with some figures for the landed cost of bulk commodities onto the quayside for two commonly used ship types, based on the rack rate. First, for a 4,000-tonne deadweight dry bulker, compared to ARAG —Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp or Ghent—UK ports are between 88% and 189% more expensive on the east coast and 213% more expensive on the south coast. For a much larger deep-water 35,000-tonne deadweight handysize bulk vessel, it is between 123% and 200% more expensive on the UK east coast, 250% more expensive on the south coast and a whopping 502% more expensive on the west coast. In cash terms, it is £62,000 for Amsterdam and £311,000 for Liverpool.

That is a problem—a £0.25 million problem—for the UK economy, but this competitive disadvantage is not referred to in the policy at all. It should be, because it is damaging our ability to trade with and earn our place in the world, especially as we are now able to operate our own independent trade policy with, for many commodities, a tariff advantage of 6.5% over the EU default on some goods. It is in everyone’s interest that we leverage this comparative advantage, but we cannot do so because we are under-ported and the policy does not mention it anyway. At this rate, we will never get to the expected 62.5% increase in dry bulks. I am doing my best to arrest the decline in liquid bulk traffics—a number that does not intuitively sound right to me given the huge volumes of LNG coming through Milford Haven, but I shall put that point to one side.

The case for new ports and port infrastructure is made. We cannot carry on without a dramatic increase in capacity and other break-bulk opportunities. We have a fleeting moment of comparative advantage to seize, so we must do it. However, we are here today because the 2012 policy has not worked. I am grateful for the short briefing from the British Ports Association, which told me that, since the existing policy was published in 2012, only four consequential consents have been issued. I take that at face value. The policy highlights a number of pre-2012 extant consents that have not been built. The UK’s ports infrastructure is sort of beached, so we have to ask why. With all the obvious demand, have we made it just too difficult to expand existing ports or build new ones? Will the draft policy make it easier or harder to expand the ports that our country needs?

Moving on, I am very surprised—here, I support the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott—that the policy makes no reference to the astonishing ecosystem multiplier that supports the ports in terms of, for the most part, privately operated businesses, stevedores, cargo surveyors, ships’ agents, hauliers, warehouses, freight forwarders and customs agents, to name but a few. It is a massive sector, but the port policy is silent on this. I cannot understand that.

Also, in my view, the policy fails in its analysis to make the distinction between the ports; the harbour authorities, which maintain the navigations and provide pilotage, dredging and so on; and the terminal operators, which occupy land and quaysides within a port from which they ply their private trade. The preamble is completely incomplete in this regard, and the order of battle is misunderstood. I support the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, in calling for a more fundamental redesign and recasting of this policy in order to reflect the richness and texture of the industry, rather than just copying and pasting a policy that has not, sadly, yielded fruit since 2012.

I consider myself a terminal operator. My experience tells me why the UK does not have the dynamic ports and logistics infrastructure that we might have. Back in 2019, I wanted to build a terminal in the north-east to handle liquid fertilisers. There was a significant upfront capital cost for tanks and a new local market to build from scratch. It was a risky operation. I could not go to the big five ports—this is a problem—because they will lease you land for only 15 or 20 years. Investing millions up front, only to hand the asset back to the landlord after 180 months so that he can punt the opportunity on to someone else using infrastructure that you built and paid for—as well as the market that you built—was not a good business strategy. The fact is that the terms offered by most UK ports do not make it easy for private operators to make long-term, generational investment decisions to build businesses and trades. There is not enough choice or competition.

We went to the Port of Sunderland, a council-owned port where we were able to enter into a much more long-term partnership that made it easy for my business to develop a patient plan to build a market and be rewarded for it. You might say that this is a case of the market-based approach working, and you would be right. However, for every Port of Sunderland—I cannot praise it highly enough for its can-do attitude and customer focus—there are dozens of less accommodating take-it-or-leave-it ports, unconcerned about competition because there is such a structural shortage of supply. That is a problem that this policy should grip; we have a market failure in that terminal operators are unable to secure premises on a long leasehold or freehold basis in the UK to grow our trade.

Just as an aside—I am looking at the clock— I welcome the points about freeports, but I express surprise that the opportunity for customs warehouses has not been appropriately recognised. A customs warehouse is like a freeport but just for a single warehouse or individual terminal located within a port estate. I have one of these, and I want to give credit to HMRC and thank it for putting its shoulder to the wheel to drive my trade forward. It is invidious to name names, but the trade taxes team in Manchester know who I am talking about. There is a part of the state that understands the need for trade and works collaboratively and positively. That opportunity for customs warehouses should be publicised more. I am astonished that it is not at all in the policy.

I support the broad thrust of the first 16 pages of the policy. I would suggest the re-emphasis of some points, but I think we can all agree that ports are important, that we are under-ported and that we need more competition. We are missing out on global trade, and we need to have a wider variety of types of tenures in a market-led approach. This is the lens through which I approach the 66 pages that follow that essential preamble. Oh dear. Very briefly, we have nine pages talking about how an applicant might confidently demonstrate the commercial, wealth-creation, tax-generating economic and socioeconomic benefits of a proposal, then we have 57 pages on the need for various appraisals, surveys and analysis, attempting to prove the unproveable. It is all very worthy and well meaning, but wholly counterproductive and at odds with the overarching imperative to get the trade flowing and the economy moving.

I read it again, and I suppose that I should have taken comfort from paragraph 2.4.2, where it says that

“the Secretary of State should start with a presumption in favour of granting consent to applications”,

which is good,

“unless other policies in this NPS provide a clear reason for refusal”,

which is bad. After the nine positive pages, the trouble is that on every one of those 57 pages that follow is a clear reason to refuse an application for reasons that can be confected. The cumulative effects of any of them are enough to topple any proposal into the drink.

We have been sitting through the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, and a lot of the well-meaning but counterproductive proposals in Part 3 will slow down development, not speed it up. I would like noble Lords to listen to my following remarks through the lens of the Chancellor—I cannot believe that I am saying this —quoted today in the Times on the day the Government have apparently consigned much of the nature-based bureaucracy to the deep. She says:

“The outdated planning system has been gummed up by burdensome bureaucracy and held to ransom by blockers for too long. Our pro-growth planning bill shows we are serious about cutting red tape to get Britain building again”.


At last! I take her comments at face value, but we need to do the same with this policy.

I read the Hutchison Ports response to the consultation. Not only are so many of the outside-the-port requirements unproveable but required, even once a consent might be granted the costs of the conditions still are not known. Even if you have spent all your money on the surveys, traffic analysis and hydraulic predictions and got your consent, you still have no idea what it might cost. It is only at that point the bills start coming in.

You have to question the value of some of these surveys. In Gorleston-on-Sea, from where I take my territorial designation, they built an outer harbour in the early 2000s. I remember that there were dire predictions from the world’s leading hydrological practice that Gorleston beach would be scoured away, and that warning held up the proposal for many years. The harbour has been built, and the beach is as wide as it has ever been—it is the beach at Hopton just down the coast that has copped it. The crime is that so many people believed the expensive report in the first place. Here lies the problem—an expensive report based on arbitrary precision and dodgy modelling misdirected the whole investment process. Is it any wonder that we have not had a significant new port development delivered in the last 15 years? Will this policy make it any easier?

The whole tone of the policy presupposes that ports are, by their very nature, bad things for the environment. That is a false premise. Keeping shipping channels open with dredging speeds the flow of water out to sea and removes sedimentary contaminants. The wildlife habituates. That is not an argument for no regulation, but we need to return to a sense of proportion and the £1.2 billion spent on environmental reports for the lower Thames crossing proves we have gone too far. We just cannot afford it.

Biodiversity net gain sounds so nice, and it is good on land, but it is totally unproven and unprovable in the tidal marine context. While we try and work it all out, the key deals for wind turbine installation and oil rig decommissioning are all being sorted out over the water by 2028. We are at risk of missing the boat— absolutely. Then I read that there are restrictions on port development in flood zones. Guess what? Show me a port that is not in a flood zone. That is not well meaning; that is wholly counterproductive.

The NSIP process, although welcome, is not going to help that much because it is not going to whittle down those 57 pages into a more sensible number. It is less wading through mud, more like stuck in the mud. It is like the whole policy was written by the Dutch—that other great seafaring nation; a competitor nation that is not known for its ambivalence towards the environment or environmental protections, and much of which is beneath sea level.

We have a document that pays lip service to economic development but strangles it in red tape. It is a statutory charter for the objectors and blockers. As the Chancellor said this morning, we need to show investors that we are a country that gets spades in the ground and our economy moving. What to do? We need to think hard about this policy and how serious we are about growing the economy, driving global trade and earning our place in the world. The policy proposal places so many risk factors and hurdles that only those with the deepest pockets can contemplate expanding their port. That wipes out the trust ports and the smaller private ports.

Consultees broadly welcome the draft presumption in favour of port development, and so do I, but it must be bolstered with a sequential test that starts with the overwhelming weight of port development that our island nation requires—a clear presumption in favour of trust ports obviously, with weight given to safety and security. While you need to sacrifice some small areas to grow the economy insofar as the environment is concerned, there should be an overriding recognition that sea freight is the most environmentally benign form of transport and the leveraging of existing infrastructure, such as a more intensive use of existing channels. This is clearly a mitigation to which nature has habituated.

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[Lord Fuller (Con)]

If we are really serious about growth in the UK ports sector, I ask the Minister to take a knife to the now-discarded copy-and-paste parts from Part 3 of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. A significant rewrite is indicated, and I think there is a consensus on that among noble Lords in this debate. Otherwise, we will have another lost decade in ports, with trade drag-anchored 20 years back. We should be the seagull soaring. Unless there is a rewrite, this policy will be an albatross around our neck.