Piracy: Operation Atalanta (EUC Report)

Lord Greenway Excerpts

Wednesday 10th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenway]

My Lords, I asked to be put at the end of the speakers list because, due to a longstanding engagement later, I was not quite certain whether I would be able to stay until the end of the debate. If I do have to leave, I apologise to the House and to the Minister. For that reason, I will not direct any questions to the Minister.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and his committee for their comprehensive job, and I broadly agree with everything they have said. The subject has been well covered by other speakers, so I would like to confine my remarks to looking at the problem from the shipping industry point of view. As has been said, piracy is nothing new. It has been around for centuries and it waxes and wanes. Going back 20 years, Brazil, west Africa and Indonesia were all causing problems. Pirates then operated on a random and opportunistic basis. They were basically after the cash that was held in the ships—and ships have to carry considerable amounts of cash around the world.

I will never forget when, 20 years ago, our parliamentary maritime group was addressed by a captain from a reputable British shipping company. He had joined a ship in Singapore and the ship had sailed. She was a big container ship, lightly loaded and therefore very high out of the water, and steaming at 19 knots, which is a reasonable speed. It was dark and, when she was about three or four hours out of port, the captain was sitting in his cabin and suddenly found himself confronted by four men in balaclavas armed with AK47s. They knew exactly what they wanted. They said, “Keys to the safe, please, captain”, and he had no option but to take them to the safe and to give them the money. They then asked him to come with them; they went down on to the deck and told him to turn round. He thought the worst—that he would get a bullet in the back of the head—but nothing happened. After a couple of minutes he dared to look round, and they had vanished. One must not underestimate the skill of some of these pirates. I have climbed up pilot ladders on big ships in the dark—that is frightening enough—but to do it in those circumstances is a quite skilful operation.

As we have heard, today piracy is a very different game. It is well organised and run as a business with a business plan. As the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, said, people are even taking shares in it. We have heard about the huge amounts of money that are paid out in ransoms. The noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, asked why we could not stop the payment of these ransoms. I understand the United States has done exactly that by executive order, and the rest of the world will watch closely to see how that pans out.

There are, of course, other expenses for the shipping community—the additional costs of security measures and extra fuel costs as a result of deviations due to pirate activity. We should not forget that these additional costs filter down through the market to the high street.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, that we are approaching the tipping point; a major incident could happen at any time involving serious loss of life. If it happened in the Gulf of Aden, it could well lead to a blocking of the most important sea route between Asia and Europe, either through crews not wishing to serve on ships in that area or ship owners being cautious and not wanting to risk their ships. If that happened, it would be similar to what happened when the Suez Canal was blocked and would lead to an 8 to 10 per cent increase in the cost of fuel.

Of course, the main concern of the shipping community is the risk to human life. I shall say a little more about that later. There is also a great humanitarian concern for the seafarers who have been taken hostage. Organisations concerned with their safety and well-being, such as the Mission to Seafarers, are particularly worried about this aspect. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, said that one person had been killed on a yacht recently. I understand that a Yemeni hostage, the second officer of a ship, died of malnutrition the other day and that three of his colleagues are in a very serious condition. That is a different aspect. There are two sides to all this.

There is already an agreed system of best practice for ship owners, which appears to be working well but, as the noble Lord, Lord Teverson said, it is by no means universal and we must try to educate the more wayward ship operators to take it on board.

Measures of self-defence are made more difficult today because ships are larger than they used to be and generally carry much smaller crews. This is largely due to the cost of crews and alternation. The industry is definitely against having armed personnel aboard ships because this would immediately up the ante. Do we really want fire fights in which some crew will inevitably lose their lives? It might be both cheaper and more effective to have more crew keeping watch, because, if you can see the pirates, you have a chance of doing something about it.

The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, mentioned the safe citadel approach, which, it has to be admitted, has worked quite well on two or three occasions recently. However, there is a drawback to it, because the pirates are forever resourceful. I heard that they may deploy plastic explosives to blast the crew out of wherever they are hiding. The strategy also depends on there being a secure means of communication with any warship that might happen to be in the area.

The shipping industry would certainly like to see a reduction in the frequency of piracy and a return to the more sporadic incidence of the past. However, it is realistic and is only too well aware, as has been said by a number of noble Lords, that the problem could easily spread to other parts of the world, largely by imitation.

I join others in commending the work of EU-NAVFOR and Operation Atalanta. I am delighted that their remit has been extended. I know that ships and resources are tight at the moment—we would all like to have more ships—and I fully agree with what has been said about the Nimrods. It is absolutely disgraceful not to spend that amount of money on a very capable aircraft that would be ideal for this sort of anti-piracy effort in the Indian Ocean.

If we build more warships—this point can be developed in the defence debate on Friday—they should be smaller and have a helicopter capability. A situation such as this calls for smaller ships and possibly amphibious ships, which are also going to be chopped.

I do, however, draw a crumb of comfort from the fact that, as both our and Europe’s naval power declines, so it is growing in other areas of the world, notably in India and China. I was surprised to read only this morning that India may have five aircraft carriers in five or six years. The mantle of policing the seas and trying to combat piracy may move to those new navies in time.