Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what progress has been made in establishing domestic equivalents to the European Maritime Safety Agency information systems currently used by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency to regulate the safety of (a) passengers, (b) merchant seafarers, (c) merchant ships and (d) the marine environment in the UK; and whether the domestic equivalent for each of those is on course to be operational by March 2019.

The government is confident that we can agree a deep and special partnership with the EU. However, a responsible government should prepare for all potential outcomes, including the unlikely scenario in which no mutually satisfactory agreement can be reached.

To this end, the Department for Transport and Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) have worked closely together to understand the operational risks which the MCA would be exposed to in the event that access to EMSA’s systems was lost on exit day, including how best to mitigate these risks.

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency is now working to deliver these domestic equivalent systems and we are confident these can be in place by exit day.