Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what metric his Department uses to assess the risk-assessed level of staffing at coastguard operations centres; and what assessment he has made of those risk-assessed staffing levels using this metric at each of the coastguard operations centres in the period from January 2015 to July 2015.

Her Majesty’s Coastguard has undertaken an in depth analysis of its historical incident data to develop suggested staffing levels for the National Network by time of day (day or night) and season (low, medium, high and peak). During the current transition period this level has also depended on the geographical scope of the National Network as areas previously managed by Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres migrate into it.

Between January and July 2015 the National Network was staffed at the suggested levels on 93% of occasions.

On occasions where staffing is below these levels the flexibility of the National Network allows for support to be made available to teams experiencing very high workloads from teams elsewhere in the network with spare capacity.