Consultation on maritime civil sanctions provisions

The MCA is the government agency responsible for maritime regulation and enforcement.

At the present time, the MCA has more limited powers to impose civil sanctions than other national enforcement bodies. Consequently, the MCA is mostly reliant on the use of informal warnings (notices of concern), prohibition and improvement notices, and criminal sanctions (alongside some existing limited civil sanctions) to punish both minor and serious offences, and breaches of merchant shipping legislation.

This creates a situation where a person in breach of a legislative requirement could end up with a criminal record for committing a minor offence, or, alternatively, offenders might receive an informal warning in cases where it is not in the public interest to prosecute, giving no incentive to encourage compliance.

Consultees are invited to respond to this consultation and in particular to the consultation questions in Section 5. Section 2 of the document, together with the three annexes, gives a more in-depth explanation of the proposal.

It should be noted that this is a brief, high level consultation, aimed at gathering stakeholder feedback on improvements that could be made to the maritime enforcement regime in the event that primary legislation were amended to provide the necessary powers. There will be further opportunities to comment in the event that primary legislation is taken forward to implement these changes.

A full list of consultation questions is contained in Section 5 of this consultation.