Ferries Allowed to Exceed Passenger Limits

Exemption for Dover Straits
Britain’s Department for Transport is allowing Dover ferry operators to carry passengers in numbers that would normally be illegal under rules against overloading, in a bid to repatriate travellers stranded by the aviation crisis. French authorities are understood to have made similar provisions for French concerns. The decision was made necessary by last week’s eruption of a volcano in Iceland, forcing the cancellation of the vast majority of airline flights across Europe because it is unsafe to allow jet engines to take in the resultant dust.
All this is possible under a get-out clause in chapter III of Solas, which states: “[An] administration may, if it considers that the sheltered nature and conditions of the voyage are such as to render the application of any specific requirements of this chapter unreasonable or unnecessary, exempt from those requirements individual ships or classes of ships which, in the course of their voyage, do not proceed more than 20 miles from the nearest land.”
Philip Roche, a partner at law firm Norton Rose, was in no doubt that the dispensation was allowable in international law. “It is not unsafe, I would say, so long as it is limited to this one particular route for the time it is needed,” he said.

Airlines Suffer; Ferries Praised
Airlines, grounded by the continuing clouds of ash, are not covered by insurers, and are suffering what is likely to amount to the industry’s worst-ever losses. The International Air Transport Association conservatively put the industry-wide loss in revenues at $200m per day, before additional costs in compensating passengers and repositioning aircraft are factored in, and Europe’s airlines have dusted off the begging bowls and are heading to national and EU authorities for aid. There are precedents. In 2001, governments handed out compensation after US airspace was closed in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. And where would banks be were it not for the public money ploughed into their balance sheets after the recent, largely self-inflicted disaster?
But one sector where such proposals might be greeted with more than a raised eyebrow is the much-maligned ferry industry, which has recently shown the sterling stuff of which it is made. The irony is that for around the last decade and a half, ferries have been continually battered, largely by governments and the EU. The abolition of duty-free and the construction of the Channel Tunnel (with state funds) were seismic events in a sector that has subsequently operated on the slimmest of margins, with no sign or hope of government bailouts. We hope the past week has given the sector some real Sterling stuff and guaranteed its future.

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