comment, 31 May 2006
There are real consultations, sham consultations, and then there's the UK government's consultation over the plan for millions of tonnes of Russian crude oil to be pumped between ships in the Firth of Forth. It's worse than a sham: it's a joke.
The consultation has been conducted from Southampton by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. People have not been asked whether they think it's a good idea for so much oil to be transferred so close to the Fife shore. They have merely been consulted on whether or not the contingency arrangements for cleaning up after a spillage are adequate.
That's rather like being asked by a gangster waving a gun in your face which hospital you would like to go to. When the communities living around the Forth have pointed this out, they have been told by the Department of Transport in London that ship-to-ship oil transfers can be stopped - but only by the harbour authority, Forth Ports.
Forth Ports plc is a company that stands to make £6 million a year from the Russian oil transfers. It has so far been an unapologetic advocate of them, despite overwhelming opposition from environmentalists, local authorities and even its own shareholders. That it also gets to be the final arbiter hardly seems fair.
It's as if the ship-to-ship transfers have fallen down a regulatory hole. The Department of Transport, the Scottish Executive, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and local authorities all seem to be sidelined, with the crunch decisions in the gift of a company with a commercial vested interest.
All the public is left with is the Maritime and Coastguard Agency's consultation on the oil spill contingency plan. And the way that has been run has hardly inspired confidence. The environmental group, Friends of the Earth Scotland, used its website to encourage people to lodge responses by email.
Approaching 500 individuals have done so. On 12 May, the day after the consultation period ended, Sophie Winstone from the Maritime and Coastguard Agency sent out a circular email in response. "Your comments have been noted and will be placed on the consultation file," she said.
Unfortunately she included in her email a long list of the email addresses of everyone she had written to. That was 467 private hotmail, yahoo, company and government email addresses, passed on without permission to 467 people.
Not surprisingly, some of them complained that this was a breach of their rights under the 1998 Data Protection Act. Realising the mistake, Ms Winstone dispatched another email on 16 May. She requested that her previous email be deleted.
"This email was sent out in error and should not be acted upon or further disclosed," she wrote. "For the sake of clarity, no permission has been granted to use any of the information contained in that message or to contact any third party."
In a follow-up letter to one complainant, Chas Booth from Friends of the Earth Scotland, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency's Toby Stone almost grovelled. "Please accept my sincere apologies for what was clearly a serious oversight on our behalf," he wrote. "I fully accept that more care ought to have been taken."
So much for the competence of the consultation procedure. The trouble is that this is symptomatic of the government's whole approach to ship-to-ship oil transfers. It's not just that it has abused the rights of protesters. It has abdicated responsibility for protecting the environment.
Read more about the ship-to-ship oil plan for the Firth of Forth here.
You are a bunch of Nimbies
Ok, not in the Firth, but ok in SCAPA!
The koke is on you........................
Posted by: A Sailor | 22 December 2007 at 06:26 PM