Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
THE MERCHANT SHIPPING ACT 1988
The Merchant Shipping Act 1988 contains provisions covering a very wide area of shipping law. It is mostly concerned with the public regulation of shipping—such as ship registration and safety. However, there are important sections dealing with private rights—such as seamen’s wages, the right to strike and compensation for marine pollution damage. The Act provides a significant updating of existing merchant shipping legislation, particularly the Merchant Shipping Act 1894. The result for the long-suffering reader of such legislation is yet another set of messy changes which have to be fitted into the existing jumble of provisions, many of which have already been heavily amended. It is becoming increasingly difficult to be sure that one is dealing with an up-to-date consolidated version of the various Merchant Shipping Acts, especially as there are many provisions which have yet to be brought into force. It would have been extremely useful, for practitioners and academics, to have had a consolidated version of the 1894 Act, e.g., as a Schedule to the amending 1988 Act. There is a precedent for this in the maritime field.1 Other countries with similar shipping legislation, such as Australia, have managed to produce working consolidations, but it seems that the United Kingdom Parliamentary system puts a low priority on moves to make legislation easier to understand.
As the 1988 Act covers such a wide area, and makes so many diverse changes to the present law, it is proposed here to give only a brief overview of its contents.2
The 1988 Act makes significant changes to the system of registration of British ships. There is to be a new U.K. shipping register for vessels generally and also a new separate register of British fishing vessels. The need for change has been apparent for some time and proposals were made in two Consultative Documents issued by the Department of Transport in 1981 and 1984 and in a White Paper of 1987. The 1988 Act adopts many of the suggestions put forward in these documents, although in the final form of the legislation there are a number of significant departures. Most important, perhaps, is the decision to end compulsory registration of British-owned ships. In practice, most commercial owners will still choose to register in order to be able to use the title and mortgage functions of the register
1. See the Hovercraft (Civil Liability) Order 1986 (S.I. No. 1305), made under the Hovercraft Act 1968. In Sched. 2 there is, for reference purposes, a version of the Carriage by Air Act 1961 as amended by the hovercraft provisions.
2. For a more detailed study, see the annotations by the writer in Current Law Statutes Annotated 1988 (Sweet and Maxwell, 1989), or The Merchant Shipping Act 1988 (Sweet and Maxwell, forthcoming).
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