Life-saving appliances: liferafts, lifejackets, lifejackets lights.

Fire protection: fire detectors and fixed firefighting systems.

Flood protection: bilge alarms and powered bilge pumps.

Vessel structural modification: stability in a damaged condition: compliance with the one compartment stability standard or buoyancy test.

Merchant Shipping (Safety Standards for Passenger Ships on Domestic Voyages) (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2019

These Regulations revise the safety standards for older domestic passenger vessels to bring their level of safety as far as possible up to the level required for vessels built more recently. The areas in which the law permits older vessels to comply with lower standards than newer ones are referred to as “Grandfather Rights”. The proposed Regulations have been made as a result of the review of “Grandfather Rights”.

The standards for modern vessels were updated as a result of the Lord Justice Clarke’s Thames Safety inquiry into the MARCHIONESS tragedy – the accident in which the elderly passenger vessel MARCHIONESS was involved in a collision with a dredger named BOWBELLE. However, due to practical difficulties involved in applying those standards to older vessels, only newer ones were subjected to the enhanced standards at that time. The UK government now believes that the standards with which older vessels are still permitted to comply no longer provide an acceptable level of safety for the 21st century.

The proposed revised standards update carriage requirements for life-saving appliances: liferafts, lifejackets, lifejackets lights; fire protection: fire detectors and fixed firefighting systems; flood protection: bilge alarms and powered bilge pumps; and vessel stability in a damaged condition: compliance with the one compartment stability standard or buoyancy test.

Standards are tailored to risk factors including, but not limited to, the Class of the vessel concerned, the area in which it operates, and in some cases the number passengers it carries, the density of marine traffic in the area in which it operates, time of day and time of year of operations.