Paris MOU on Port State Control data indicates the pandemic may well have had an negative impact on the safety standards of ships calling at European ports.
Despite lower levels of inspections last year due to the pandemic, detentions seem to be on the rise.
But the increase is not being experienced in the US or the Far East.
Between 2020 and 2021, there was a significant dip in the number of port state control inspections at Paris MOU member ports.
Pre-pandemic, in 2019, inspections were running at 17,916 annually, but fell to 13,168 in 2020 and then recovered to 15,387 last year. As the number of inspections fell so did detentions, from 534 in 2019 to 385 in 2020.
But in 2021, detentions increased to 528 — similar to pre-pandemic levels — even though the number of inspections was roughly 15% lower.
Detentions as a percentage of inspections is now at 3.43%, its highest level since 2017.
The Paris MOU secretariat described this increase as a “worrying development for safety” in its annual report.
One suggestion is that a fall in the number of inspections in 2020 meant a lot of deficiencies could have been missed. Those problems have now turned into detainable deficiencies in 2021.
But it could also be a statistical blip.
Paris MOU secretary general Luc Smulders said he is not ready to jump to conclusions based on a single year’s figures.
“Due to the changes in the number of inspections, there is no conclusive correlation. A longer period of time may show whether the safety standard is affected in a negative way,” he said.
Smulders is hopeful that inspection levels will return to near normal by 2023 and that will help give a clearer picture.
There also seems to be a mixed picture globally. Other major PSC inspection regions have not experienced the pick-up in detentions to the same extent that has occurred in the Paris MOU region.
In the US, there has even been a decrease in detentions, while in Asia the detentions per inspection figures have improved.
According to the US Coast Guard annual report before the pandemic in 2019, there were 95 detentions out of 8,622 inspections.
In 2021, the number of inspections recovered to pre-pandemic levels with 8,663 inspections carried out. But the number of detentions fell to just 63.
Similarly in the Tokyo MOU region, which saw inspection rates more than halve to 35,000, the detention per inspection ratio improved to 2.31% in 2021 from 3.13% in 2019.
