Ferry safety improvement plan outlined at Interferry

At the 44th Interferry Conference in London yesterday, I reported on the work of the FerrySafe group, a subsidiary of Interferry’s Domestic Ferry Safety Committee.

Interferry is the international industry association of ferry owners and its FerrySafe project is funded by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, the charitable arm of the leading classification society. The membership of the Domestic Ferry Safety Committee comprises several very passionate and knowledgeable ferry safety experts and advocates. Its objective is to improve the ferry safety record of the developing countries in which almost all ferry fatalities occur.

I described the FerrySafe group’s two study missions to the Philippines in March and May this year during which that country’s remarkable improvements in ferry safety were examined. A detailed report of that work is available on the Interferry website.

The primary driver of ferry safety reform in the Philippines, I explained, was that successive presidents of the country and other political leaders had developed the WILL to tackle the problem . Most of the other success factors arose from that political WILL.

The next step for FerrySafe is to decide which other poorly performing, in terms of ferry safety, country, has the most potential to achieve reforms similar to those made in the Philippines. FerrySafe’s role will then be to encourage and support those reforms.