Report from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council. REFIT – Adjusting course: EU passenger ship safety legislation fitness check

Given that 23 out of 28 Member States are coastal countries, with four being island states, passenger ships play an important role in the mobility of EU citizens. On average, it is estimated that more than 400 million people pass through EU ports every year. 120 million passengers are transported by domestic passenger ships, i.e. ships sailing between ports of the same Member State.

The EU legislation on Passenger Ship Safety has been put in place over a period of 15 years mainly in response to accidents. This has resulted in a set of Directives driven and shaped by the circumstances in which they were drafted. Although they serve the same overall purpose, i.e. to ensure a common, high level of passenger ship safety, they do not create a fully coherent framework. Each Directive has a different scope and applies to different types of ships and voyages. More importantly, the past decade has brought about technological development that rendered some of the existing provisions outdated and unnecessarily burdensome.

Previous evaluations and consultations failed to gather sufficient evidence to shed light on the implementation and revealed poor data availability, especially in terms of national passenger ships fleet and safety records. The Commission, together with the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA), national administrations and an external contractor, has therefore undertaken a more systematic and comprehensive fitness check of the legislative framework in place. While more data became available over time, this fitness check has also been an occasion to collect further information and carry out additional consultations, desk analysis and case studies.

For the first time, extensive quantitative data was gathered in a reliable and proportionate manner. Although the available data did not allow for the carrying out of a fully-fledged cost-benefit analysis on every single regulatory requirement, they are considered to provide an informative input to the fitness check analysis; and a sufficient basis for the subsequent review and monitoring processes the Commission proposes to undertake.

EUR-Lex: SWD(2015)197: Commission Staff Working Document accompanying the report http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=SWD:2015:197:FIN

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