THE UK’s Defence Secretary may be asked to appear before MPs to be pressed on a nuclear submarine’s near miss with a ferry which could have claimed hundreds of lives.
SNP MP Martin Docherty-Hughes will today urge fellow members of the Commons Defence Select Committee to write to Ben Wallace about the incident, revealed following the publication of a Marine Accident Investigation Branch report last week.
The MAIB investigation found a trainee was navigating the submarine just before it almost hit a car ferry travelling from Belfast to Cairnryan with 282 people on board. The Royal Navy trainee periscope watchkeeper overestimated how far the ferry was from the submarine. Accident investigators said the passengers and crew on the Stena Line ferry as well as those on the submarine had been put in “immediate danger” by the incident in November 2018.
The two vessels came within 250 yards of a collision in the North Channel off the southwest coast of Scotland. The report said it was “extremely fortunate” the ferry’s lookout spotted the periscope at close range. Only “rapid and effective action” by the ferry’s bridge team reduced the “serious risk” of collision, the report said. Two similar incidents were recorded in 2015 and 2016.
READ MORE: Nuclear sub in ferry near-miss was being navigated by trainee
Docherty-Hughes told The National: “I’ll be raising this issue with the Defence Select Committee this week, and making sure that the Government has to take this issue as seriously as people who live in the Firth of Clyde and Scotland in general.
“Had circumstances here been slightly different we’d have been looking at the immediate loss of hundreds of lives in a collision, followed by a nuclear incident on a scale never seen on these islands.”
He added: “I understand why the MoD do not comment on individual submarine operations, but given that this is the third major incident involving Royal Navy submarines and commercial shipping in the five years that I have been an MP, we must ask ourselves what the major policy issues are that mean this keeps happening.
“Parliamentary oversight of the military should be the cornerstone of a functioning liberal democracy, and any attempt to evade this accountability will be noted.”
According to the report, the submarine officer of the watch altered course to avoid the ferry. But instead of turning away from the ferry, it turned towards it. About the same time the ferry’s lookout spotted a periscope and alerted the watch officer, “who took immediate action to avoid collision”.
Until the change of course was made “there was a serious risk of collision”, the report said, adding: “It was extremely fortunate” that the lookout spotted the periscope “though there was no expectation he would do so”.
The submarine, based at Faslane on the Clyde, was conducting pre-deployment safety training.
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