Captain Bligh all at sea after Coastguard mutiny
By Alan Hamilton
THERE has been a mutiny. Captain Bligh has been forced to relinquish his command, abandon ship and row the stormy seas of the job market in the equivalent of an open boat.
This is Captain Stephen Bligh, who enjoys the bounty of a £130,000 annual salary as head of the Government’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency.
Yesterday the Department for Transport confirmed that he would leave his post at the end of the month after a vote of no confidence by his crew of 1,100 coastguards and marine safety inspectors.
Trouble has been brewing on the agency’s quarter-deck for two years, ever since the latter-day Captain Bligh — who claims descent from his 18th-century namesake whose crew mutinied on HMS Bounty — announced plans to streamline the service by closing some coastguard stations and merging others.
The Public and Commercial Services Union, which represents three quarters of the agency’s staff, told MPs that understaffing was lowering the standard of service. The union conducted a ballot of members which showed that a majority no longer had any confidence in Captain Bligh.
Deprived of the option to have them tied to the mast and flogged, the captain has resigned. John Astbury, the chief coastguard, will take over as caretaker director.
In his farewell message to staff yesterday, Captain Bligh, who was recruited from a senior position in the P&O shipping group, acknowledged that there had been difficulties.
“There has been an element of dissent but I have tried to foster an open, honest and transparent discussion,” he said.
“But I regret that in some quarters there has been an appetite for alarmist conjecture with little appetite for the changes that I continue to believe are necessary.”
Union officials, who regarded Captain Bligh as an unpopular appointment, claimed that the streamlining would lead to at least 200 job losses and that the quality of its service was declining, particularly in the Channel, where at times there were no properly qualified staff to keep watch on one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.
A union spokesman, whose name was not Christian, said yesterday: “We did not have confidence in the way the department was being run.”
The Commons Transport Committee said that staffing levels at the agency were unacceptable and could have been behind a 25 per cent rise in fatal accidents around the coast. More than 300 people died in 2002.
Captain Bligh’s future is uncertain. His predecessor made it all the way back to England to report to the Admiralty on the unfortunate loss of his ship.
