This week I was delighted to see so many colleagues from around the world as the Chamber hosted the first ever M7 event.

The M7 is a new forum for the national ship owning associations of the G7 members and to match the invitation list for this year’s G7, being hosted in Cornwall, we also extended the invitation to Australia, India, South Africa and South Korea. The Secretary General of the International Chamber of Shipping, Chief Executive and Secretary General of BIMCO and a representative from ECSA also joined the meeting.

During the two hour virtual meeting delegates discussed issues around digitalising documents to speed up trade, green R&D projects, the crew change crisis and seafarer vaccinations. There was agreement across all nations that more investment is needed from governments and industry to develop the technologies for a cleaner and greener shipping industry and that the G7 governments should be urged to back the shipping industry’s proposed $5bn R&D decarbonisation fund.

Delegates also agreed that more work was needed to help develop digital documentation to facilitate an increase in global trade as the world recovers from Covid-19. I want to thank our President John Denholm for chairing the meeting and all the delegates for attending.

At the Chamber we continue to work closely with our cruise members on both domestic and international restart. We provided briefing this week for Jackie Doyle-Price MP for a travel and tourism debate in the House of Commons where she raised the concerns of the industry with the Shipping Minister Robert Courts.

We have also been lobbying the Scottish Government and along with other trade bodies and businesses we wrote to 30 MSPs highlighting the issues being faced by the cruise sector in Scotland. We will be meeting the Scottish Tourism Minister Ivan McKee next Friday to again push the case for domestic cruise restart in Scotland.

Finally this week, our excellent Understanding UK Shipping course returns on 22 June and there are still places available for both members and non-members. Head to our website to book your place.

Bob