Maritime & Coastguard Agency Spring Place 105 Commercial Road Southampton SO15 1EG Mr Jonathan Mantle Website: www.dft.gov.uk/mca/ By email Our Reference: F0001493 23 February 2016 Dear Mr Mantle, FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT REQUEST - F0001493 Your request for information has been dealt with in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000. You have asked a number of questions which I will take in turn. Your questions are: 1. Please can you give full details of what all known shipwrecks known by your agency within British territorial waters. Following correspondence, this was amended to ask does the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) have records of all wrecks in UK territorial waters and with regard to a specific time period, please could you give me details of ships wrecked from 1900 until 2000, please. 2. Please can you also give all details of what someone would have to do when they have identified a shipwreck and when a wreck is identified what is that process for yourselves? 3. Please could I also have all information about what your agency does when someone has access a ship wreck without prior agreement from appropriate government agencies. 4. Which law protects wrecks once identified by your agency from privateers who would take from wrecks for illegal gain? 5. What circumstances would there be needed for specific permissions or licences for accessing of wrecks? 6. More than anything I was interested in people trying to take good from a ship or such without authorisation. I hope that the following responses will provide you with much of the information that you were hoping to find. I have numbered them for ease of reference. Question 1. In response to your first question, the various different branches of the MCA hold a variety of information about shipwrecks around the UK. However, the MCA does not maintain a record of all known shipwrecks around the UK. It would be a significant undertaking for the MCA to provide you with full details of all shipwrecks in UK territorial waters which are known to the MCA. The time and resources required to provide this information would be such that it would not be possible to provide this information free of charge. Following our email correspondence, you refined this request to all wrecks in the date range of 1900 to 2000. However, this would still represent 100 years of wreck information which, for the MCA, would encompass information from HM Coastguard, the Receiver of Wreck, Counter Pollution and Salvage, the Secretary of State’s Representative for Maritime Salvage and Intervention (SOSREP), Navigation Safety Branch, Marine Offices throughout the UK and other branches of the MCA whose work has touched on any issues related to wrecks in UK waters. If there are particular wrecks that you are interested in, please let me know and it may be that this information can be provided more easily and without charge. Alternatively, you have my contact details and please do give me a call so that we can discuss how you might refine your request in order to focus on the information that you are most interested in. In terms of Receiver of Wreck information particularly, as I have outlined above, we do not maintain a database of all wrecks within the UK. However, we do maintain a database which relates to salvaged wreck material. Using your date range of 1900 to 2000, I have made an initial calculation of how many records this is likely to encompass and have produced a spreadsheet sample of this data. This data relates to records which are flagged as ‘modern’ on our database. To be flagged as ‘modern’ the recovered material must be known to have been less than 100 years old at time of loss. As your date range terminates at 2000, I have not included records which clearly relate to more recent wreck material, for example items recovered from the MSC Napoli in 2007, recent losses of small vessels such as yachts, dinghies, tenders etc. and I have also not included records related to fishing nets which post- date 2000 (lost fishing equipment falls within the definition of ‘wreck’). This initial calculation suggests that approximately 5000 records would be encompassed within your query. To provide full information on each of these records would certainly attract a fee under the terms of section 13 of the Freedom of Information Act. In accordance with section 13 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, the MCA may charge for information if the cost of providing the information exceeds £600. This is based on a rate of £25 per hour per member of staff. An initial estimate for providing full wreck details on each of these 5000 records is approximately 20 minutes per record. This is only for records held by the Receiver of Wreck and does not include a wider estimate of the cost across the MCA for providing full details of all wrecks known to the MCA dating between 1900 and 2000. For this reason, the information that I have provided in the attached spreadsheet is relatively basic and it is a sample only, but it is provided free of charge. However, if there are particular wrecks listed on the attached spreadsheet that you would like further information on, please do let me know and it maybe that this more specific information can be provided without charge. Currently, the spreadsheet provides information on a sample of 300 records from the database and includes the droit number (a reference number unique to each salvage claim), a description of the wreck material that was salvaged and the name of the wreck from which it was salvaged (if known). As explained above, the MCA does not maintain a database of all known shipwrecks within UK territorial waters. However, there are a number of organisations that do maintain records of shipwrecks. For example, the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO) produces charts for mariners and as part of that the UKHO maintains a database of wrecks and other seabed obstructions. You can find out more by visiting the UKHO website at http://www.ukho.gov.uk/Pages/home.aspx. If you would like to contact the UKHO, I would suggest that perhaps you try their archives and research section first at [email protected]. I understand that whilst this information is publically available, charges are likely to apply. Further information on the records held by the UKHO and charges for access to it can also be found on the gov.uk website at https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-ukho-archive. If you have not already done so, you might like to visit www.wrecksite.eu where you can find wreck data which is largely derived from the UKHO wreck database and Admiralty charts. Anyone can search this online database free of charge but you will need to subscribe for full chart and location information. For databases which focus on shipwrecks around the UK from a heritage perspective, a number of heritage agencies maintain databases which are freely available online. For example Pastscape, the Historic England database which can be found at http://pastscape.org.uk/. There is also the Canmore database formerly the database of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) which has recently merged with Historic Scotland to form Historic Environment Scotland. This online database can be found at http://www.rcahms.gov.uk/canmore.html. Also, Coflein is the online database for the National Monuments Record of Wales which is maintained by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW). Coflein can be found at http://www.coflein.gov.uk/. Much of the information on shipwrecks which is likely to be held in MCA files is already publically available. I have outlined above a number of online databases which provide useful information on shipwrecks. However, for more modern vessel losses, you may find reports published on the website of the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) at https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/marine- accident-investigation-branch. For more historic vessel losses, some years ago the MCA’s collection of Board of Trade Enquiries was gifted to Southampton Central Library. The Library has since digitised some of these records which can now be accessed via the Port Cities website. The following is a link to the wreck reports. http://www.plimsoll.org/WrecksAndAccidents/wreckreports/default.asp. Whilst copies of some of these Enquiries are likely to be held within the Receiver’s files, we do not hold any copies of these which are not already publically available. Whilst the above information is not exactly what you have asked for, I hope that it is of use to you and provides you with a broad understanding of what is already publically available. As outlined above, if this assists you in narrowing down particular wrecks or salvaged material that you are interested in, please do let us know and we will be able to provide more focussed information. Question 2. For your second question, you have requested details of what someone would have to do when they have identified a shipwreck and, when a wreck is identified, what is the MCA process. The Merchant Shipping Act 1995 states that anyone finding or taking possession of wreck shall report it to the Receiver. When differentiating between discovering wreck and recovering wreck the Receiver requests and encourages the reporting of discoveries, but it is the reporting of recoveries which is a statutory obligation. Where a person, for example a recreational diver, is able to determine the identity of a charted/known wreck, they are not required to share that identity with anyone unless they have also recovered wreck material from the wreck site which they would be required to report to the Receiver.