Weekly Bulletin 

On Monday we hosted our Annual Dinner at the JW Marriott Grosvenor House with more than 700 guests from the UK and international shipping community. It was wonderful to see so many of you there after such a long time since we have been able to host such an event. Thank you again to our sponsors Northern Marine, Denholm, UK Ship Register, Lloyd’s Register, Jotun, V.Group, MLA College, Seapeak, Vortexa and Aberdeen Harbour Board for helping us put on such an enjoyable evening and you can see all the photos from the event here.

We were honoured that Brian Johnson from the MCA was there to present the awards for the Trainee Officer of the Year for 2020 and 2021 to Gregor Connor and Gabriel Verne. Unfortunately Gregor couldn’t be with us as he was at sea, but we were delighted to have Gabriel there to collect his award. Congratulations to both.

Our chose charity for the evening was The Mission to Seafarers who do such amazing work around the world. It gives me great pleasure to say that during the evening we raised £5,421 which is an amazing amount of money. Thank you to everyone who donated so generously.

We were also pleased to have the Maritime Minister Robert Courts deliver the keynote address. He used the opportunity of speaking at our Annual Dinner to launch a Call for Evidence on the use of shore power in ports around the UK.

At the Chamber we support the use of shore power technology, which has a major advantage of being available now, delivers quick emission reductions, and improves the local air quality around ports. Our members have told us the lack of infrastructure is the number one barrier to the uptake of shore power so we welcome this Call for Evidence and we look forward to working with our stakeholders to develop a framework that will make it easier to deploy this technology around the UK.

One of the next major events for the Chamber is the British Tugowners Association Conference and Dinner on 11 May on the “Future of Towage”. Full details will be released next week but if you have any questions on the BTA please do get in touch with Robert Merrylees

Finally this week I would like to welcome Hannah Gilbert to the Chamber. She has joined the team as a Policy Advisor working on maritime commercial and legal issues having previously worked within several Alternative Dispute Resolution organisations. We are delighted to have Hannah working for us and I’m sure many of you will get the chance to meet with her in the coming months.

Sarah