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“Where would we be without them?” said Ray Wicks of his local coastguard volunteers in Shoreham-by-Sea in West Sussex. “If the coastguard weren’t in place, a lot of people would be in trouble.”
He was voicing the fears of some in coastal towns over the Maritime and Coastguard Agency’s (MCA) decision to stop paying about £11 an hour for callouts, in response to a court ruling that the money was among the features classifying coastguard officers as workers – giving them benefits such as paid holiday.
The move has upset many within seaside communities and the coastguard service. Coastguard rescue officers, aided by the GMB union, are due to hold a meeting with supportive MPs in Westminster on 1 July.
“They are well thought of [locally],” said Wicks, whose neighbour in Shoreham serves the local community as a coastguard. The town was “heaving with people in the summer”, many of whom were not familiar with the particular dangers just off its beaches, he said.
He wondered what would happen if a vital emergency service was weakened just as tourists flocked to beaches. “They should continue to pay these people – it is a vital service and they should be suitably remunerated,” he said.
Dr Kelly Stockdale, a coastguard rescue officer based on Scotland’s east coast, has taken a leading role in coordinating the national response to the plan by the MCA to scrap remuneration.
She said: “We do this job because we care about the communities we live in, and the communities we serve,” adding that coastguard officers harboured “real concerns about the future of the service long term and what that would mean for these communities if these proposals went ahead”.
She said coastguard officers hoped the MCA would suspend its plans to stop remuneration in August, and meet them for talks, stressing that she held no animosity towards the agency.
About six miles along the coast from Shoreham-by-Sea, in Brighton, the bodies of three sisters were pulled from the water in May. It is a case that was cited by more than one person in the Sussex town as tragic evidence of the inherent dangers posed by the sea and the need for effective protection.
“The coastguard is super important – especially with the weather getting hotter,” said Bethany Coley, who runs a flower shop in Shoreham. “They deserve to be paid because they do a job, we wouldn’t be saying this about paramedics.”
Nikita Allcorn stressed the importance of coastguard officers to coastal communities:“I probably hear them going past mine at least 10 times a week – more so than the police. There would be a big worry [if they weren’t there]. In a coastal town, they are just as important as the police.”
While expenses are still to be paid, Stockdale stressed that taking away the roughly £11 an hour remuneration would make it difficult to maintain the diversity of the coastguard’s workforce because many would be unable to take large amounts of time off work to serve.
She cited the example of a search and rescue operation for a distressed woman who may not want to be around male officers. The coastguard was far better placed to respond to these kind of emergencies if it maintained diversity, she suggested.
She also pointed to the pressures of family life, saying it would be more difficult to justify responding to calls when their time was no longer paid – even at the sub-minimum wage they are used to. “How would I answer to my teenagers when I just drop everything? And I do just drop everything – the pager goes off, and I’ll walk away from family mealtimes, I walk away from helping and supporting them.”
Stockdale said that, while the pay did not go far, it “would buy you an ice-cream each to say ‘sorry I missed you yesterday, and you were on the way to an exam, and that I just rushed out of the door. How was it? How are you feeling now? How is it going?’”
While coastguard rescue officers do volunteer for service, there has been a longstanding agreement they can claim expenses and remuneration for their time when called out. In January, the court of appeal judge Lord Justice Bean upheld the ruling in a case brought by a former coastguard officer, Martin Groom, and the GMB union that they had actually been operating as workers – not on a purely voluntary basis – entitling them to minimum wage at a slightly higher rate, among other benefits.
Rather than respect their worker status, the MCA’s response was to scrap the pay. While it acknowledged Bean did not order it to amend its model, and that he said coastguard officers already enjoyed a “great deal of freedom” under the existing system, the MCA’s own analysis of the ruling led it to believe it would need to make changes. “We judged the volunteer model to be the best option to protect the future of the service, as it allows members flexibility to continue to serve alongside their primary employment,” it said.
The agency claimed the way it would have amended the model had it sought to respect coastguard officers’ worker status would have introduced “formal employment requirements and constraints which would significantly change the nature of the role and could limit people’s ability to participate”.
Groom said: “That’s a political decision … I really believe it is purely on a basis of not wanting to give workers’ rights.” And others have suggested the government could legislate to allow organisations to “remunerate emergency volunteers whilst preserving its volunteer status” as an alternative to the MCA’s action.
An MCA spokesperson said: “We deeply value and recognise the significant service coastguard rescue officers provide along our coastline, and we will be supporting them during this transition. The coastguard rescue service will continue to maintain a robust, effective search and rescue response, ensuring the highest quality of service and levels of safety.”
