Merchant Shipping (Safety Convention) Act 1949

24 Carriage of grain

(1) Where grain is loaded on board any British ship registered in the United Kingdom, or is loaded within any port in the United Kingdom on board any ship, all necessary and reasonable precautions shall be taken to prevent the grain from shifting; and if such precautions as aforesaid are not taken, the owner or the master of the ship, or any agent of the owner who was charged with the loading or with sending the ship to sea laden with the grain, shall be guilty of an offence under this subsection, and the ship shall be deemed for the purposes of Part V of the principal Act to be unsafe by reason of improper loading.

(2) Where any ship, having been loaded with grain outside the United Kingdom without the taking of all necessary and reasonable precautions to prevent the grain from shifting, enters any port in the United Kingdom so laden, the owner or master of the ship shall be guilty of an offence under this subsection, and the ship shall be deemed for the purposes of Part V of the principal Act to be unsafe by reason of improper loading:

Provided that this subsection shall not have effect if the ship would not have entered any such port but for stress of weather or any other circumstance that neither the master nor the owner nor the charterer (if any) could have prevented or forestalled.

(3) Without prejudice to the generality of the two preceding subsections, any particular precaution prescribed by rules made by the Minister under this subsection, in relation to the loading of ships generally or of ships of any class, as being a precaution to be treated for the purposes of those subsections as a necessary or reasonable precaution to prevent grain from shifting, shall be so treated in the case of ships generally, or of ships of that class, as the case may be:

Provided that this subsection shall not apply where a ship is loaded in accordance in all respects with any provisions approved by the Minister as respects the loading in question other than rules made under this subsection.

(4) If any person commits an offence under subsection (1) or subsection (2) of this section he shall be liable on conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding three hundred pounds, or on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding one hundred pounds.

(5) On the arrival at a port in the United Kingdom from a port outside the United Kingdom of any ship carrying a cargo of grain, the master shall cause to be delivered to the proper officer of Customs in the United Kingdom, together with the report required "by the Customs Consolidation Act, 1876, a notice stating—

(a) the draught of water and freeboard, as defined by Part V of the principal Act, of the said ship after the loading of her cargo was completed at the final port of loading ; and

(b) the following particulars of the grain carried, namely,

(i) the kind of grain and the quantity thereof, stated in cubic feet, quarters, bushels, or tons weight;

(ii) the mode in which the grain is stowed, and

(iii) the precautions taken to prevent the grain from shifting;

and if the master fails to deliver any notice required by this subsection, or if in any such notice he makes any statement that he knows to be false in a material particular or recklessly makes any statement that is false in a material particular, he shall be liable to a fine not exceeding one hundred pounds.

(6) Any person having a general or special authority in that behalf from the Minister may, for securing the observance of the provisions of this section, inspect any grain, and the mode in which it is stowed, and for that purpose shall have all the powers of a Ministry of Transport inspector under the principal Act.

(7) In this section the expression " grain " includes wheat, maize, oats, rye, barley, rice, pulses and seeds, and the expression " ship carrying a cargo of grain " means a ship carrying a quantity of grain exceeding one-third of the ship's registered tonnage, reckoning one hundred cubic feet, or two tons weight, of grain as equivalent to one ton of registered tonnage.