The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) is the competent U.K. authority responsible for responding to pollution from shipping and offshore installations. The MCA is regularly called upon to respond to a wide range of maritime incidents and have developed a comprehensive response procedure to deal with any emergency at sea that causes pollution, or threatens to cause pollution. The “National Contingency Plan for Marine Pollution from Shipping and Offshore Installations” (NCP) was published in January 2000 and sets out revised command and control procedures for incident response following Lord Donaldson’s Review of Salvage and Intervention and their Command and Control. These procedures have built-in thresholds to allow for flexibility of response to different degrees of incident.

The Coastguard Agency’s Marine Pollution Control Unit (MPCU) was formed in 1967 following the TORREY CANYON incident, to provide a command and control structure for decision making and response following a shipping incident that causes, or threatens to cause, pollution in UK waters.
MPCU was then restructured during the merger between Marine Safety Agency and The Coastguard Agency in 1998 to become the Counter Pollution and Response (CPR) Branch of the MCA.

MCA’s CPR is now based on a regional response with central operational, technical and scientific support. A Regional Operation Manager – Counter Pollution and Salvage (ROM-CPS) is based in each region, supported by scientists, mariners, cost recovery specialists and logistics support specialists in the MCA’s headquarters in Southampton.