P&O Ferries chief executive Peter Hebblethwaite told MPs there was absolutely no doubt the company had been required to consult trade unions before sacking almost 800 seafarers — and that it deliberately chose not to, in one of the most extraordinary admissions in modern British industrial relations.
The sackings happened on 17 March 2022. Services were suspended, ships were ordered to offload passengers and freight, and hundreds of crew learned by pre-recorded video message that their employment was terminated with immediate effect. Security staff were sent to vessels, some crew initially refused to leave, and unions reacted with fury, calling the move scandalous and a betrayal.
P&O, owned by Dubai-based DP World, replaced experienced crews with cheaper agency workers. Hebblethwaite told a joint session of Commons committees that the new model was a last resort to save a loss-making business, that the company would offer £36.5 million in total compensation, with some staff receiving 91 weeks' pay and no one less than £15,000 — and that, with hindsight, he would make the same decision again.
He also acknowledged that new crews were being paid below the UK minimum wage on some routes, which he said was permitted under international maritime rules because the ships were registered abroad and many crew were employed through Jersey-based entities. The government strongly disputed his suggestion that ministers had known of the plan months earlier.
The political response was swift. Criminal and civil investigations were opened into whether notification rules had been broken, ministers announced plans to give ports powers over ferry operators that did not pay the minimum wage, and the affair drove wider legislation on seafarers' pay for routes calling at British ports.
Unions argued the episode showed how weak employment protections could be when a determined employer decided the cost of breaking the rules was simply a business expense. The RMT described the compensation offer in harsh terms, saying payments in lieu of notice were contractual entitlements rather than generosity.
Years later, P&O remains the shorthand example in debates about fire-and-rehire and mass sackings. The image that endures is not only of workers escorted off ships, but of a chief executive calmly telling Parliament that the law had been weighed, priced and consciously set aside.
The affair also changed the politics of the waterfront for good. Ferry routes that had been treated as purely commercial operations were reclassified in public debate as essential infrastructure, dependent on skilled crews who could not be replaced overnight without safety questions following. Inspectors detained P&O vessels in the weeks after the sackings over a string of deficiencies, a sequence the company said was unrelated to the new crews but which deepened public doubt. For ministers, unions and rival operators alike, March 2022 set the benchmark against which every later dispute about seafarer pay and conditions has been measured.