Branded case

Maritime Legislation

Danish Ports works to ensure the best possible framework conditions for all Danish commercial ports. There must be equal and fair competitive conditions between ports in Denmark and among ports internationally. The Ports Act must create clearer guidelines for where tasks should be solved and thus contribute to a good foundation for growth throughout Denmark.

Soldering

Denmark is one of the only countries in Europe that considers pilotage a free market, and experimenting with it in Denmark has not had a positive effect on the ports in particular, to say the least.

Among other things, we have noted that prices in the period from 2014 to 2017 have increased by 18 percent on average and for some ports up to 40 percent in the same period. This means that the ports cannot accept further price increases, and that we therefore see an advantage in rolling back the liberalization and reintroducing DanPilot's monopoly, as the market de facto looks today. And this despite the fact that we are generally strong advocates of liberalization for the sake of competition. Here we just have to say that pilotage must be a public authority task, and that liberalization has damaged the competitiveness of Danish ports.

Our proposal is therefore that 2020 will be a transition year, where we set the future framework and keep prices stable.

The Port Act

We started the current stage of the revision of the Port Act when the expert committee presented the first proposal for the future Port Act in May 2018, and since then there have been political negotiations and a few postponements. 

However, Danish Ports' position on the Port Act is clear:

We believe that the new Ports Act should help ensure a level playing field - especially in terms of borrowing opportunities - for ports across the country.

We believe that all ports, regardless of organizational form, should have the same access to state-guaranteed loans, and we are strongly committed to ensuring that Danish ports have framework conditions that allow them to compete with other ports, especially in the EU.

We also want a port law that looks at least ten years into the future, so that it can allow for new forms of cooperation between public and private actors, and so that each can contribute what they do best.

This is the only way we can succeed in a European context with relatively small ports.