(www.MaritimeCyprus.com) Safety Is Two-Way Traffic - Vetting has earned its place in shipping. Its next chapter belongs to everyone in the chain, not to the ship alone.
By Capt. Daniele Badalucco – Chief HSQE Officer, Prevention at Sea
For most of my career at sea and ashore, vetting was seen as a stressful test to survive. The inspector arrives, tensions rise, and the outcome is perceived as a verdict based on a single day's performance.
That mindset is now a liability, and it was never quite accurate either. Vetting is not something done to an operator. It is the mechanism through which our industry establishes the standards of safe business.
Why vetting matters
Vetting is often discussed as though it arrived fully formed. It did not. Before 1993, preparing for a vetting inspection was very different. There was no harmonized inspection questionnaire, and each oil company used its own inspection checklist and standards. The SIRE Programme came later, introducing a standardized approach.
Even in dry bulk, where it gained real momentum only over the last ten years, it grew for a reason worth being honest about: the sector did not manage to calibrate and standardise its own safety expectations, so an external framework filled that space.
Two decades of refinement have followed. RISQ in its current form asks more of an operator than anything that preceded it, and it is also clearer and better calibrated than before. RightShip has begun listening to the constructive feedback of ship managers through workshops and direct engagement, which is a genuinely encouraging signal for the direction of travel towards a fair vetting system. Steps remain, particularly around consistency of application, governance, quality and accuracy.
Our position is a simple one: vetting helps the shipping industry do safe and responsible business. Shipping is not a hobby. It is a business, and safe business is the only version of it that remains sustainable.
What the data is telling us
The frameworks are converging on the same target, and it is not equipment. In our tanker pre-SIRE 2.0 inspections, Safety Management accounts for 44.7% of observations and Navigation and Communication for a further 26.8%. Across 140 navigational audits conducted in 2024 and 2025 we recorded 1,643 findings, split by root cause 55% procedural failures to 45% behavioural ones.
The trend matters more than any single figure. Over ten quarters, ECDIS-related findings fell from 24% to 8%, real evidence that technical competence in voyage planning is improving. Over exactly the same period, findings related to distraction on the bridge, from media, computers, mobile phones and visitors, climbed from 4% to 15%. The two lines cross. Technical proficiency is rising while human-factor risk intensifies, and vetting is now built to catch precisely that.
Vetting helps the shipping industry do safe and responsible business. Shipping is not a hobby, and safe business is the only version of it that lasts.
Safety is a two-way effort
Which brings me to the part of this conversation our industry still under-discusses. Safety is two-way traffic, not one-way, and it is not the sole responsibility of the ship operator. Ship Managers, Charterers, terminals, regulators, classification societies, ship builders and the organisations that carry out vetting all shape the conditions in which a crew works, and every one of them influences the outcome an inspection eventually measures.
Commercial pressure to sail, a tight laycan, excessive admin workload, or a crew change scheduled with little regard for rest: none of these appear as a finding on a report, yet each one shapes the conditions an inspector will observe. A vessel is assessed on the deck. The conditions that produced what is seen there were often set ashore.
Self-governance and certification of quality are reasonable things for all stakeholders to demonstrate. So why not a Right-Charterer Safety Score, or a Right-Terminal Safety Score? We offer this not as a criticism of what exists, but as an opportunity to extend its principles more broadly across the industry.
We therefore believe the next essential steps belong to every link in the chain, ourselves firmly included. Fairness, transparency, continual improvement and practicality are what the frameworks ask an operator to demonstrate, and they are reasonable things for each of us to demonstrate in return, through self-governance and independent certification of quality.
Following its conclusion, the same thought raises a fair question: why not a Right-Charterer safety score, or a Right-Terminal safety score? We offer it not as a criticism of what exists but as an opportunity to extend its principles more broadly across the industry.
What comes next
The direction is already visible in what the oil majors are asking for. Neste now enforces requirements on the resting period of travelling seafarers before they join a vessel. ExxonMobil is revising its MESQAC criteria. Chevron has signalled that it will begin reviewing seafarer behavioural competency data. Every one of these is a request for evidence about people, gathered over time, that no single attendance can supply.
Physical inspection will remain valuable, though increasingly difficult to arrange as geopolitical challenges and travel restrictions bite. And by its nature a single attendance captures one vessel at one moment. We therefore expect vetting to develop into a multi-dimensional, multi-factor exercise in which physical inspection is enriched by data rather than asked to carry the whole assessment: validated operational data from digital logbooks, checklist completion, near-miss and Key Risk Indicator trends, behavioural indicators followed over months, to name just a few.
The inspection that actually counts
Compliance comes at a cost, but that cost is a fraction of what is paid when things go wrong. We have lived with the slogan Safety First for decades. At Prevention at Sea we prefer a reframing that is harder to set aside: Return Home Safely. Vetting, at its genuine purpose, is not about a star rating or a clean report. It is about every seafarer making it back to their family at the end of the voyage, and that is an inspection none of us passes alone.
Capt. Daniele Badalucco is Chief HSQE Officer at Prevention at Sea, bringing over three decades of hands-on experience in vetting and Safety Management Systems to operators preparing for SIRE 2.0, RISQ, TMSA and DryBMS. Prevention at Sea is an LR-certified maritime compliance and technology firm, certified to ISO 9001, ISO 27001 and ISO 22301, and a member of the Dry Bulk Centre of Excellence. The figures cited are drawn from the Prevention at Sea database, including 140 navigational audits conducted in 2024 and 2025.
