The Swedish Maritime Administration should retain responsibility for maritime and aeronautical search and rescue

The Swedish Maritime Administration has submitted its consultation response to the inquiry “A New Organisational Home to Strengthen Maritime and Aeronautical Search and Rescue in Sweden.” The inquiry proposes transferring the operational parts of maritime and aeronautical search and rescue to the Swedish Coast Guard, while responsibility for training and operational development, as well as the development of environmental response operations, would be transferred to the Swedish Civil Defence Agency.

The Swedish Maritime Administration emphasises that the organisational placement of these functions should be determined by what best serves the life-saving mission and Sweden as a whole. It also argues that the inquiry should have been tasked with analysing the advantages of, and conditions for, retaining the operations within the Swedish Maritime Administration.

The Swedish Maritime Administration supports the proposal for the Swedish Civil Defence Agency to assume responsibility for overall development and certain training activities relating to maritime and aeronautical search and rescue, as well as marine environmental response. This would provide a more coherent methodology across the entire rescue sector.

The Swedish Maritime Administration also supports the proposal to coordinate rescue command with marine environmental response. However, it considers that responsibility for marine environmental response should in that case be transferred to the Swedish Maritime Administration, which has broader and more extensive experience in rescue command.

Read the inquiry and the consultation responses on the Government’s website:
A new organisational home to strengthen maritime and aeronautical search and rescue in Sweden