The classification societies today
Today the main job of the classification societies is to ‘enhance the safety of life
and property at sea by securing high technical standards of design, manufacture,
construction and maintenance of mercantile and non-mercantile shipping’. The
Classification Certificate remains the mainstay of their authority. A shipowner
must class his vessel to obtain insurance and in some instances a government may
require a ship to be classed. However, the significance of the Classification
Certificate extends beyond insurance. It is the industry standard for establishing
that a vessel is properly constructed and in good condition.
Although the major societies do not distribute profits, they depend on client
revenue to cover their costs and are subject to commercial pressures. As selffunding
organizations, their survival depends on maintaining a sufficiently large
fee paying membership to recover their costs. There is, therefore, intense competition
between classification societies to attract members, leading to the anomaly that
they are paid by the same shipowners on whom they have to impose financial
penalties through their regulatory inspections. This led to criticism that shipowners
were avoiding carrying out essential maintenance by re-classing to a society with
less exacting standards.
Most of the large classification societies also supplement their income by
undertaking technical inspection work on behalf of governments. Since government
regulations cover much of the same ground as class rules, this leads to the confusion
of the role of the class societies and government regulators. There are currently
more than fifty classification societies operating world-wide, some large and
prominent, others small and obscure. The list of the larger societies and the number
of cargo ships they class, shown in Table 12.1 gives a rough idea of the relative
prominence of the various institutions. These are all well-known names in shipping
circles and together they cover over 90 per cent of the cargo and passenger fleet
(note that these numbers do not include the many small non-cargo carrying vessels
which the societies also class). Because they developed independently, the
classification societies do not have common rulebooks. At one level this is a source
of inconvenience. A repeat design built for one class society may have to be reworked