Are you inferring that if a chap is picked up in Bridlington Bay then it will be paid for by a different body than if he were on the top of Flamborough Head, and hence different pressure/lobbying will be applied to these organisations?
Only different Co-ordinating Authority and thus statutory responsibility. This certainly means different reporting and recording. That in turn means different relationships and ways of managing those relationships.
I appreciate the Police control overland rescue and the MCA maritime rescue, but I thought it was all coming under a DfT umbrella?
I can see no change ahead in the statutory position that the Police are the Co-ordinating Authority above the High Water Mark.
As far as I can tell, the Future Coastguard programme has considered a 2 MOC (Maritime Operations Centre) solution and has moved on to a single MOC solution. At the same time, the DfT documents for the SAR Helicopter Service contract process are written as though the ARCC does not exist and persons not distant from the situation increasingly talk sadly of ARCC closing and being absorbed into the MOC.
Many will remember the previous regime of 2 ARCC, north and south. Many will also have a sound grasp of the principal of redundancy in important systems. Rather than grasping the benefits of placing important centres for emergency response in smaller communities full of self-reliant people, and creating redundancy with two main centres, the current path appears to favour pulling everything into a single site between sprawling conurbations near Coastguard HQ. If somebody said to me that we should have combined (Air-Maritime) operations centres in say Peterhead and Falmouth then I'd consider that to be more strategically worthwhile, though for those who think strategic is about gongs and budgets it will make no sense whatsoever.
The police are nowhere in all this. It's mainly their problem (50 to 70% of jobs are Land SAR), but unification in Scotland, NPAS and Olympics and relations with News International in England, along with a raft of lesser self-indulgences, mean that they have taken their eye off the ball. They will wake up one day and discover that they are on somebody's front page for all the wrong reasons. A Sheriff or Coroner will have pointed out the error of their ways, and while they were sleeping, someone stole all the tools they need to fix it. All the MOU in the world won't dig them out of the hole they are making for themselves.