The International Committee on Seafarers' Welfare (ICSW) would appreciate your help with some research we are conducting about port welfare levies. ICSW is an international NGO, supported by the shipping industry, which promotes the welfare of seafarers around the world.

Port welfare levies are small voluntary or compulsory fees charged to ships entering a port that help fund the cost of port welfare facilities and services for seafarers, as recommended in the Maritime Labour Convention (2006, Guideline B4.4.4). The ICSW is researching where such levies operate and how they work in order to share best practice & to promte their adoption.

If you have a port levy for welfare, or intend to have one, then we would like to hear from you. We would like you to take part in a short survey.

The survey should take no more than five minutes to complete and your answers will remain confidential, anonymous and will not be attributed to you in the research report. We would be grateful if you could complete the survey by 30 November 2012.

The survey can be accessed here

This link is uniquely tied to this survey and your email address. Please do not forward this message. If another member of your organization is better able to fill in the survey, please reply to this email with their details, including email address, so we can send the survey link to them directly.

This research is funded by the ITF Seafarers' Trust. For further information about this research or ICSW, please contact Research@icsw.org.uk.