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The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) is the competent U.K. authority that responds to pollution from shipping and offshore installations. The MCA is regularly called upon to react to a wide range of maritime incidents and have developed a comprehensive response procedure to deal with any emergency at sea that causes pollution, or threatens to cause pollution. The National Contingency Plan for Marine Pollution from Shipping and Offshore Installations (NCP), which is currently under review was published in January 2000 and sets out revised command and control procedures for incident response following Lord Donaldsons Review of Salvage and Intervention and their Command and Control. These procedures have built-in thresholds to allow for flexibility of response to different degrees of incident.
MCA oversee an accreditation scheme for organisations that provide training in the field of oil spill response.This scheme is administered on behalf of MCA by the Nautical Institute