New Zealand already does something no other country does: since 2024, the government and maritime operators calling at the country's ports have jointly funded welfare services for international seafarers through maritime levies, administered by Maritime NZ as an annual grants programme. The model has delivered real, measurable outcomes - 28,500 seafarers received support through welfare centre visits in the 2024/25 year alone, coordinated through the NZ Seafarer Welfare Council. It is a world-first funding model for welfare services delivered in port. What it does not touch, however, is what happens once a seafarer's contract ends and they return home - a gap a new private insurance product is now trying to close globally.
Global insurance intermediary Howden has launched SAFER at Home, developed with UK-based Crewsure and supporting the Mission to Seafarers, providing healthcare cover for seafarers and their families during the months they are off contract. This is a period when, under the Maritime Labour Convention, standard protection and indemnity (P&I) cover no longer applies once a seafarer reaches home. Captain Hari Subramaniam (pictured), Howden's chief growth officer for marine and the executive behind the product's design, spent 17 years at sea before working in loss prevention and says the gap is structural rather than a matter of any one country's welfare policy. "We're trying to plug that gap so that throughout the year - including when on leave - they don't have to worry," he said.
New Zealand's welfare levy funds services delivered through organisations such as the Mission to Seafarers, Sailors' Society and Stella Maris, coordinated locally through the Seafarers' Welfare Board: practical, in-port support that runs from transport and personal shopping for crew who can't get into town themselves, to currency exchange and SIM cards, and a role that extends to raising formal complaints with Maritime NZ on seafarers' behalf and helping identify and address modern slavery risks. Welfare officers have also stepped in for something closer to crisis support. Stella Maris has documented a Ship Welfare Officer in Nelson spending hours with a captain who had just lost his family to COVID-19 back home and could not get back in time to grieve with them. This is the kind of pastoral support the welfare network has long provided and that the new funding now supports.
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That funding is not open-ended: Maritime NZ's own November 2025 levy review shows the $1.5 million-a-year seafarer welfare allocation sits inside a wider $3.1 million funding shortfall facing the regulator, with reserves due to hit their minimum threshold. What the levy was never designed to fund, shortfall or not, is a seafarer's hospital bill or their family's medical costs once that seafarer has flown home and their employer's obligations have technically ended.
Subramaniam is candid that products like SAFER at Home only work if shipowners see a commercial case alongside the welfare one. Owners, he said, are increasingly told that welfare investment now feeds directly into vessel ratings - schemes such as the Tanker Management Self-Assessment and the Dry Bulk Management System - that charterers actively use when choosing ships. For a country as trade-dependent as New Zealand, where the vast majority of imports and exports move by sea, that link between crew welfare and charter competitiveness gives local brokers a tangible reason to raise the issue with shipping and logistics clients rather than treating it as background noise.
New Zealand's marine broking market has itself been expanding its international shipping capability. Lockton's recent opening of a new Queenstown office signals brokers extending their marine reach beyond domestic pleasurecraft and cargo accounts into the broader trans-Tasman shipping market. That expansion puts brokers in a stronger position to raise crew welfare and retention cover directly with shipowners and ship managers calling at New Zealand ports, at a time when the global officer shortfall detailed in the Seafarer Workforce Report 2026 - projecting a need for 113,735 additional officers worldwide by 2030 - is making crew retention a genuine commercial concern rather than a compliance box to tick.
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Subramaniam is unambiguous about how he wants brokers to frame the product to clients rather than as an insurance upsell. "Howden is not in this to make money," he said, pointing to the charitable contribution made to the Mission to Seafarers from every policy sold. For New Zealand brokers, the pitch may be less about margin and more about aligning with a welfare model the country has already shown, through its own levy system, it is willing to invest in.
