Campaign groups, politicians and union leaders were joining forces today to launch a drive to recycle ships in the UK rather than send them to Third World countries to be dismantled.

Greenpeace said the initiative followed the controversy over the ''ghost ships'' sent to Teesside last year amid claims they contained harmful materials and dangerous chemicals.

The campaign group said the ''real scandal'' involved UK ships being sent to Third World countries where they were dismantled by children.

Hartlepool MP and former Trade Secretary Peter Mandelson and officials from the GMB union were joining Greenpeace to launch the initiative.

The Government was being urged to develop a state of the art ship recycling industry in the UK and to help stop British ships being sent to countries including India and Bangladesh to be broken up under ''dangerous and polluting'' conditions.

Work on scrapping the so-called ghost ships, which were brought across the Atlantic to a dry dock in Hartlepool, has been delayed because of disputes over the permits required from the Environment Agency.

Mr Mandelson said his eyes had been opened to the issue of unregulated ship-breaking in southern Asia following last year's row over plans to dismantle so-called ''ghost ships'' in his Hartlepool constituency.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: ''I think we have a choice.

''We either see this recycling and dismantling activity undertaken in properly regulated conditions, with human life and environmental considerations fully protected, as they are in my constituency and elsewhere in Europe... or, as it is becoming increasingly done, in Asia, on the beaches in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, where you can see poverty-paid workers, including women and children, breaking ships with torch-cutters and their own bare hands, unprotected from toxic substances, explosions and falling steel.

''I just do not want to see those conditions - the human life put in danger and the environmental pollution that is widespread - carrying on. ''We have a moral obligation to find a properly controlled and regulated alternative for breaking up these ships.''

Mr Mandelson said that two Royal Navy vessels had recently been broken up on an Indian beach after being sold by the Ministry of Defence to a German company which sought the cheapest means of recycling them.

''The British Government has to be extremely alert to what happens to these ships once they leave their custody and their responsibility,'' he said.

''They have got to introduce very stringent conditions about how they are disposed of and what conditions and with what proper regulation and control.

''That is what I shall be asking ministers to pursue very actively.''

Stephen Tindale, director of Greenpeace UK, told Today: ''We are saying to the Government it is time to take responsibility for Britain's own ships.

''They should make sure that state-of-the-art recycling facilities are developed in the UK.

''They should give an immediate public commitment that all Government-owned vessels will be entirely recycled within the EU.

''And they should encourage other British ship-owners to break their ships in the EU.''

The GMB union's Julie Elliot added: ''If we felt there was a risk to workers in this country by doing this work, we wouldn't be saying do it.

''But we know we have got the skills and expertise to do it. We understand the risks of it. We have built millions of ships. We know how ships are built, so we know how ships are to be taken apart.''