Friday 3 September 2010

Boaters - An afterthought in BW's thinking?

To all of you who have been sitting round waiting for my latest musings my apologies! Please blame BW because my spare time has been pre-occupied with their latest musings on the future management of directly managed residential moorings.

What are their latest thoughts? Well that's the nub of it. BW have made it clear they don't want me to tell you!

This is of course a point I have made about BW's attitude to it's boating customers in the past: BW's preference seems to be to try to make changes to the terms and conditions of boating by whatever method that ensures boaters are the last people to hear about these changes.

What has been happening is that BW only grudgingly revealed their latest intentions over the future of Houseboat Certificates and directly managed residential moorings to me in the course of an Ombudsman complaint. It is only out of respect for the Ombudsman’s good offices that I am restraining the considerable urge to publish their correspondence with me and be damned!

I have in fact written to BW recently and proposed that actually they should go public with what they now have in mind and let all the boating customers that might be effected by what they are proposing have an opportunity to comment on the proposals in advance of the event. That suggestion has to date been studiously ignored! For the moment then you are going to have to be patient while the Ombudsman muses over how she wants to work through the situation.

However these events have found echoes in a couple of other things that have happened recently.