Monday 5 May 2014

Mooring customers still being screwed by Canal and River Trust

I've been tracking the state of play with vacancies at Engineer's Wharf for several years now and latest observations from the CRT moorings Auctions site re-confirm that CRT are simply lying to us when they claim that prices of directly managed moorings are market led.

As of today there are yet again two vacancies advertised, but the reserve prices have been increased since I last reported vacancies in Winter 2013. The current vacancies have reserve prices of £5292 pa. Agreed this is a modest increase of just over 1% compared to the reserve prices I reported in Sept 2012 but the facts are the same: The berths are it seems unpopular and/or have high turnover, but instead of lowering prices and getting them in use, the price goes up. 

Friday 2 May 2014

A Sick Joke?

My last post on April 01 yielded a number of reactions which let's be honest was exactly what I intended!

The vast majority of people realised at once  it was an April fool because like me they know that the current CRT set up doesn't really give much of a damn about boating customers. It is noteworthy that so many people found the idea of CRT offering boaters a better deal and addressing long held concerns about facilities and moorings to be unbelievable. The thought that CRT might actually invest money in facilities for boaters as opposed to more and more hare brained enforcement schemes is clearly something many boaters found to be highly unlikely.

A few conspiracy theorists linked my post to the announcement of Sally Ash's retirement. I must say I did not have foreknowledge of that news, because in the past Sally has said she was going to go on and on and on. However the fact a few people thought my post about investment in facilities was linked to Sally's departure speaks volumes.

NABO's posting on Sally's imminent retirement still has me smiling!