Rumours of common sense being applied to Canal and River Trust mooring policy may have been premature

I was clearly being far too optimistic when I suggested an outbreak of common sense at CRT when it came to visitor moorings policy. As usual, although the intentions were doubtless genuine, the execution was....

CRT attempted another consultation on restricting visitor mooring times in the South East region earlier this year, but a few days after they started, they admitted that they had provided incorrect data for one of the sites so they withdrew that part of the consultation. In their own words:

"...the current mooring stay time information for Batchworth provided in the visitor mooring report to the sub group in November, and subsequently transferred into the consultation was incorrect. This error was highlighted to me today, so I have taken action to withdrawal the Batchworth proposal from the consultation information on the web page replacing it with a correction and apology..."

After that false start Mark Tizzard of NABO pointed out a slightly more serious flaw in the methodology when it came to the data used to justify the consultation as a whole:

It would appear that the volunteers who did the boat logging were not asked to record whether there was any available mooring space so it is not clear whether over the suggested period there was a consistent shortage of available mooring space or not.

So basically the consultation was not based on any evidence of the lack of availability of space, because CRT did not get its  foot soldiers to check for that

(I suppose trying to introduce restrictions with the wrong evidence is a step forward from trying to do it with no evidence whatsoever?)

So it was 'charitisation'?

Hello everyone. Still here but not had much to say recently. Not sure if it means CRT are drawing their horns in or if they are just getting better at keeping what they are up to a bit quieter?

One thing has caught my eye and it goes to the bigger picture stuff: A few years back I wrote a piece saying that the transfer of British Waterways to Canal and River Trust was akin to a privatisation as many of us remember that term being applied in the 1980's and 1990's. This article in the Guardian recently informs me that the correct word now is "charitisation".

(I'm pleased to note that the spell check here does not recognise charitisation as being a real word!)