Should you bother volunteering with Canal and River Trust?

The whole question of volunteering with CRT is a difficult one for me, and I suspect for many others. What I do know is that CRT urgently have to up their game on this front by several orders of magnitude.

There is no doubt that CRT does not have the resources to maintain the waterways as a whole and are constantly fire fighting. Many jobs especially when it comes to litter and grounds maintenance, that in the past were done by staff or contractors, now only happen when volunteers are available. CRT realise this but are they going about engaging with volunteers effectively? Some examples of my personal frustrations:

Canal and River Trust does not record complaint outcomes

CRT have confirmed that they don't keep a list of complaint outcomes, (I assume a practise inherited from BW). Following a recent FOI response to the question: 'May I ask what percentage of formal complaints made to Canal Trust are upheld on investigation by yourselves?', we are told:

"... We have considered your request and I am writing to let you know that we do not hold this information. At the first and second levels of our complaints procedure (where we consider complaints, as opposed to the Waterways Ombudsman) we try to resolve complaints rather than judge whether we 'uphold' a complaint; as such we do not record the outcome of a complaint only that it is made."

Hardly surprising then that problems re-occur. From my various rantings in these pages I could have told you that. The repetition and re-occurrence of problems previously reported and even formally complained about, has long convinced me that there is a 'lack of corporate memory' in CRT. Their response to this FOI confirms it.

This state of affairs of course makes a mockery of the complaints process as a whole and undermines any claims that CRT cares for its paying customers and the wider community.

Happy 10th Anniversary Year!

Just noticed it is now into the tenth year that I have been waiting for full terms and conditions for my mooring. 

I would particularly like to thank Tony Hales, Robin Evans, Sally Ash, Nigel Johnson, Simon Salem and all those others whose broken promises have been instrumental in reaching this anniversary, and without whose wider efforts I would not be today marking the last decade's struggle.

Two people are not with us today; that is Hilary Bainbridge and Stephen Edell. Sadly neither they or I have seen their recommendations come fully to fruition to date but I am sure they both wish us well for the future.

As some will know 10 years is in some contexts celebrated as a Tin anniversary. I am happy to say that we still seem to be kicking the same can down the road today as 10 years ago.

Waiting for the train that never comes

Going through old paperwork today I discovered that next week will be the ninth anniversary of my first serious questioning of British Waterways about terms and conditions for their residential mooring customers. As of today the question is still open. Along the way:

• Several Ombudsman Complaints in my favour.
• A Government Public Consultation
• A Select Committee
• BW unilaterally abandoning the Working Group supposed to address these issues
• Files full of correspondence and broken promises from BW starting with the Chairman Tony Hales
• Government Departments ducking the question and passing the buck between themselves

Still British Waterways seem unwilling to provide me with and other residential customers with the full written terms and conditions that a previous Ombudsman said I was entitled to.


I wonder if BW can string it out another year and make double figures?

Raw deal for British Waterways mooring customers

Most of you will realise that the I take some interest in the issue of Moorings. I'm quite unashamed about giving BW a hard time when they don't perform, especially when like me you are paying a premium rate for what I say is too often a poor service.

I always have a close read of the Waterways Ombudsman's annual report so was pleased this year to see that Ms Bainbridge has again highlighted two areas of longstanding concern to me. Lack of independent scrutiny of the charges we pay and more worryingly what I characterise as BW's persistent unwillingness to be clear about we mooring customers get for out money.

Why I don't feel like a valued customer

The current DEFRA consultation on the future structure of BW closes at the ended of the month and I have been reviewing lots of my file records over the past few days both in connection with that and my more more personal ongoing 'discussions' with BW and others about the better management of the Houseboat Certificate Scheme. I also started a thread on a waterways forum to see if I could get some views on one aspect of the ongoing question of how BW proposes better managing visitor moorings.

The common thread in all this is the reflection that these and many other boating related issues have been debated yet remain unresolved over many years. Maybe I'm just getting too bitter and twisted but it strikes me that in a variety of ways, this amounts to solid evidence of BW's continuing failure to achieve what we are supposed in management speak to call "positive outcomes".

BW and Complaints

Further to a comment on a previous posting, some thoughts on the BW complaints process.

Structurally, in terms of procedure, it has evolved to something that I for one say is quite acceptable. (I am biased cos I was one of the people who lobbied for it to be modernised!) In the bad old days, as recently as 2004, it was not so good and there was plenty of scope for BW to obfuscate. It was up to them to say when you had completed a complaint stage and many complaints would be held up for months. Many complainants gave up.

Under pressure from some complainants, frustrated by this loophole, and with support of the then Ombudsman, who noticed the frustrations over the length of time that BW had taken to process some of the cases that eventually came to him, the policy was modernised, becoming much more akin to other public sector complaints policies. Now there are in effect time limits and two as opposed to the previous three internal complaint stages. In effect if BW don't respond in a reasonable time, the complaint has to be accelerated to the next stage.

The Waterways Ombudsman is the final step in the most extreme cases. A look at the annual reports will reveal the range of issues that people pursue to that stage. (Whoever you were that offered a comment recently about the Local Government Ombudsman, this is why I didn't post that - there is a dedicated scheme for BW.)

However a frustration of the current scheme is that as it is an Ombudsman Service and not a waterways regulator, complaints that can be considered have to be procedural and the scheme does not generally offer a route to challenge policy decisions (see the Ombudsman's' terms of reference). That is not a fault in the scheme but a reflection of the fact that there is no effective parallel mechanism other than civil litigation by which individuals can challenge BW policy decisions or BW's interpretation of their legal powers.

A recent example of course is Mooring Tenders, BW's current policy of offering vacancies to the highest bidder. A case reported in most recent Ombudsman Report (No 336 for 2008/9) illustrates the point that BW has a lot of discretion about how it conducts consultations.

It is also true that generally the duty on BW is to carry out some sort of consultation. However final policy formulation is not a democratic process in most cases. The Mooring Tenders policy is a very good example of this. Although opposed by most user groups, BW went ahead with it anyway. (The User Groups' formal submissions to BW can be seen here under the heading BW long term moorings: allocating vacancies and setting prices)