The continuing joke of BW moorings maintenance

In December the Ombudsman made a ruling against BW in connection with one of my neighbours' wider complaint about maintenance on our mooring. 6 months later one of the repairs she recomended  be undertaken has still not been carried out!

A notional prize* will be awarded for anyone who can guess what this sign is supposed to say or do?

It seem BW's moorings service has declined so far that they can't even afford to carry out Ombudsman recommendations?

(* PS - the answer to the 'competition' is now available here.)

Welcome to the parish of Smoke on the Water

Simon Satan spokesman for the Smoke on the Water Parish Council in the county of Glossitover was interviewed on local radio in the last week about the Parish Councillors' radical new approach to parking management.

"We have decided we don't like the look of some of the people who park in our village and so we have resolved to make the whole village out with yellow lines.

A little bit of Thames boating

The relative silence for a few weeks can in part be excused by what we in NABO Council call "always a valid excuse for not...": I've been away boating! Just been with my friend crewing his Dutch Barge from Goring on the Thames back to London. It's good to remember that despite all the blustering here, getting out on the waterways in a boat is ultimately what makes sense of it all.

Can't see the elephant for the smoke and mirrors?

I have long described the absence of a realistic and transparent financial picture of BW's affairs as being an elephant in the room that BW have been doing their best to deny with 'smoke and mirrors'. Allan Richards hit the mark for me in his article revealing that in response to his FOI request DEFRA apparently don't have current figures about the maintenance costs of the waterways.

Social Cleansing continues?

Nice to see a bit of the mainstream media again picking up on some of the current issues: Guardian Article, 27 April.

The Guardian of course picked up on this a few weeks ago. In the item on the River Lea and Olympics. Despite a subsequent 'correction' and a letter from the much misunderstood Sally Ash of BW the cat is out of the bag: "Some people will have to suffer".

Temporary Visitors Moorings for the Olympics are now for sale at various locations on London's canals via BW's Waterscape site.

River Lee and Olympics

Just a quick hello to highlight the London Boaters' website: http://www.londonboaters.org/home

A particulalrly useful section here is the Documents section, which shows in some detail the way BW go about arguing these things.

Secret war a secret no longer

I claimed last year that I thought BW was continuing its long standing tacit policy to price out residential boaters through a process of exclusion and gentrification. In a remarakable statement reported in the Guardian, BW's Head of Boating Sally Ash confirms this in the starkest terms:

"... we have to control the number of boats, which have increased by 40% over the last four years on the Lea. The only way we can do this is through price, and some people will have to suffer."

Snouts in the trough while frontline staff face more redundancies

The ridiculous and unjustifiable salaries of some of BW's Directors have again been highlighted this week and well done Narrowboatworld for running with this. More front line redundancies are in the pipeline while BW's directors continue to be paid vast sums of our money for sitting on top of an organisation which on their own reckoning is running at a £30 million a year shortfall. It's heartening to see that other boaters and canal enthusiasts are waking up to this one, even if most of the National User groups remain too cowed and fearful to speak out too strongly on this elephant in the room.