Robin Evans recently made the following statement to the press;
“ We are determined that our waterways should thrive as working navigations, for this is at the root of their heritage. We want waterways that are vibrant with boat movement, rather than extended linear boat parks.”
Sounds reasonable, perhaps?
He is after all the head of British Waterways so must have investigated the matter pretty thoroughly before making such a important policy statement.
So, one of our correspondents thought he would investigate and made a Freedom of Information Act request for;
1) Copies of documents BW holds giving details of any studies done into the likelihood of BW’s canal system becoming an extended linear boat park.
2) Copies of any other documents relating to the BW’s canal system becoming an extended linear boat park.
British Waterways reply?
There ain’t none.
“British Waterways holds no documents on the likelihood of BW’s canal system becoming an extended linear boat park.”
So there you go.
As the IWA said of British Waterways back in the 1950s
“When a public corporation behaves like this… …it is extremely difficult to know what to do. It is the same problem as was presented in dealing with Hitler. Our social organisation is simply not constituted to deal with flat untruths in high places.”
Not sure what’s worse – BW threatening boaters with homelessness with no proper evidence, or the old, over zealous, BW boat checker pyjama bob!
and we let these muppets control our lives? what a constitutionally incompetent corporation full of … my alliteration fails at this point!
Tangentially.
“Chatting” to a patrol officer (sorry, “data checker”) on Tuesday, I questioned him as to how boat location information was entered on his smart gadget. He replied that he selected a checkbox for the appropriate km location. “But where are the km points located ?”, I asked. He didn’t know. “So you select a km stretch in which a boat is situated, but you don’t know where the start and end points of that stretch are?”, I queried. He agreed. “And is this information ever checked against gps or similar ?”. He wasn’t aware of it.
So in essence patrolboy thinks you’re in km x but can’t prove it, but ticks box x anyway. Hardly convincing evidence of boat locations is it ?