Posts Tagged ‘British Waterways’
Monday, January 3rd, 2011
Congratulations Kris Malarchist, you are the lucky winner of a lifetime’s free membership of our web site!! You contributed the funniest caption to the photo of a liveaboard boater’s encounter with Simon Salem, BW Marketing Director –
“Salem: I feel sick. Boater: I thought so – I spiked the punch.”
Kris, your prize is in the post…!!
For some reason we received a lot of entries we couldn’t publish, as even we thought they were too offensive to BW…and a few that missed the deadline, but we thought one of those was good enough to let it through anyway.
Tags: British Waterways, Lifestyle, liveaboards
Posted in Stories | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, December 7th, 2010
A boater attended the BW Annual General Meeting in Birmingham on 2 December and put the following question to the question and answer panel.
“When will BW stop acting beyond its powers in carrying out enforcement that makes liveaboard boaters homeless, given that Nigel Johnson’s evidence in Bristol County Court on 23 September shows that such enforcement is unlawful?”
Read more…
Tags: British Waterways, liveaboards, meeting
Posted in Continuous Cruisers, Events, News | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, December 7th, 2010
We are offering a prize for the best caption to this photo of BW Marketing Manager Simon Salem talking to a liveaboard boater at the National Association of Boat Owners AGM in November. Email your entry to info@boatingcommunity.org.uk or post it as a comment before 24 December 2010 and we’ll give the best caption the great prize of a free lifetime subscription to this web site. We already have one entry: “Who is this woman?”
Tags: British Waterways, liveaboards
Posted in Continuous Cruisers, Events, Stories | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, December 7th, 2010
BW appears to be going ahead with local mooring strategies in other areas which it defines as ‘hotspots’ before the pilot local mooring strategy on the Kennet and Avon Canal has even been drawn up and implemented. As far as we know, these areas are the Lee and Stort, Birmingham, the Macclesfield Canal and the Southern Grand Union.
As we have discovered from the consultations and the subsequent local mooring strategy steering group meetings on the Kennet and Avon, local mooring strategies are likely to be targeted at boats without moorings and especially at liveaboard boaters without moorings.
Photo: Bob Naylor KAcanalTIMES.co.uk
Read more…
Tags: British Waterways, continuous cruising, FOI requests, Local Mooring Strategy, mooring policy, NABO, traveller's rights, Wiltshire County Council
Posted in A-Featured Articles, BW Policy News and FOI Act Requests, Continuous Cruisers, Moorings Consultation | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, December 1st, 2010
We have received this message from a boater in the north west about BW’s unlawful enforcement practices:
British Waterways served an injunction on a boat at Nantwich earlier in the year. The owner lived on the boat and had been refused a licence although offering to pay for one. He left it to the last minute to seek legal advice. He didn’t turn up at court. An order was made to remove/seize his boat. He was given 14 days notice. This notice was ignored on the grounds that he might ‘abscond’. Two BW ‘enforcers’ accompanied by two Polish ‘mercenaries’ dressed in BW uniforms came to his boat at 7-o-clock one morning when he wasn’t there.
Read more…
Tags: British Waterways, continuous cruising, enforcement team, liveaboards, Section 17, Waterways Act 1995
Posted in Continuous Cruisers, Stories, The Law | 7 Comments »
Monday, November 29th, 2010
The local mooring strategy steering group met again on 8 November. We are able to provide notes of most of the discussion, taken by a volunteer, which are at the end of this article.
The most significant point that emerged at this meeting was the fact that there is a strong consensus among the different interest groups – liveaboard and other boaters, the hire boat industry, local authorities and parish councillors – around the table on the following points:
Photo: Bob Naylor KAcanalTIMES.co.uk
Read more…
Tags: Bathampton Parish Council, British Waterways, continuous cruising, Damian Kemp, mooring policy, Sally Ash, Section 17, Waterways Act 1995
Posted in A-Featured Articles, BW Policy News and FOI Act Requests, Continuous Cruisers, Moorings Consultation, News | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
The first meeting of the Local Mooring Strategy steering group for the western Kennet and Avon took place on 26 August in County Hall, Trowbridge. As you will see from the documents below which BW circulated before the meeting, most of the changes that BW want to make, that will have a big impact on our lives, will not be up for discussion in the local mooring strategy.
Read more…
Tags: British Waterways, continuous cruising, mooring policy, Sally Ash, Section 17
Posted in BW Policy News and FOI Act Requests, Continuous Cruisers, Moorings Consultation, News, Opinion, The Law | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010
Following our incomplete story, BW and the K and A Trust: After the apology, the answers! (July 2010 posts), we have received the emails between Mark Stephens, K&A Manager, and the Trust, requested using Freedom of Information. These emails include the draft minutes of the User Group meeting on 29 April. They also show Mark talking about the boaters’ towpath tidy, saying how pleased he is that people are volunteering without being asked, but also saying that some control is needed. Mark, if you’re reading this, one of the people organising the clean-up tried many times to talk to you on the phone to ask permission to do this, with no joy. So we went ahead and tidied the towpath anyway.
The emails also show that the main focus of the Trust’s partnership with BW is the use of volunteers to carry out maintenance of the canal. A good reason to get involved methinks. It doesn’t look like the Trust will be involved with enforcement, but we still don’t know what the partnership agreement actually says. At the last request for it, we were told it hadn’t yet been drawn up.
The emails are here. Mark Stephens emails 1 Mark Stephens emails 2 Mark Stephens emails 3 Mark Stephens emails 4 Mark Stephens emails 5 Mark Stephens emails 6
Mark Stephens emails and draft UGM minutes
Mark Stephens emails and K&A Trust volunteer tasks
Tags: British Waterways, Damian Kemp, FOI requests, Kennet and Avon Canal Trust, Mark Stephens
Posted in BW Policy News and FOI Act Requests | No Comments »
Thursday, July 15th, 2010
At one of the meetings between boaters, BW and Wiltshire Council Ken Oliver, Wiltshire Council’s Canal Officer, made a comment about the amount of money that Councils pay each year to BW. Wanting to know the amounts and what this money was for I made FOI requests to BW, Wiltshire Council, B&NES and West Berkshire Council, asking for amounts that they had paid to or received from BW in the last five years.
As usual, the figures received from the Councils and from BW don’t match, but judging from the recent totally inaccurate FOI replies from BW I feel it is more likely the Council ones are accurate. The amounts in total come to a massive £552,955 paid to BW over a five-year period.
Read more…
Tags: B&NES Council, British Waterways, BW funding, Council Tax, FOI requests, West Berkshire Council, Wiltshire County Council
Posted in BW Policy News and FOI Act Requests, Continuous Cruisers | 4 Comments »
Thursday, July 15th, 2010
Boaters have attended the Wiltshire Council Area Board Meetings at Trowbridge and Pewsey recently. Here’s a report from the Trowbridge Area Board on 1st July.
Wiltshire Council’s canal officer Ken Oliver gave a brief update on the outcome of the recent meeting between BW, boaters and Wiltshire Council in Devizes on 1 June. He only spoke for about 5 minutes as Councillor Osborn had somewhat hijacked the meeting due to being unhappy about a £500,000 hole in library budgets.
Read more…
Tags: British Waterways, enforcement team, mooring policy, Moorings Consultation, Wiltshire County Council
Posted in Continuous Cruisers, Moorings Consultation, News | No Comments »