Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
MONDAY 26 FEBRUARY 2007
MR JOHN
FLETCHER, MR
NEIL EDWARDS
AND DR
ROGER SQUIRES
Q1 Chairman: Can I welcome everyone
to the first evidence of the Sub-committee of Environment Food
and Rural Affairs Committee to look at British Waterways, and
related matters to the waterways system. We think this is an important
investigation at this time. Obviously it comes on the back of
quite a difficult budget round, which no doubt we will be alluding
to, but we do not want to limit it to that but look at the strategic
direction referring back to the paper Waterways For Tomorrow
and also looking at some of the other things that have been happening
on our waterways for some time, and where we can be taking things
to in the future. Now we start with the Inland Waterways Association
and we have before us John Fletcher, National Chairman, Mr Neil
Edwards, Chief Executive, and Dr Roger Squires, Chairman of IWA's
Navigational Committee. If I could start with just an introductory
question to you, Mr Fletcher, could you say very quickly what
you do as an organisation and who you represent?
Mr Fletcher: We campaign for the
maintenance and the restoration of the waterways, and we have
a wide interest, including freight, of course, navigation and
all users of the waterways. We are a charity and, therefore, we
do not represent the individual interests of any particular group:
we represent the good of the waterways as we perceive it.
Q2 Chairman: That leads into my first
question. Can you give us a state of the nation report on the
waterway network? What is the state of repair? What is the regeneration?
Is it getting better, notwithstanding the current budgetary problems,
or is there a real problem coming our way in terms of the some
of the maintenance issues?
Mr Fletcher: I think that over
the last 10 years or so there has been a tremendous improvement
in the state of the waterways which has not necessarily been helped
by the diffuse nature of its management which, of course, extends
well beyond British Waterways to include Environment Agency, Norfolk
Broads and several independent waterways. Nevertheless, the extra
investment which government has provided has done wonders for
the state of the waterways and, in particular, to remove the worst
of the backlog of maintenance, and that has enabled a number of
new developments to come along which has included a very high
degree of urban regeneration, much of it assisted by funding from
Lottery funds, and also a significant amount of rural diversification
as well. Much of that is, however, currently threatened and the
one thing that has not been established, to the best of my knowledge,
is what is an appropriate figure to run the waterways and maintain
them in a sustainable way, whatever the source of that funding,
and British Waterways in particular have, of course, been looking
much more widely and creating new funding sources which have not
been open to the other navigation authorities in the same way,
and therefore they have even greater problems perhaps.
Q3 Chairman: Do you support the general
strategy that BW is pursuing, including this notion that they
could become self-supporting at some point in the future?
Mr Fletcher: No, I do not support
it to that extent. I think there is an opportunity to drive new
income streams and I think that the current extra government funding
streams are potentially threatened by the insecurity of the funding
at present, but I do not believe it would be appropriate to be
totally free of some sort of government funding. The reason I
say that is that the boaters, for example, represent something
like 3% of the visitors, and we have a list of all the other visitors
which come to the waterways, many of whom it would be impossible
to charge for the benefits they derive and for all the government
agendas which are subscribed to by the waterways. Short of putting
turnstiles on the towing path there is not any way of recognising
those alternative provisions which the waterways make, and I think
it is appropriate that it is recognised by some form of public
funding.
Q4 Mr Jack: Can I bring you back
to the Chair's first question, Mr Fletcher? You said that the
extra money had dealt with the most needed repairs but if you
were to grade the existing infrastructure as sort of "good",
"acceptable" and "poor", and I choose those
just as three words, give us a flavour as to what needs still
to be done, bearing in mind the budgetary restrictions. What is
the baseline? Where do we start from?
Mr Fletcher: I am not an engineer
but I think that is quite a difficult question to answer because
of the nature of the structure particularly of the canals, which
are more than 200 years old in the main and, therefore, in a very
friable situation and potentially always at risk of deteriorating
and deteriorating catastrophically. You cannot always determine
a cause and effect but it is quite remarkable that during this
first year, when there has been less expenditure, there just happens
to have been rather more catastrophes on the waterways over this
last winter. So predicting that which is going to fail is always
difficult.
Q5 Mr Jack: When you use the word
"catastrophe", what actually do you mean by "catastrophic"
failure?
Mr Fletcher: For example, an embankment
giving way or a culvert under it which drains the canal, causing
damage locally to the farms nearby or nearby houses or whatever
preventing the waterway being used as a through route, and the
more that happens of course the more people lose their faith in
the ability of the waterways to provide employment, because there
is no certainty about them being there and viable, and there is
less encouragement to take holidays by hire boat and that sort
of thing.
Q6 Mr Jack: One final point: within
this sort of area of increased frequency of failure, are any of
these at all preventable or predictable by regular planned maintenance?
Can you spot the weak points?
Mr Fletcher: You can spot the
risks, and British Waterways are very good at that. The problem
is that the less maintenance you do the greater the risk, and
there becomes a balance tipping situation where not only are the
risks very much greater and therefore the failures more frequent,
but the cost of putting them right then escalates. It is a stitch-in-time
situation and there is not a crunch where you can say: "This
has failed because". It is an increasingly serious situation
that will have greater frequency of things going wrong. There
is not a specific tipping point and that is what makes it very
difficult to analyse and justify the expenditure because it is
rather hidden. But it is, I believe, an increasing risk all the
time.
Q7 Chairman: So is it fair to say
that you are gently supportive of BW but you believe BW is under-funded,
from what you just said? You can argue where that additional funding
comes from but do you think that BW is the appropriate organisation
to organise the operation of the waterways in general, or should
it be taken over by another body?
Mr Fletcher: British Waterways
has changed out of all recognition over the last 10 or so years
and that is importantly as a result, I believe, of the style of
management and partly as a result of the increased funding by
government. As an organisation, however, we have always maintained
that it would be most appropriate for there to be one navigation
authority for a number of reasons, not least the management expense
of having a number of navigational authorities—not just
the major ones but, of course, guarding our heritage are a number
of individual waterways that are self-financing or financed in
other ways, and these face considerable difficulties as well.
The fact that Environment Agency runs a number of our navigations
does mean there are two major sets of administration looking at
navigations, and we believe that is not only inconvenient for
boaters—
Q8 Chairman: In the consultation
did you actually support the conflation of those two organisations
into one?
Mr Fletcher: We did not specifically
talk about that but it is nevertheless something which we felt
was appropriate and we have been campaigning for a single navigation
authority ever since the association was founded more than 60
years ago.
Q9 Sir Peter Soulsby: Before I ask
any questions can I remind colleagues and put on the record that
I am, of course, former vice-chairman of British Waterways and,
indeed, also a member of the IWA—not that that will affect
my questioning in any way! There has been obviously a lot of focus
of late on the reductions of funding to BW. Could you say a little
bit about what the IWA believes would be the impact of the grant
reductions that have taken place, perhaps in the short term, this
year, and perhaps looking beyond that, if there are further reductions
beyond the current period?
Dr Squires: One has to start to
analyse where we are now. The Government set a target for British
Waterways to get rid of the statutory arrears by 2012. In the
last annual report British Waterways identified £119 million
worth of statutory arrears. With the Government cuts one has effectively
seen a further reduction in the amount of money that is going
on maintenance, so the days on which those arrears are going to
be removed are going to take time, but at the end of the day the
waterways need to identify their assets. British Waterways, for
instance, keep an asset register. Under freedom of information,
444 items within that asset register were classified as being
poorly maintained. We therefore have a situation of potentially
even more poorly maintained items if they are not looked at frequently,
and we are going to have an ever-deteriorating system.
Q10 Sir Peter Soulsby: But is it
not fair of the government to argue in response to that that the
level of reductions are comparatively small in proportion to the
overall expenditure of BW, and that the impact is therefore likely
to be no more than marginal?
Dr Squires: The argument is always
that British Waterways must identify how much money it believes
it needs in grant in aid to run its business over and above that
that it can gain from its commercial operation. It has given that
estimate to the Department and that estimate a year ago was £65
million worth of grant in aid. In effect, they only ended up with
£7.1 million less than that over the year. Now, if you are
constantly being asked to judge how much money you need to spend
and you are not given the money you need to spend, who else is
going to make a judgment unless you get an independent consultant
in to look at the assets British Waterways has, and to identify
how best those assets can be properly maintained and what the
expenditure should be? It is no use simply relying on commercial
activity to bring in extra funds to meet the gap because one never
knows how that commercial activity is going to fare.
Q11 Sir Peter Soulsby: Unless it
is the argument that the Government put when they are asking you
these questions that the sums involved are a comparatively small
proportion of the total.
Dr Squires: If I may come back
there, everything is a comparatively small part of the total,
but if you look at the way in which you are putting the total
together you have a certain amount for certain elements of the
job you are doing, and British Waterways, in its commercial activities,
has taken the view that those commercial activities need a lot
of resource to ensure that they bring in revenue. At the end of
the day the assets have to be maintained, and it is only by having
a proper cashflow to meet that maintenance bill that one is going
to be able ultimately to be assured that the assets will deliver
and not fail.
Q12 Sir Peter Soulsby: In response
to an earlier question Mr Fletcher took issue with BW's ambition
of becoming largely self-sufficient by 2012, and gave an argument
for continued government funding. I wonder by what mechanism you
think it is appropriate for the level of that funding to be determined?
Mr Fletcher: I am not an expert
on that. I do not know if Neil feels he could answer.
Mr Edwards: I think it is very
difficult for us to know all the different areas on which BW needs
to spend its money, so to work out exactly which portion should
be funded by all the different users. I think we do not have a
firm view on that.
Mr Fletcher: Yes. I have nothing
to add to that really.
Chairman: We will now move on to looking
at existing funding arrangements, and David Lepper will look at
who pays what.
Q13 David Lepper: Thank you, Chairman.
You understandably pointed out, Mr Fletcher, earlier the difficulty
of devising a system whereby users other than boaters of the waterways
might pay a contribution other than putting up turnstiles, I think
you said, and one appreciates activity. Nevertheless, I think
it is true that boaters are, in overall total, the minority of
users of the waterways and it is cyclists and anglers and ramblers
and casual walkers who outnumber them, and Save Our Waterways
seem to be arguing that cyclists ought to pay a share because
of the wear and tear on the towpaths, and I think they also argue
that a portion of the annual rod licence fees that the Environment
Agency collects from canal anglers should go to British Waterways.
Is that an argument that you would support?
Mr Fletcher: I think that it would
be seen to be equitable if there was recognition of all those
who benefit from the waterways, and the number of those who actually
go fishing is perhaps three times as many as those who go boating.
Clearly, the users of the waterway that create by far the most
visits are those who use the towing path walking, rambling, dog
walking—whatever. That brings me back to the turnstile situation
which is totally inappropriate, and therefore I think there should
be some recognition in the funding of all users, whether that
is a direct charge or whether it is a grant in lieu of a direct
charge, and I am not suggesting precisely where that charge should
be levied but one has to look at local authorities and one has
to look at all the benefits that come to the waterways. For example,
walking does contribute to the health agenda, and there are all
sorts of agendas of government which are beneficiaries of the
waterways, because nearly everybody lives within five miles of
a waterway and goes towpath walking on a regular basis, if they
go walking at all, and it is a very healthy way of getting into
the outdoors, and this is totally unrecognised. So I do not think
I have, and I do not think the Association has, a strong view
on whether anglers should specifically be charged more, or any
of the other users, but I do think that the uses and the wide
number of other users should be recognised in some form by the
way the funding of the waterways is structured.
Q14 David Lepper: Were you suggesting
earlier in what you just said, when you talked about local authorities,
grants from local authorities?
Mr Fletcher: I do not feel competent
to suggest where it should come from; I only believe that it should
be recognised. I do not know if either of my two colleagues would
like to comment further but I believe it should be recognised.
I do not feel competent to suggest exactly from where it should
come, or how.
David Lepper: I think, Chairman, it is
true we will not have a chance to ask local authorities about
that because none of them have put in any evidence.
Q15 Chairman: Yes. We have had a
lot of evidence, as you can imagine, but interestingly not from
any local authority, let alone the LGA. Now, we may try and put
that right but it is interesting that the local authorities in
terms of their various planning documents refer to the importance
of waterways and canals passing through their areas, but they
have not written into us at this time.
Mr Fletcher: And one would have
to recognise, Chairman, that where waterways have been regenerated,
the Rochdale Canal, for example, and no doubt in your own constituency
things will be happening—
Q16 Chairman: We are still waiting,
but we are optimistic!
Mr Fletcher:—but certainly
on the Rochdale Canal the support from the local authorities promised
has been difficult to extract, and no doubt they are facing exactly
the same problems as this government as a whole is, so it is a
difficult situation and I recognise that, but I do not think the
fact that it is a difficult situation should result, for example,
in either the 3% of users which are boaters being lumbered with
the cost when, in fact, they bring the animation which other people
come to see and visit, or that the waterways should be forced
into a situation where the heritage is not adequately guarded
and the need to make a fast buck to keep things going in fact
detracts from the quality of the waterway, and the stewardship
has deteriorated because of the pressures on British Waterways
to make money in other ways.
Q17 David Lepper: You have talked
about making a fast buck but I think you have also referred in
your evidence to some inappropriate property dealings that have
been made in order to raise funding. Could you enlarge on that
a little?
Mr Edwards: What concerns us is
that the pressures on British Waterways to raise sufficient money
to maintain those waterways could lead them into property development
along the side of the waterways that does not necessarily take
due regard of the heritage as much as not only we would wish,
but also British Waterways in their own heart would wish. If they
are being pressurised to scrape and save every penny then, when
an attractive property deal comes along, surely they will be tempted
to take the money rather than safeguard the heritage to the extent
they would otherwise do if they had proper funding all the time
to cover all their duties and maintenance requirements. So I think
we fear that a tightening of finances for British Waterways would
lead to more inappropriate property developments along the waterways.
I think we could go along any waterway and point to those developments
that we think truly recognise the character of the waterways and
the heritage and so on, and those developments that do so in a
less favourable manner, and I think we fear that the tightening
of finances is leading to a downward trend in this aspect. There
are always a number of developments where members have expressed
great concerns at the loss of heritage, or the loss of character
of waterways or just a sense of place in the waterways through
what seems to be development purely for raising income and what
might be termed money grabbing, and I think this is where we have
our principal concerns.
Q18 David Lepper: Would you like
to give us any precise examples of what might be considered inappropriate
development?
Dr Squires: At the moment we are
presently speaking at a public inquiry into a development at Brentford
Basin. Brentford Basin was a river/canal interchange port, but
here there has been a very successful residential development
put into an island site which used to have warehouses on it with
a little ecology park within it. The whole of that development
was within human standing; in other words, it was not high rise.
Now, there is pressure to develop the other side of the Basin
and to pull down what we consider to be an historic warehouse—in
fact, one of the last warehouses ever built by a canal company
to try and compete in the market for trade. Now, even the residents
in the island site are saying: "That development is too high".
They are talking about eight storeys high as against four on the
island, which will cut out the afternoon sun. We are arguing that
the historic warehouse is going to be taken away and the boaters'
facilities are going to be removed because they are wishing to
put finger arms in a linear mooring that is beneficially used
by boaters in transit from the river. So here is a direct example
of a situation where the need to make the maximum amount of money
from the site is, we feel, overriding the heritage of the site
and the usefulness of the site to the waterway users, and even
going against the people who now live there, and that seems to
be wrong.
Q19 David Lepper: And the example
you have chosen in answer to my question there does suggest that
your organisation believes, and would support, appropriate property
development, and it is not a blanket objection to development
of any kind.
Mr Fletcher: We could more easily
identify some very good developments but the worry, as Neil pointed
out, is that the pressures are coming to be more self-sufficient,
and the pressures that that will cause give rise to considerable
concern.
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