Examination of Witnesses (Questions 320
- 339)
MONDAY 12 MARCH 2007
MR ROBIN
EVANS, MR
TONY HALES
AND MR
JIM STIRLING
Q320 Sir Peter Soulsby: There has
been I think a 7% growth in the number of licensed boat holders.
Do you anticipate it will slow down?
Mr Hales: No.
Q321 Chairman: Despite loss of red
diesel, and loss of additional mooring sites because of investment
and so on?
Mr Hales: I suppose that has to
have some effect but all our projections are that there is this
historic growth of two per cent a year and the basic underlying
reasons remain. A growing population, particularly 50 year old
plus, are coming into this market in very significant numbers.
Mr Evans: We anticipate that we
need more than 10,000 new berths on the waterways over the next
ten years to meet with demand. It is very much a part of the economy.
Q322 Chairman: You can provide that?
Mr Evans: We cannot, that is why
we launched our Marinas Investment Guide earlier this year to
attract new private sector investment on to the waterways.
Q323 Chairman: That is a partnership
with the private sector.
Mr Hales: Absolutely, because
we cannot afford, and we do not think it is our role, to invest
our short money in providing marinas, and it is something the
private sector does very well indeed.
Q324 Chairman: Could you send us
a copy of that?
Mr Hales: Certainly.
Mr Evans: You were asking the
other day about the forecast of demand. There are some demand
models in there.
Q325 Sir Peter Soulsby: What about
the holiday hire boat industry? They have expressed a lot of concerns
about the lack of maintenance having impact on their business?
Do you share those concerns, and what do you see are the trends
in holiday hire? Is that something set to grow?
Mr Evans: Holiday hire is essential.
It is a really critical activity for us, not only because there
are over a thousand boats which pay us their licences and it is
quite a lot of money for us but also we know from research that
people who buy boats have generally hired a boat first of all,
and that is how they have got into boating. It is the way into
boating. So as a feeder stream it is essential that holiday hire
boating retains and grows, or at least stays the same if it does
not grow. In recent years there has been a lot of growth in time
share on the waterways and there have been a number of companies
which have grown quite successfully, so although over the last
ten years hire boating numbers have decreased, a lot of time share
boats have come on to the waterways and so that has almost but
not quite compensated. We worry very much with our operators about
the future: we are acutely conscious that they operate in a difficult
environment and they rely almost totally on us to ensure that
their livelihood can survive. If we do not provide water in the
canals and they do not operate they cannot operate, and we are
acutely aware of that. This year for the first time we undertook
a very comprehensive survey of all our business customers to understand
what their needs are and what they expect from us and how we can
do better, and we are actively pursuing that. Every general manager
in every business unit has a list of clients and it is their job
to manage those clients in those waterway businesses which are
relying on our activities, so we are acutely aware of how important
they are and we want to grow them, and we are doing what we reasonably
can to ensure that they survive and thrive.
Q326 Sir Peter Soulsby: One of the
previous witnesses was talking about the potential for opening
up some of the less crowded parts of the waterways, and I think
they gave us the example of the northern part of the Birmingham
network with the Lichfield & Hatherton as one of the links
into that. Is there indeed potential for doing that, and is that
something that is affected by reduction in the revenue of British
Waterways?
Mr Evans: There are parts of the
network which are much more heavily used than others. The Birmingham
canal network is relatively under-used and we try very hard to
attract more people to use it, but it is a mainly urban environment
and traditionally the boater wants to boat and cruise and stay
on the more rural waterways. The Leeds & Liverpool Canal is
another very under-used canal in the north of England and we are
very keen to attract more canal boaters up to those parts, so
there are areas where we would like to see more people and we
try and encourage that.
Q327 Mr Williams: The facilities
you provide and maintain are very popular with the public and
readily enjoyed. Have you ever considered having some sort of
voluntary subscription scheme or some membership to allow people
to express their satisfaction and enjoyment that they get?
Mr Hales: People can belong to
the Waterways Trust, so we are keen on that. We are certainly
very keen on supporting all the voluntary organisations, the Waterway
Recovery Group. They cannot belong to British Waterways.
Q328 Mr Williams: So how much finance
and resource do these voluntary bodies bring into the network?
Mr Evans: That is a figure I do
not have. Their enthusiasm alone is worth millions and millions
of pounds to us. They are the people who are responsible for ensuring
the waterways did not disappear for ever in the 1960s and they
have campaigned vigorously and strenuously and loudly ever since,
and they are the ones almost always who are behind the initial
thoughts of restoring a waterway and getting the momentum behind
that which we help with and join in.
Q329 Mr Williams: I was not so much
thinking of people actively involved in restoration, but the more
casual user, and some way in which they could on a voluntary basis
support what they so obviously enjoy.
Mr Evans: My Chairman is very
keen on increasing the amount of volunteer help in British Waterways,
and it is one of the tasks he has given me and the Executive,
to see a sharp growth in the amount of volunteer activity. Traditionally
we have been slow at attracting that, primarily because of the
safety issues of working and the sort of work the volunteers can
do and supervision, because it is all about working near water
with machinery and everything else. That explanation is not an
excuse; that is not right; we need to break down those barriers
and we need to grow and bring more people on, and we are in active
discussions with ENCAMS, which is the old Keep Britain Tidy, the
Groundwork Trust, IWA and a few others like BCTV to bring those
sort of well-trained, well-organised, well-disciplined volunteers
on to the network. I would get those people on to the network
and demonstrate to ourselves as well as to everybody else that
we can have many other people. I used to work for the National
Trust and I think they are absolute masters at attracting volunteers,
and we need to copy their success.
Q330 Sir Peter Soulsby: One of my
parliamentary colleagues asked recently about the Bedford-Milton
Keynes link. Is that still on the British Waterways' agenda, because
there they had the opportunity to make a link that does not exist
and make new cruising possible.
Mr Evans: It is one of the projects
that has been given money by the Big Lottery Fund to develop its
thinking. It has recently received I think £250,000 to develop
its proposal so it can go back to Big Lottery and it is bidding
for a £50 million Living Landmarks lottery grant. British
Waterways is not at the moment taking the lead in that; the Bedford-Milton
Keynes Trust is the lead along with the Council. We are right
in there providing the technical support and any other support
they want, but it is very much on the waterway restoration agenda,
or the new waterway agenda.
Q331 Mr Jack: Can we all put our
little bit in? The opening up of the northern section is now down
in the report—
Mr Evans: It is! I walked it about
two months ago, and it is an excellent project.
Mr Hales: You illustrate exactly
one of the dilemmas we have. We do not have the cash to support
widespread restoration. We support all of it morally and in terms
of providing technical assistance wherever we can, but we do not
have the cash to be able to support many initiatives like this.
They have to be driven locally.
Mr Evans: Part of our problem
is that we work very hard to put funding packages together. They
take a lot of time and it is one of the things we like to think
we are quite skilled at, bringing a lot of funding partners together
to create a funding package. All those people who give us money
will say: "That is the money, there is nothing more, it is
your risk now", so for a £25 million project we will
get the money and it will all add up to £25 million. If actually
during the execution of the project it becomes £26 million
that is our risk. Now, we can deal with that on a small number
of projects but we cannot have a large number of projects with
that risk because if they do go over, and these are big technically
difficult challenging projects spread over a number of years,
any money we put into those restorations just means it is less
money we are putting into our existing network.
Q332 Chairman: Can I mention one
point you have not mentioned at all? I pop along annually to the
Saul boat gathering, which for a small canal trust restoration
body raises quite significant money. Have you thought about going
big time into the events area? You could do Handel's Water Music
all round the country, and weddings on water—this is serious
money. One event can raise you, if you know what you are doing,
several million pounds. You have venues that some private sector
organisations would die for.
Mr Hales: I think we have to be
careful as to how far we stretch our management skills.
Q333 Chairman: You do not have to
do it. You just do it in partnership with somebody.
Mr Hales: We have done events
at the Falkirk Wheel which the Scottish Executive are delighted
to fund because it is building on a major tourist event. It does
cost some money and it is not our money. We have done events at
Canary Wharf; we have turned it into a beach scene in the summer
with support from Mr Livingstone and the London Authority.
Q334 Chairman: And that makes you
money?
Mr Evans: No.
Mr Hales: It brings in people.
We have found no way yet of making money out of events. If you
can introduce us to somebody who would like to partner with us
and give us ten per cent as a facilitator we would be delighted
to do it.
Mr Evans: If I thought for a moment
there was a chance of a tenth of a million pounds profit from
an event we would be doing it. All our experience is it is not
easy, we do not have the venues, Saul Junction and festivals like
that are absolutely fantastic but they are all run by volunteers
and that is why they make money, because all the hundreds of people
involved in that, before and on the day, receive nothing for their
efforts and it all goes into the profits. If you take British
Waterways or a professional organisation all that has to be paid
for and therefore it is very difficult to make money from events
other than in event venues.
Q335 Mr Jack: Moving on to freight,
you heard our earlier exchanges so you know the areas we are interested
in, and I think we have heard some encouraging messages about
the potential for waterway development both during the construction
phase and thereafter with the Olympics, but there is that sort
of nagging feeling that the old freight side is all a bit of a
bore because it does not raise much money, as your report indicates.
If you look at the column inches devoted to freight in it, they
are very small and column inches for everything else is very large.
It strikes me it is all in the "rather too difficult"
column.
Mr Hales: There is a market out
here: why is freight not going on to the waterways? The market
is not irrational. The great transport companies are not choosing
to put freight onto the waterways because at the moment it is
not economically sound in most of the cases. We are not running
those companies but one might hypothesise that. First, most freight
today goes through containers and particularly the narrow waterways
are not capable of moving containers because the bridges are too
low, so there has to be a separation. I am being prejudicial in
these remarks but it is a bit romantic to talk about major freight
on the narrow waterways. The question is whether there is a serious
freight opportunity on the broader waterways, the Aire & Calder,
the Trent, the Severn and the Scottish canals. There may be. The
fact is at the moment we spend a million pounds a year in extra
dredging and we get half a million pounds back. We have had a
very disappointing response out of the dredging of the Severn;
I think there has been one movement of aggregates down there as
a result of the expenditure there.
Q336 Chairman: I know a bit about
the history of that and, to be fair, you did market it quite strongly,
so why was it there was such a poor response?
Mr Hales: I am suggesting that
the economics at the moment are not there to move freight seriously
on the water. You have asked the question a number of times about
carbon emissions and there is one sixth of the carbon emissions
moving freight on the water, so if there is a way of finding a
value which is ascribed to a transport company, not to British
waterways, which changes the economics of moving goods according
to the amount of emissions they are making, that creates the environment
where it may be more attractive for freight to go on the waterways
because of course we would love it.
Q337 Mr Jack: You heard Sea and Water
in response to my probings about this Oxera study, and they were
not exactly very complimentary about the fact there seemed to
be rather a short timescale from what they thought might be potentially
a very interesting area to evaluate. And I think that is the thing
that has been frustrating. Every witness so far has extolled with
enthusiasm the potential but when you come up with: "Where
is it? How much is it? What does it cost? Tell us the facts",
it all evaporates. Is this Oxera study going to answer these things
definitively?
Mr Hales: It will take us a lot
further forward. We are conscious that there is a lot of opinion
expressed. I have expressed an opinion to you. The fact at the
moment is we spend a million, we get half a million, there are
very few movements, the amount of tonnage is going down—why
is that? Because the market does not want to use it. We could
have more wharves but what would be the point of them at the moment?
Mr Evans: Can I also say what
we have to remember is we are just a part of waterway transport.
It is estuarial, intercoastal—it is joining it all together.
People often say to us: "Why are you not driving freight?
Why are you not making a difference?" Well, we can where
we happen to have water against a place of origin, a gravel pit
or where waste is produced—
Q338 Mr Jack: In these matey little
chats you are having with Defra every week, do they not say: "Yes,
we agree with you, there are some really good environmental gains
to be made; our friends in other parts of government have got
some money to put by this; we will ring up the Department for
Transport or the DTI and see if we can get a bit of cash to compensate
you for these extra costs you are having to incur to open up some
of the waterways and perhaps a bit of marketing"? Do you
ever get any kind of hint that Defra are vaguely interested in
assisting you on this?
Mr Evans: They are very sympathetic
and I think they have traditionally found it is as difficult to
find sources of money from other government departments as we
have.
Q339 Mr Jack: So you can unequivocally
say, just to strip away that beautiful diplomatic language, that
the answer is Defra have tried and failed?
Mr Evans: I think it is for them
to say more than me.
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