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good morning... Summers iver??....not yet!!

Fun for you, crass and stupid in my opinion Richard

Troll gardens.

Hmm, hard to describe. You generally get a lot of opportunities to examine it though Richard

Gutt says, greedy, complete noobs at selling boats or...just very cunning. Mind says, their taking the piss now. Stick around the forum, make friends in the know, and next time you will be offered help from your new friends. Boaters are awesome that way :-)

An understanding of the legislation

In general the powers that be don't adopt solutions that come from the general public - the general public are clearly not experienced enough to know their ar5e from their elbow so can't have useful ideas. Only newly qualified graduates and expensive consultants can have ideas that are worth considering never mind implementing.

There is something faintly ridiculous about this post, besides being grossly elitist. The fact that they are going to be facing further costs is why they aim to voluntarily throw more good money after bad? Simply to get a Cost Order they know will be good only to bankrupt someone – at yet further cost? On the stated facts of this case, even selling the boats from under him will never cover the costs even of just getting the costs order. I understand the psychology of setting a frightener by way of example, but this is a poor choice of subject; far more appropriate to go that route with one of the more valuable boats in the enforcement process. Then, too, the authority is not “indulging” the NBTA with these cases; they are pursuing them whether the NBTA are involved or not, and if a sectioned boater wants help at court, then he is entitled to it from willing friends just as much as if he could afford to engage a barrister – who would give the authority far more of a run for their money. The logical corollary of the above post is that if you are impecunious [not “inpecunious”] you ought not to defend yourself when the authority takes you to court to remove your home/possession, despite any argument you feel [rightly or wrongly] that you have on your side. It is plain silly to suggest that “there is no reason that CRT should be the ones to bear the costs” of fighting impoverished boaters – of course there is a reason; cold, harsh reality. If you want to fight an impecunious person through the courts, you recognise that you will have to bear the costs win or lose. The decision is made to start the process with eyes wide open to the inevitable. A further factor for readers to enter into their considerations on the subject is the choice made by the authority on how much they spend on the cases. The published list of concluded cases shows an average usual cost of £1,000 for fees and representation. The only reason to spend more is in order to outsource a team of solicitors and barristers with a wealth of expensive advocacy experience and expertise; – what would motivate that choice when facing an ignorant layperson? Logically, the answer has to be that, ignorant layman or not, an argument has been presented that the authority thinks is going to take those “big guns” to combat. In itself, that is strong indication that they recognise a significant degree of validity to that argument. Otherwise they could just use their in-house legal team. So the jibe about arguing points no-one would argue if they were at risk, is without foundation. There is yet another factor that should be considered – the courts themselves will not entertain a purely specious defence without merit; it is always open for a party to move for dismissal without trial for lack of substance to a particular line of defence. The sneering contempt in trotting out the phrase “they want their day in court” belies the reality that, for all the existence of unquestioned law breakers [quite rightly taken to court], some boaters are being chosen as targets for dubious exercise of statutory powers. The senior courts in the land have publicly acknowledged this and rebuked the authority for it. It is not the straightforward law breakers that are costing the big sums; the expensive cases are the marginal ones where the legality of the authority’s action is susceptible to legal question. So far as the NBTA are concerned, they have no need to have a day in court; they’ve had a few of those already and demonstrated that, win or lose, they have presented a sufficiently cogent case to justify pitting the nation’s foremost specialist in these matters against them. So, for example, a hot-shot barrister at considerable expense persuaded a couple of High Court judges to dismiss the Judicial Review application as having no merit? A higher level appeal judge disagreed with those judges; that’s saying something considerable, and that is one for the score card whatever the eventual outcome. So it is not a case of pride, any more than [for them] it is a case of personal necessity; it is for them, a matter of public conscience and aiding those less able – and that must be acknowledged whether you agree with their arguments and actions or not. Nor is it true to suggest that there is no cost to them or the boaters they represent; once a court order for costs is granted against you, that’s there for life. There is no statute of limitation that prevents the beneficiary of that order bringing a bankruptcy petition 20 or 40 years down the line when you may have achieved some financial success in life – you can never escape the consequence, in other words, short of spending a grand [if you can scrape that together] to pre-emptively bankrupt yourself. A professional barrister recognises that he or she will never win all cases, and knows that losing does not of itself indicate that they were wrong; what they are proud of - and so list in their CV’s - are the important cases in which they were involved, the ones they contributed to that were significant explorations of the law; where, even when they were on the losing side, they had a hand in moulding the direction the law was to take.

The staff at West Middlesex Hospital had to check their guage/gauge twice before they believed it too. And I am on medication for it, but sometimes I run out between prescriptions. Meanwhile I don't know whether to blame the waterways authority or thank them - might just drop dead if I have to stop fighting! Then again, sunny foreign holidays [rare] have been known to restore me to normal without such assistance.

Both – chronological sequence indeterminate on currently available information. Hales & Evans saw the benefit of sliding out from under governmental oversight at least since the last EFRA Select Committee Report of 2007/8 - the investigation that publicised the flagrant disregard of Evans for requests from the Waterways Minister. They employed the lobbying firm of Cavendish Communications to work on persuading government that BW were a lovely organisation which would profit from being allowed to go their own way unsupervised. Cameron saw the advantages of being disassociated from a financial burden with a disastrous track record of human rights abuse and fiduciary profligacy. Rather than recognise the immense financial benefit of the waterways to the country in ways that could never be directly recovered by the authority, he chose to lump them in with the much vaunted “Bonfire of the Quangos”. We’ve ended up with even more of them, with BW one of the few to be burnt at the stake – largely due to eager promotion of that scenario by those who planned to scuttle from the burning ship ahead of time.

75% of the system may be wide, but if a boat wider than 7ft is north or south of the narrow bit in the middle then much less then 75% will be accessible, unless the boat is craned out and craned back in on the other side. Anyway, in my opinion the whole idea of complaining about others and trying to increase their fees has more to do with the politics of envy than anything else and is indicative of a petty mindset. It's along the same lines as complaining about CCers, liveaboards or those without moorings and trying to get them to pay more. It actually does nothing to improve things for anyone and all it does is assuage the complainants' bitterness. In the end all that happens is that stricter rules and higher fees are implemented for everyone, which negatively impact on all of us! That's what we're seeing with CRT at the moment. I and many others have been saying the same thing for years, but some people won't stop complaining and won't be happy until we are all controlled by an authoritarian waterways regime. Isn't it time we stuck together, broadened our horizons and stopped complaining about those who we think might be having a slightly better time than us? There are much worse things going on in the world!