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London boaters fight for moorings


Boaty Jo

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4 minutes ago, Paul C said:

Aaaaah so you don't even own a boat???!?!?!?!?!? You're being offended on behalf of others..........well nobody else actually, it seems. Its an entirely theoretical argument! Might I suggest you stop being offended on behalf of others and actually go out and enjoy the sunshine, or the rainy British summer, maybe even spend the day next to a canal!!! You might even get to talk to boaters!!?!?!?

 

By the rationale I have already outlined, a boat wouldn't be necessary. I do have a boat. 

 

 

Edited by Higgs
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28 minutes ago, Paul C said:

You've lost me now.

I think Higgs's point is that if you choose to live on a boat in a marina, with no intention of taking it out onto the canals, there should be no need for a licence. Which is true, but CRT thinks it would open a can of worms with people who only go out for a few weeks in summer fiddling the system. Which it would, the only solution being a huge increase in enforcement and thus costs.

Which doesn't make the insistence by marinas that such people have livences fair, but it does make it understandable.

Apologies to Higgs if I've got his position entirely wrong!

Edited by Arthur Marshall
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I think you have a good point, in that its a practical consideration due to the enforceability of licensing. If it indeed were possible to do as Higgs suggests, then we would need a step change in the way licenses are checked (think: ANPR, electronic tags, etc, unless anyone has a better plan). In the meantime, the Network Access Agreement contains a clause that obligates marina owners to ensure their moorers are licensed, which is actually a pretty efficient way for CRT to enforce this (and edge cases lose out).

 

Also if we shifted to a "pay per mile" or "pay per lock-mile" model, rather than "pay per year", it would need a big cost adjustment to the rate of licences, you would have winners like Higgs and the losers would be CCers (and other online moorers) because they are out all year.

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1 hour ago, Arthur Marshall said:

I think Higgs's point is that if you choose to live on a boat in a marina, with no intention of taking it out onto the canals, there should be no need for a licence. Which is true,

 

I strongly disagree. This is not 'true'. The marina is only an attractive place to live because it has a connection to the canal system, via which it gets filled with water. Water provided and paid for by CRT. We all know Higgs thinks the water gets there by accident or luck and should therefore floating in it should be free, and it now appears you do too!

 

 

This is probably why there are not large numbers of people living on boats sitting in empty holes in the ground, or floating in water acquired by the boaters themselves.

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48 minutes ago, MtB said:

 

I strongly disagree. This is not 'true'. The marina is only an attractive place to live because it has a connection to the canal system, via which it gets filled with water. Water provided and paid for by CRT. We all know Higgs thinks the water gets there by accident or luck and should therefore floating in it should be free, and it now appears you do too!

 

 

This is probably why there are not large numbers of people living on boats sitting in empty holes in the ground, or floating in water acquired by the boaters themselves.

But I pay two chunks of money to CRT, one for the licence which lets me move round the system same as a CC does, and another mooring fee which allows me to stay on the same bit of water, provided, as you say, by CRT. Plus an additional mooring fee to the farm where I moor. On some moorings, you just pay a dollop to the landowner and they send some of it to CRT as your share of the mooring fee.

A marina pays a chunk to CRT for the right to allow boats to moor there, on CRT water, and a static liveaboard will pay a fee to the marina, part of which goes to CRT as their mooring permit on that water. So CRT has already got paid for that. What the boat owner doesn't need is the bit that lets them wander about, which is the licence. I think. I accept it's a daft argument because it's pointless.

By the way, I noticed (or rather didn't) that the boat by the Llangollen canal that used to sit in a hole in the ground isn't there any more. Anyone know what happened to it?

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2 minutes ago, Arthur Marshall said:

By the way, I noticed (or rather didn't) that the boat by the Llangollen canal that used to sit in a hole in the ground isn't there any more. Anyone know what happened to it?

 

Speculation :

C&RT determined that the puddle was filled by seepage from the canal ( ie their water), the boat in their water was nor licenced so they 'Section 8' it, and sold it for scrap.

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2 hours ago, MtB said:

 

The marina is only an attractive place to live because it has a connection to the canal system, via which it gets filled with water. Water provided and paid for by CRT. We all know Higgs thinks the water gets there by accident or luck and should therefore floating in it should be free, and it now appears you do too!

 

 

This is probably why there are not large numbers of people living on boats sitting in empty holes in the ground, or floating in water acquired by the boaters themselves.

 

A marina is a place to moor. That's it. Where water goes to and fro has no bearing on the status of private property. The water above that property is not CRT water. The same as the water overflowing onto a farmer's field. Beyond the land boundary, either side is demarcation of access and rights to that space. A boat with a licence could accidentally drift onto water above private property, but legally, it has no authority to be there. Not even if the water is joined to CRT navigation water. 

 

Try mooring in a marina, on the waving of your boat licence. 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Higgs
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1 hour ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

Speculation :

C&RT determined that the puddle was filled by seepage from the canal ( ie their water), the boat in their water was nor licenced so they 'Section 8' it, and sold it for scrap.

My understanding from a course on law I attended many years ago  is that you are entitled to make use of water that seeps  through the ground onto your property, regardless of where it may have seeped from.    It is different if you dig a hole and then make a physical connection to a waterway so that the hole is not filled by seepage, but after the event and in  the absence of evidence, how to prove where the water came from? They would surely only be entitled to compensation for the value of the water extracted, it would not make the water-filled area part of their property.   

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A Marina with lock gates who's water level doesn't rely on the canal feeding it maybe could claim they have nothing to do with CRT waters. 

 

Though you can't build a marina onto CRT waters without their say so and I presume various legally binding agreements, CRT of course own the banks on both sides for maintenance reasons, on private property it's about a meter or so. 

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14 minutes ago, waterworks said:

Though you can't build a marina onto CRT waters without their say so and I presume various legally binding agreements, CRT of course sometimes own the banks on both sides for maintenance reasons, on private property it's about a meter or so. 

 

Corrected that for you.

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8 hours ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

 

Agreed, but the boater must comply with the marina's T&C (which will often include the requirement to have a licence)

In all newish marinas, and some older ones, that is because the agreement between CaRT and the Marina requires them to require it.

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8 minutes ago, Arthur Marshall said:

We seem to have moved into a timeslip of ancient arguments. I can't even remember what the OP was about, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't about marinas and licences.


It was a about mooring restrictions down in London. 
 

If I have it right, there’ll be a protest again tomorrow. 
In Hackney if anyone would like to attend. 

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1 hour ago, Arthur Marshall said:

We seem to have moved into a timeslip of ancient arguments. I can't even remember what the OP was about, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't about marinas and licences.

 

 

Here's a flavour of what the protest is about. From the OP article:

 

"In October 2021, ‘no mooring’ signs started appearing on the River Lea and boaters moored in these areas were told they would have enforcement action taken against them under the new ‘Improper Mooring Process’.  CRT claims that these sites come under its existing rules on where boats are permitted to moor, but these are the exact same stretches that they’d planned to designate as no mooring as part of their ‘Water Safety Zones’, making these new rules for areas where boaters have lawfully moored without any penalty for many years."

 

Having read that, I don't know what its about either.

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58 minutes ago, MtB said:

 

 

Here's a flavour of what the protest is about. From the OP article:

 

"In October 2021, ‘no mooring’ signs started appearing on the River Lea and boaters moored in these areas were told they would have enforcement action taken against them under the new ‘Improper Mooring Process’.  CRT claims that these sites come under its existing rules on where boats are permitted to moor, but these are the exact same stretches that they’d planned to designate as no mooring as part of their ‘Water Safety Zones’, making these new rules for areas where boaters have lawfully moored without any penalty for many years."

 

Having read that, I don't know what its about either.


Get yourself to Hackney

 

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10 hours ago, MtB said:

 

 

Here's a flavour of what the protest is about. From the OP article:

 

"In October 2021, ‘no mooring’ signs started appearing on the River Lea and boaters moored in these areas were told they would have enforcement action taken against them under the new ‘Improper Mooring Process’.  CRT claims that these sites come under its existing rules on where boats are permitted to moor, but these are the exact same stretches that they’d planned to designate as no mooring as part of their ‘Water Safety Zones’, making these new rules for areas where boaters have lawfully moored without any penalty for many years."

 

Having read that, I don't know what its about either.

Probably the crucial point is saying that they have "lawfully moored without any penalty for many years". It us clear that they believe, or would like to believe, this to be true but more likely they fell into this as a result of BW and then CaRT not being resourced to take sufficient action. It is a good example of what can arise with unenforced or unenforceable rules - people come to believe that they do not matter. It may be a matter of scale. What is best ignored when small scale becomes an issue when taken to a large scale.

 

It is also the case that some people are now facing not being allowed to do what they have been doing for some while, although perhaps not as long as sometimes suggested. This is always a recipe for problems, even conflict. The only real resolution is to restore a situation in which the demand is very limited.

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2 hours ago, Mike Todd said:

 

It is also the case that some people are now facing not being allowed to do what they have been doing for some while, although perhaps not as long as sometimes suggested. This is always a recipe for problems, even conflict. The only real resolution is to restore a situation in which the demand is very limited.

Or increase the supply, which is simple and can be charged for and so increase income.

If, to considerably reduce numbers of liveaboard boaters, you just boot them off the canal or river, all you are doing is making it someone else's problem, you're not actually solving anything.

If the problem is just dumped boats, fine - lift them out and destroy them. But if it's people's homes, the equivalent action to bulldozing a shanty town is not something a civilised country should do (not, I admit, that this can really be described as such any more, if it ever really was). Even the old slum demolitions generally had somewhere for the disposessed to go. Of course, back in the good old days of Scottish land clearances they just left them to rot.

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6 minutes ago, Arthur Marshall said:

Or increase the supply, which is simple and can be charged for and so increase income.

 

Surely a large part of the problem is NOT just a lack of available moorings, but the lack of will to pay for anything - hence the numbers of 'pretend CCers' who either cannot afford to pay reasonable mooring rates, or, just as a principle refuse to do so when they can just squat on the canal.

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46 minutes ago, Arthur Marshall said:

If the problem is just dumped boats, fine - lift them out and destroy them. But if it's people's homes, the equivalent action to bulldozing a shanty town is not something a civilised country should do (not, I admit, that this can really be described as such any more, if it ever really was). Even the old slum demolitions generally had somewhere for the disposessed to go. Of course, back in the good old days of Scottish land clearances they just left them to rot.

 

 

What a load of tosh.

 

Nobody is forcing boaters to moor on the River Lea in the parts re-classified as non-mooring areas. Nor are their boat-homes at risk of demolition unless they deliberately and persistently flout the new mooring rules.

 

 

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They want to use the London canals as cheap housing and I can't see what basis they are protesting on, since CRT is under no obligation to provide moorings for housing boaters within London. 

 

They are righty concerned  about the shortage of housing in London which has been caused by an increase over a million to the population since 1950 when the population growth in London was 0 %, they shouldn't be campaigning to use canals as housing they should be campaigning to stop mass immigration. 

 

1950 - 8361,000 

2022 - 9541,000 

 

Continued population growth in London is 1.2 to 1.5 % per year .

 

 

 

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23 minutes ago, waterworks said:

They want to use the London canals as cheap housing and I can't see what basis they are protesting on, since CRT is under no obligation to provide moorings for housing boaters within London. 

 

They are righty concerned  about the shortage of housing in London which has been caused by an increase over a million to the population since 1950 when the population growth in London was 0 %, they shouldn't be campaigning to use canals as housing they should be campaigning to stop mass immigration. 

 

1950 - 8361,000 

2022 - 9541,000 

 

Continued population growth in London is 1.2 to 1.5 % per year .

 

 

 

 

 

 

That is a very sensible post - have you suffered from an identity theft ? has someone cloned your forum ID ?

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28 minutes ago, waterworks said:

They want to use the London canals as cheap housing and I can't see what basis they are protesting on, since CRT is under no obligation to provide moorings for housing boaters within London. 

 

They are righty concerned  about the shortage of housing in London which has been caused by an increase over a million to the population since 1950 when the population growth in London was 0 %, they shouldn't be campaigning to use canals as housing they should be campaigning to stop mass immigration. 

 

1950 - 8361,000 

2022 - 9541,000 

 

Continued population growth in London is 1.2 to 1.5 % per year .

 

 

 

Absolutely. Kick out the Russians and the Saudi money launderers that buy up most of the new buildings in London and leave them empty. Demolish the empty luxury blocks and offices and replace with decent cheap housing.

I presume you mean by mass immigration the number of people forced to move to London to work (ie the people who actually work rather than just sit at desks moving numbers about) because businesses refuse to move elsewhere? Not really their fault. Unless, of course, it's just a coded bit of racism - are all the canal dwellers foreign imports? I'd never have guessed.

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One way to do it would be like they do with council homes. 

 

Find out if people are genuinely in poverty and if they are then allow them subsidised housing. CRT is currently subsidising housing. 

 

You could easily find that there are very many people "living" on boats while renting out their house or flat. If the subsidy (cc option for boat license) was removed this would not result in them being homeless as they are a property owner. 

 

Not everyone is in this position, obviously. 

 

It's basically just squatters and freeloaders who seem to not understand the market economy who are moaning.

 

Charging for something that is in demand is normal. If you can't afford it you don't have it. 

 

It's not complicated. 

 

Also I think in the CRT transfer order somewhere there is a bit where CRT are obliged to make profit from their assets and must not allow anyone to gain from their assets.

 

So if someone is living on a boat while renting out their property then they are directly gaining because living on a boat cheaply and remaining in one general area is only available due to the 1995 act and the 14 day rule. 

 

You are bound to get parasites in this situation.

 

 

Edited by magnetman
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