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London boaters fight for moorings


Boaty Jo

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A basic towpath mooring anywhere between say Kensal Green and Limehouse, if allowed and with water to berths, would get between five and  ten grand a year. Easily. 

 

Obviously people won't want to be in shit areas that's a given.

 

Not sure how much the double breasted moorings by little Venice are but when a boat comes up for sale there it is always ridiculously expensive as the berth is transferable. This must mean that the mooring fees are too low. 

 

I'm pretty sure they pay at least £9k pa for those but have not checked this. 

 

London is a seriously expensive place to live (I mean to be a resident, pay council tax etc)

 

Also there would presumably need to be a planning application and another thing to point out is that the CRT are not allowed to use their near monopoly position to undercut other mooring providers. 

 

It's not an easy nut to crack this one. 

Edited by magnetman
Edit to remove various mild sex references
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I know. Its not that easy to find out though because you would have to be there right at the last minute and once it's finished the end price is not public information. 

 

It was public previously but not any more. 

 

The auction system doesn't truly find the market value. It's a bit of a dodgy situation that one. 

 

 

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1 hour ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

When 'London' moorings come up for auction it is not unusual for them to achieve £15,000 + (per annum)

But the whole point of London's housing and employment problem is that there is no need whatsoever for rents and moorings to be so expensive. Once a house or a bit of towpath is paid for, there is maintenance and all the rest is profit, or what used to be called, and taxed as, unearned income. Sooner or later someone has to bite the bullet and either let the city rot without those who actually keep it going, or allow housing at a rate those people can afford. At the moment, of course, most of the rent is paid by the government (ie you and me as taxpayers) as a direct gift to the landlords, and this is just not sustainable. 

I see the latest trick is to allow fifty year mortgages for 1st time buyers, which they can pass on to their kids in due course. All that will do, of course, is raise prices even more. A radical solution is needed.

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Yes but the plebs won't vote for people who cause house prices to drop.

 

Rising house prices is the biggest scam in the Book of Scams. 

 

It's all bollocks. 

 

I can fortunately avoid it all as live on a boat and pay the CRT for the mooring and the other half and my kids have a council owned home to live in. 

 

The worst of the worst feed on other people's insecurity. It's sick (not in the new lingo meaning of "sick")

 

 

 

Edited by magnetman
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2 hours ago, magnetman said:

A basic towpath mooring anywhere between say Kensal Green and Limehouse, if allowed and with water to berths, would get between five and  ten grand a year. Easily. 

 

Obviously people won't want to be in shit areas that's a given.

 

Not sure how much the double breasted moorings by little Venice are but when a boat comes up for sale there it is always ridiculously expensive as the berth is transferable. This must mean that the mooring fees are too low. 

 

I'm pretty sure they pay at least £9k pa for those but have not checked this. 

 

London is a seriously expensive place to live (I mean to be a resident, pay council tax etc)

 

Also there would presumably need to be a planning application and another thing to point out is that the CRT are not allowed to use their near monopoly position to undercut other mooring providers. 

 

It's not an easy nut to crack this one. 

OK, a few points to start from.

 

1. I think this is an interesting debate so am carrying on for a bit. I promise I will stop when Ockam's razor applies!

2. London boaters are not well represented on here, so you are the closest we've got to have spoken up, hence thoughts being addressed in your direction 🙂

3. I think the current situation is unsustainable and change is needed. Unless that change is constructive and local to the problem, it may be detrimental to a lot of other people in an effort to control a minority whilst avoiding outcry of discriminatory behaviour. An easy (lazy?) solution for example would be to change the rules to stop the current interpretation of continuous cruising. How about if you had to prove that you have moved between local authority boundaries, and that you do not return to the same one within a six week period except in transit for 24hr stops max. if it is a dead-end district (up the Llangollen for example), or imposing reduced mooring time restrictions across a lot of the system and making all dedicated visitor moorings chargeable with the use of surveillance to enforce it? Radical, unpopular and unnecessary but simple and unequivocal. I am therefore exploring alternatives with no real expectation of finding any, absolutely no expectation that anyone would notice or implement them but because they might be better options and some times a constructive alternative is a good thing to offer. With that in mind, for now I will develop my theme in response to your comments.

 

So there appear to be two competing factors here, the viability of affording a mooring in a location vs. CRT's obligation to achieve market rate. How about then if CRT did not create moorings, instead it rented stretches of the towpath to the local council for the purpose of creating affordable housing, whilst retaining a right of access for towpath users (public right of way) much as it is now? The council could then set the rent, could means-test it for both overall eligibility and any rebates due on the headline rate. Say CRT rented it to the council at the equivalent of £2k per boat, the council then determined a baseline rate of £5k per boat but opened eligibility to anyone earning under £35k (that would include most teachers, nurses etc) and ran some form of sliding scale from full rate down to £2k at earnings of under £15k p.a. The council would then also handle council tax requirements and housing benefit, as it currently does. CRT would not be renting moorings so would not be undercutting market rate.

 

With reference to location, how far out from 'London' is reasonable to call 'London'? For me, everything inside the M25 is labelled 'Here be Dragons' and by the time I hit the North/South Circular I am at risk of evaporating in a puff of smoke if I accidentally enter the ULEZ, but hypothetically what would be reasonable? I have generally taken the view that whilst everyone might have a preference to live exactly where they want, actually there is a level of market forces that says you may not be able to afford that, but it is reasonable to expect to be able to afford to live somewhere within a sensible travelling distance of where you work, such that both the time and cost do not make that prohibitive. For example, a cleaner at the Natural History Museum may not be able to afford to live in South Kensington or Knightsbridge, but they should be able to afford somewhere within say half an hour's tube ride and their salary should be sufficient to allow for the necessary travel on top of the basic cost of living, otherwise you simply don't have any employee choices except the homeless. I have generally taken it that 'living in London' as a need rather than a preference means some level of need to do so for work/family reasons in a location which can be accessed by public transport within the above criteria. I recognise that is a very loose definition but I am trying to come up with what would constitute reasonable expectations and I don't think that simple preferences can reasonably be accommodated if the area is defined as only a few miles of canal in the very centre.

 

Thoughts?

 

Alec

Edited by agg221
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1 hour ago, magnetman said:

Yes but the plebs won't vote for people who cause house prices to drop.

 

Rising house prices is the biggest scam in the Book of Scams. 

 

It's all bollocks. 

 

I can fortunately avoid it all as live on a boat and pay the CRT for the mooring and the other half and my kids have a council owned home to live in. 

 

The worst of the worst feed on other people's insecurity. It's sick (not in the new lingo meaning of "sick")

 

 

 

The only people who gain by rising house prices are landlords and second home owners, and people are beginning to realise this, as more and more of their kids can't afford either mortgage or rent. Unfortunately, a hell of a lot of politicians are landlords, so they don't have a lot of incentive to change anything. I suspect the plebs may be learning, a bit too late, obviously, as most of them won't be allowed to vote in the next election anyway.

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7 hours ago, waterworks said:

Canals should not be used to solve housing issues in my opinion, anymore than any other heritage places like parks or historic properties or even farm or woodland. 

 

The causes of the housing crisis should be dealt with not pass the buck onto CRT

 

 

Totally agree. People should be prevented from living on boats, then all the CMer problems would disappear. 

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3 minutes ago, MtB said:

 

 

Totally agree. People should be prevented from living on boats, then all the CMer problems would disappear. 

 

Do you talk nonsense just for effect?

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1 hour ago, agg221 said:

OK, a few points to start from.

 

1. I think this is an interesting debate so am carrying on for a bit. I promise I will stop when Ockam's razor applies!

2. London boaters are not well represented on here, so you are the closest we've got to have spoken up, hence thoughts being addressed in your direction 🙂

3. I think the current situation is unsustainable and change is needed. Unless that change is constructive and local to the problem, it may be detrimental to a lot of other people in an effort to control a minority whilst avoiding outcry of discriminatory behaviour. An easy (lazy?) solution for example would be to change the rules to stop the current interpretation of continuous cruising. How about if you had to prove that you have moved between local authority boundaries, and that you do not return to the same one within a six week period except in transit for 24hr stops max. if it is a dead-end district (up the Llangollen for example), or imposing reduced mooring time restrictions across a lot of the system and making all dedicated visitor moorings chargeable with the use of surveillance to enforce it? Radical, unpopular and unnecessary but simple and unequivocal. I am therefore exploring alternatives with no real expectation of finding any, absolutely no expectation that anyone would notice or implement them but because they might be better options and some times a constructive alternative is a good thing to offer. With that in mind, for now I will develop my theme in response to your comments.

 

So there appear to be two competing factors here, the viability of affording a mooring in a location vs. CRT's obligation to achieve market rate. How about then if CRT did not create moorings, instead it rented stretches of the towpath to the local council for the purpose of creating affordable housing, whilst retaining a right of access for towpath users (public right of way) much as it is now? The council could then set the rent, could means-test it for both overall eligibility and any rebates due on the headline rate. Say CRT rented it to the council at the equivalent of £2k per boat, the council then determined a baseline rate of £5k per boat but opened eligibility to anyone earning under £35k (that would include most teachers, nurses etc) and ran some form of sliding scale from full rate down to £2k at earnings of under £15k p.a. The council would then also handle council tax requirements and housing benefit, as it currently does. CRT would not be renting moorings so would not be undercutting market rate.

 

With reference to location, how far out from 'London' is reasonable to call 'London'? For me, everything inside the M25 is labelled 'Here be Dragons' and by the time I hit the North/South Circular I am at risk of evaporating in a puff of smoke if I accidentally enter the ULEZ, but hypothetically what would be reasonable? I have generally taken the view that whilst everyone might have a preference to live exactly where they want, actually there is a level of market forces that says you may not be able to afford that, but it is reasonable to expect to be able to afford to live somewhere within a sensible travelling distance of where you work, such that both the time and cost do not make that prohibitive. For example, a cleaner at the Natural History Museum may not be able to afford to live in South Kensington or Knightsbridge, but they should be able to afford somewhere within say half an hour's tube ride and their salary should be sufficient to allow for the necessary travel on top of the basic cost of living, otherwise you simply don't have any employee choices except the homeless. I have generally taken it that 'living in London' as a need rather than a preference means some level of need to do so for work/family reasons in a location which can be accessed by public transport within the above criteria. I recognise that is a very loose definition but I am trying to come up with what would constitute reasonable expectations and I don't think that simple preferences can reasonably be accommodated if the area is defined as only a few miles of canal in the very centre.

 

Thoughts?

 

Alec

I have always advocated Local Authorities running the towpath in London. It's the obvious solution. 

 

Housing benefit seems to be related to savings rather than earnings and if you own property then you are not eligible. This would weed out the parasites. Nobody wants parasites. 

 

If CRT could hand over control of towpaths to LAs it could end up with a lot of really Good Things happening. I don't think it will happen but it does seem like a blatantly obvious way to deal with the fact that in a lot of areas towpaths are used for housing. 

 

I really don't believe it's a poverty thing. Obviously in some cases it is and if the LA were involved then people would get looked after. 

 

I find it quite easy to identify areas in London from postcodes. We can ignore the S ones as there are no connected CRT waterways South of the River. 

 

So basically the postcode will start with a W, a N or an E. It won't start with UB. 

 

That's the definition. 

 

M25 is a red herring. 

 

 

ETA @agg221

 

You will come up against a fairly basic problem here which is that most people do NOT want to live on a boat. 

 

It is a compromise and in a lot of cases an awful nightmare. 

 

For the tiny minority who would live on a boat come hell or high water (one can but hope !) it could seem ideal but there is an obvious caveat here. 

 

Catering for people who are not there leads to negative outcomes. 

 

 

 

Edited by magnetman
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Agree, local authorities are better placed to handle this type of thing than CRT. Hence why London should be a "special case" canal with different management, different rules etc. 

 

My point on planning permission isn't so much about the complexity of applying, but of being successful - there's other bodies involved, and wider issues, with simply granting some moorings residential planning status. If these barriers were to be overcome, a joined-up approach involving CRT (or maybe not if they can 100% handover their navigation authority duty in that area) and the other bodies such as Local Council, etc

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5 hours ago, Arthur Marshall said:

but why a low maintenance towpath mooring should actually need planning permission is beyond me. You're not changing anything, just nailing a boat to it.

Because planning permission is about the use of land, not just the erection of buildings.

The mooring of leisure craft to the towpath has been found to be incidental to the use of the waterway by such craft, and therefore does not need explicit planning consent, even where in practice a particular piece of towpath is in continuous use as a mooring for a succession of different liveaboard craft. But designating that same piece of towpath as a residential mooring for long term use by a single craft is a change which requires planning consent, even if no physical changes to the site are proposed.

Edited by David Mack
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10 hours ago, agg221 said:

In my hypothetical construct, I was envisaging that pretty much the entire area which is currently very heavily occupied would be divided up into blocks of permanently assigned moorings separated by short lengths of short-term visitor moorings (48hrs?) It would be necessary to police those 48hr moorings with the approach of a traffic warden issuing on the spot fines for overstaying. My proposal would be to add this fine to the next licence fee so there is effectively no way to obtain a licence without paying it, and the admin burden is minimised.

 

Outside of those areas if you want to stop them growing you would create an adjacent extended length of 24hr moorings, using the K&A model. Beyond that, if the area is not under excessive pressure you would simply allow the current free-for-all to continue, just as it does around the rest of the country, relying on the fact that the area is less desirable to keep the pressure down.

 

I lived in Cambridge for a while and still live fairly nearby, regularly visiting friends there. I think the main difference is scale. Cambridge has a very short length of river available for moorings in proportion to its size, further restricted by the need to keep a channel wide enough for two rowing eights to pass. That means some lengths are unavailable and breasting up is essentially impossible. I wouldn't care to make a definitive statement on this but my impression of the London situation is that a fair proportion of the boat dwelling population is younger and more transient, heading back on land once it can afford to do so or has had enough of boat life. The sheer scale will also inherently create some turnover too.

 

It is possible that a very long waiting list would develop - that could be used as an indicator for demand, forming the basis for a business plan. Not sure if anyone has the vision to do that yet though.


Alec

CRT has no powers to issue fines, it would be unlawful.

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18 minutes ago, Bod said:

C&RT may have no powers to "Fine" as such, but they do have the power to put you in front of a Magistrate, who does, and gets you a criminal record.

 

Of course that means CRT (and BW before them) don't get money from the fine, so they don't bother using this power.

 

Penalty charges they get to keep...

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So.......IF (inner) London's canals were given over to the Local Authorities, this would presumably mean jettisoning the 1995 Act (ie it would no longer apply there) and the LAs introducing their own licensing of some kind - a reasonable assumption since basically no other navigation authorities have the allowing of CCing written into law. 

 

Would there be a transition? Would there be a wholescale clearance of the canals? Would the boaters be unaffected and ignore a different set of rules from a different body? I imagine NBTA would have something to protest about then!!

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8 minutes ago, Arthur Marshall said:

Engage brain. Detect irony. If necessary, consult dictionary.

 

Unfortunately given his other ramblings it's not always possible to say. Hence posted as a question.

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12 hours ago, MtB said:

 

 

Totally agree. People should be prevented from living on boats, then all the CMer problems would disappear. 

 

While I hope you're being tongue in cheek with this comment, it's in the 1965 bylaws.

 

Use of vessels as clubs, houseboats, etc.

30. No vessel on any canal shall without the permission of the Board be used as a club, shop, store, workshop, dwelling or houseboat.

 

The Bridgewater Canal Company introduced their Platinum Licence a few years ago where they grant permission for liveaboard use for £1200 per year extra charge on top of  the standard boat licence.

 

 

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32 minutes ago, Paul C said:

So.......IF (inner) London's canals were given over to the Local Authorities, this would presumably mean jettisoning the 1995 Act (ie it would no longer apply there) and the LAs introducing their own licensing of some kind - a reasonable assumption since basically no other navigation authorities have the allowing of CCing written into law. 

 

Would there be a transition? Would there be a wholescale clearance of the canals? Would the boaters be unaffected and ignore a different set of rules from a different body? I imagine NBTA would have something to protest about then!!

You could do that, but I wasn't thinking quite so radically. I was thinking of CRT granting a lease of the towpath and mooring rights to an agreed width to the Local Authorities. I envisaged a public right of access to the towpath being part of the terms. My thought was that CRT would then continue to be the navigation authority so travelling boaters would continue to have use of the canal as they currently do (in theory) but since the LAs would hold a lease on the moorings then CCing would no longer apply. I would imagine that having a valid licence, BSS and insurance would still remain conditions. In that respect, it would be no different to any other fixed mooring operated on privately held land/CRT waters (I can't rock up to a marina and refuse to pay for a berth because I am CCing).

 

How the boaters, NBTA and the LAs interacted would be a different question - I imagine it would not be universally popular, since it would move from 'free' to 'not free' but how much protest and how legitimate it was would depend on the attitude the LAs took. If they were paying CRT for the lease and incurring costs from management then I would anticipate they would want to charge, however it would not be in their interests to make the charge punitive since they would benefit most from keeping the moorings full, and would not benefit from over-charging to the point where they had to take with one hand and give back with the other in the form of housing benefit. This is where my thought above around defining the area for dedicated social housing came from, with a pricing structure to reflect this.

 

The point of fine vs. fixed penalty notices is well made. The latter would be more beneficial to CRT and, since it already has a mechanism to collect money through the annual licence, this led to my thought of simply adding fixed penalty notice charges to the next licence fee. Failure to pay in full would result in no licence being issued and there is already a mechanism for dealing with unlicensed boats.

 

@magnetman I take your point that most people in this position are not choosing to live on a boat but are making a compromise. I don't have figures to back this, but my anticipation is that this leads to a somewhat transient population as people decide they have had enough of the compromise. This is not necessarily a bad thing - it creates a degree of churn, which is the point I was making to @Alan de Enfield as a major difference from the situation on the Cam which has very limited churn due to other options being available, so those who have chosen to live there stay for very long periods with a consequent extended waiting list. I don't think the fact that it is a compromise necessarily has much impact on alternative management strategies though, so long as people continue to want to try that compromise in the current numbers.

 

Alec

Edited by agg221
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I see - so a percentage area of mooring space would be "converted" from towpath-side as-is, to towpath-side long term mooring (effectively), much as they exist in certain areas of the canal system eg Bunbury, Gailey etc.

 

Part of it would need to be some type of penalty for non-permit holders mooring on the permit area. Interestingly, in Gailey there is a sign saying mooring without permission is chargeable at £150. I am not sure if I took a pic of the signs. And of course this would need to be enforced to be effective.

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36 minutes ago, TheBiscuits said:

 

While I hope you're being tongue in cheek with this comment, it's in the 1965 bylaws.

 

Use of vessels as clubs, houseboats, etc.

30. No vessel on any canal shall without the permission of the Board be used as a club, shop, store, workshop, dwelling or houseboat.

 

The Bridgewater Canal Company introduced their Platinum Licence a few years ago where they grant permission for liveaboard use for £1200 per year extra charge on top of  the standard boat licence.

 

 

It was partially tongue-in-cheek but I remember back in 1976 deciding to buy a boat to live on on the Thames rather than on the canals as my (limited) research at the time had turned up it was illegal to live on a narrow boat. That is probably what I'd found. 

 

Is it still in force? 

 

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31 minutes ago, Paul C said:

I see - so a percentage area of mooring space would be "converted" from towpath-side as-is, to towpath-side long term mooring (effectively), much as they exist in certain areas of the canal system eg Bunbury, Gailey etc.

 

Part of it would need to be some type of penalty for non-permit holders mooring on the permit area. Interestingly, in Gailey there is a sign saying mooring without permission is chargeable at £150. I am not sure if I took a pic of the signs. And of course this would need to be enforced to be effective.

That was pretty much my thought, yes. I wasn't thinking so much of the penalties for a non-permit holder mooring on the permit area, since that would then be up to the lease holder (Local Authority) to manage, although if the moorings became permanent and were fully occupied the problem would not arise as there would be no spaces to moor on.

 

I was thinking that rather than leasing out the continuous length of towpath, CRT could lease it in blocks, retaining short lengths in between. These short lengths could be allocated as short term visitor moorings (24 or 48hrs) with fixed penalty notices for overstaying which would need to be enforced. My provisional thought on how was based on installing fixed remote operating cameras to cover the relatively small areas of visitor mooring, taking a snapshot every 24hrs and sending out the picture. Such systems are available for home security use and run for a very long time on a charge since they are not continuously monitoring, so you would only need a physical visit once a month or so to change batteries, or when you could see by consecutive images that a boat had overstayed. My thought was that this would deter additional continuous moorers from attempting to use the visitor moorings as it would be too much hassle to move that frequently and would therefore leave them available for visitors. If this didn't quite work then those moorings could be brought into the bookable mooring system.

 

We're getting somewhat into the detail here. What I find interesting is that there have been no objections raised to the principle?

 

Alec

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Its probably a workable idea, but the penalty for mooring in a permanent mooring place (with no permit) would need to be the same as (or proportionate to) the penalty for overstaying a CRT-retained stretch of towpath or visitor mooring; and equally enforced too. There is no current provision in law for them to do this but if a new law were to be drafted to allow them to hand over control to the LA, maybe it could be written into that.

 

Of course, NBTA would totally not see the logic and reasoning, and simply say that "swathes of moorings they're entitled to are being taken away converted to unaffordable ones".

 

NBTA are interesting - they don't have a mandate from their "membership" (there is no election or democratic process internally) so CRT and LAs could simply press on ahead and not see them as a stakeholder at all. There is a need for boater representation in these types of plannings/decisions though, so they could optionally invite them to the table which is what I believe CRT's current approach is.

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