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Is C&RT's Boat/Location Logging System Fit for Purpose?


Tony Dunkley

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I’d be very surprised if it was.

 

In the first place, the genesis of the complaint – regardless of all consequential claims - is the CaRT claim that the boat was not moored or used in compliance with the terms of its licence.

 

If the relevant officer claims that the boat exceeded the mooring limits, then whether the boat did or did not, unless the boat-owner can produce proof that it is wrong, the court will give credence to the authority’s claim [as I have illustrated from cross-examination transcripts and judgments].

 

The Officer has made that claim – “sightings were gathered that showed the boat was overstaying at the location.” The boat owner has no evidence to contradict the statement, so really, any evidence CaRT brings forward [such as the document under discussion] is actually superfluous to requirement.

 

But even this basis for revoking the licence is a redundancy. The application to the court for an injunction against the boat “is made on the grounds that the Defendant’s boat . . . is moored at the property without a current licence such that CRT is entitled to remove the Boat from the Property pursuant to CRT’s statutory powers.” That is all that the Claim itself asserts [as distinct from the Officer’s evidence]. The background reasons for why the boat is unlicensed are immaterial to the fact of its unlicensed status.

 

If the boat had remained there, waiting for this case to be heard, or continued to cruise betimes, not having the relevant consent - then there could be no defence at all to that application – as per the Mayers case.

 

It seems to me that what you are saying is that the best (only?) strategy for a boater in this situation is to take CRT to court immediately the licence is removed rather than defending the court case that follows a Section 8 on a liveaboard boat.

 

If so, how does this procedure 'work'; what is the process?

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Er...no...where on earth did you get that idea from? If you read what I've said earlier, the only way to get true records of boat movement is for us all to have GPS loggers fitted to our boats....which of course is open to abuse (as is the CRT system, if they choose to amend records in the database). That's why these systems should be independently audited....

 

Just for clarity, are you suggesting that we must all install GPS loggers?

 

It seems to me that what you are saying is that the best (only?) strategy for a boater in this situation is to take CRT to court immediately the licence is removed rather than defending the court case that follows a Section 8 on a liveaboard boat.

 

If so, how does this procedure 'work'; what is the process?

 

Did you read the full text of the Mayers case?

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So I did.

 

I only quoted that part of your posting which I was interested in responding to. As I had nothing I wished to say about the part I missed out, I missed it out.

 

No reflection intended on that part of your observations.

...fair enough...don't you think though that anyone reading this thread (amongst others) could get the impression CRT are an organisation to be feared? ....Ok, I'm just being paranoid then...

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Just for clarity, are you suggesting that we must all install GPS loggers?

 

 

If you are scared of being hauled up in court then it makes sense to keep a log of your movements. I just use my Yahoo calendar. I understand from Nigel that if you have no log to present in court, the decision will be weighted in favour of CRT data simply because it's the only data which exists. You can only contest their data using your own data.

 

Fortunately, anyone with any common sense will see that the CRT data can only be used to show where you have been on the day the entry was made. It's up to us to fill in the gaps....in the end though it's up to the judge...

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...don't you think though that anyone reading this thread (amongst others) could get the impression CRT are an organisation to be feared? ....

 

Feared? No. To be wary of? Certainly.

 

As for the Big Brother aspect – he IS watching – as patrol records demonstrate. My view on that is so what? The queries raised in this thread, really suggest only that he should watch rather more closely and record that more accurately/usefully.

Edited by NigelMoore
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There seems to a point about the nature of a computer database not fully grasped by one or two posters in this thread . The data in the database is a mass of incomprehensible (to the untrained person) information.

 

To extract the information in a (hopefully) meaningful manner, a report has to be designed and produced. The reports which have been produced and posted in this thread do not, and cannot represent the full extent of the data in the database, so it is not possible to deduce from those images that the database is 'not fit for purpose'.

 

The best one can achieve is to say that the specification of the report used to pluck information from the database is not fit for purpose.

 

MtB

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There you go yet again, bending it to suit your view. For the collection of data to be used in the manner to which CRT wish, it should be collected correctly and efficiently.

 

Yes, that is an interesting point.

 

Do you have any solutions to offer?

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This thread is making me a tad cross.

 

Does anyone actually think that C&RT want to railroad the enjoyment of the majority who abide by the rules? Of course they don't. They only want to focus on the handful that blatantly take the piss.

 

No apologies for getting straight to the point but this is scaremongering of the highest order. GPS tracking x 34,000 boats or nailing yourself to a bridge hole & having your photo taken to prove where you have been. Dont be daft!

 

I think that some folks should actually get out on their botas & forget their Lappies & Phones for a bit.................. A newbie to this site, reading this thread, would be looking for a rafter to swing about from.

 

Norma & Bert can & should rest easy on their boat assuming they do not take the piss & avoid a level of arrogance toward C&RT that would wind the Pope up!

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This thread is making me a tad cross.

 

Does anyone actually think that C&RT want to railroad the enjoyment of the majority who abide by the rules? Of course they don't. They only want to focus on the handful that blatantly take the piss.

 

No apologies for getting straight to the point but this is scaremongering of the highest order. GPS tracking x 34,000 boats or nailing yourself to a bridge hole & having your photo taken to prove where you have been. Dont be daft!

 

I think that some folks should actually get out on their botas & forget their Lappies & Phones for a bit.................. A newbie to this site, reading this thread, would be looking for a rafter to swing about from.

 

Norma & Bert can & should rest easy on their boat assuming they do not take the piss & avoid a level of arrogance toward C&RT that would wind the Pope up!

As it happens Tony Dunkley has been boating in a way most of us would be envious of for around 50 years and all I know of him and his boats indicates he is an asset to the canals.

 

Why is it there is an assumption by people like you that anyone who falls foul of BW/CRT's arbitrary and inconsistent wrath is that lazy and meaningless label 'a piss taker'. ( I know it's difficult to think for yourself but do try ).

 

The onus is on CRT as a powerful and broadly unaccountable body to behave impeccably and impartially and it is the duty of the courts to ensure fairness.

 

If examination of procedures and behaviours in social media helps to promote such probity of can only be a good thing and I suggest it is you that needs to get out to your boat and leave intelligent debate to those with something interesting to add - unlike your vacuous post.

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This thread is making me a tad cross.

 

Does anyone actually think that C&RT want to railroad the enjoyment of the majority who abide by the rules? Of course they don't. They only want to focus on the handful that blatantly take the piss.

 

No apologies for getting straight to the point but this is scaremongering of the highest order. GPS tracking x 34,000 boats or nailing yourself to a bridge hole & having your photo taken to prove where you have been. Dont be daft!

 

I think that some folks should actually get out on their botas & forget their Lappies & Phones for a bit.................. A newbie to this site, reading this thread, would be looking for a rafter to swing about from.

 

Norma & Bert can & should rest easy on their boat assuming they do not take the piss & avoid a level of arrogance toward C&RT that would wind the Pope up!

 

I'm glad someone has taken the time to post a thoroughly sensible overarching post, and for that its worthy of a greenie from me. Do I keep a log? Yes. Do I need to? No. Is it burdonsome to update, or relies on technology, or records my every track? No. Does it, do I need to log in such detail or robustness? No. I suggest if you now fear CRT due to this case, or now feel you need to log via GPS tracking your moves, that your perception of the balance of freedoms which living on a canal brings, vs the necessary role of the navigation authority to generally uphold the various laws which surround running waterways is distorted too much, and you might be better off doing something else. Or more pragmatically, you could await the outcome of this interesting case once all the evidence is presented in a proper way and put in the public domain.

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It seems to me that what you are saying is that the best (only?) strategy for a boater in this situation is to take CRT to court immediately the licence is removed rather than defending the court case that follows a Section 8 on a liveaboard boat.

 

If so, how does this procedure 'work'; what is the process?

 

That is what I am saying. It is what the judge in Mayers said also.

 

The law requires that a person with an actionable case should prosecute that case with some expedient dispatch. If having your licence removed entails your committing the crime of being on the waterway without lawful authority, then it is incumbent upon you – if you believe that the removal of the licence was itself illegal – to apply to the court for what they call “Declaratory Relief”.

 

You could alternatively challenge the authority’s decision by way of Judicial Review. Going that route, you have a strict 3 month deadline from the time you learn of the decision objected to. The application will be considered by the Administrative Division of the High Court.

 

I appreciate [as does the authority] that few will understand this to be the situation, which is why even those with an arguable case tend to think that they need to wait for the authority to make the first move. There is too much understandable ignorance amongst boaters, and lack of knowledge of required responses, and hopefully discussions on this Forum are a means of redressing that dangerous imbalance.

 

The other factor of course, is that even with the requisite knowledge, boaters may well fear the process itself. They should not. You would, of course, only pursue this route if very confident that the point of law applying is firmly in your favour – but your home and property are being placed at risk anyway, once your “lawful authority” has been retracted &/or refused. If uncertain of the strength of your position, your only alternative is to either comply with what they ask or remove your boat from the waterway.

 

Information on how to apply for Judicial Review is available from the court website –

 

http://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/rcj-rolls-building/administrative-court/applying-for-judicial-review

 

The useful link they provide is to this document –

 

http://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/courts/administrative-court/applying-for-judicial-review.pdf

 

It costs only £60 in court fee, with a further £215 if permission is granted. If you are receipt of certain benefits, you are entitled to claim “Fee Remission”.

 

There are two things in favour of Tony Dunkley which did not apply to Mayers:

 

1) He was still within time to apply for Judicial Review from the time his renewal application was refused to the issue of the s.8, and

2) He has since removed [i believe] the boat from the relevant “river waterway” while awaiting trial.

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As it happens Tony Dunkley has been boating in a way most of us would be envious of for around 50 years and all I know of him and his boats indicates he is an asset to the canals.

 

Why is it there is an assumption by people like you that anyone who falls foul of BW/CRT's arbitrary and inconsistent wrath is that lazy and meaningless label 'a piss taker'. ( I know it's difficult to think for yourself but do try ).

 

The onus is on CRT as a powerful and broadly unaccountable body to behave impeccably and impartially and it is the duty of the courts to ensure fairness.

 

If examination of procedures and behaviours in social media helps to promote such probity of can only be a good thing and I suggest it is you that needs to get out to your boat and leave intelligent debate to those with something interesting to add - unlike your vacuous post.

 

If you wish I could expand on the 'piss taker' phrase & dress it up all nice & perhaps score a few more scrabble points?

 

Intelligent debate? No, scaremongering to the extreme more like.

 

Examination of procedures & behaviours in Social media...... Pleassssse, let me go back to 1984 now!

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The boat logging report.

 

Missing data:

 

time of sighting should be included, it is perfectly possible to be logged twice or more when cruising.

Long/Lat of sighting

Accuracy of GPS at the time of sighting

 

The base location recorded by the GPS unit has been reverse geolocated (translated) into a position (location code) at some point in the processing. The consequence is that CaRT have, de facto, defined place., and as a consequence how far a boat must move to be in a different place.

 

GPS can be quite inaccurate in situations with overhanging trees or buildings close by. Sometimes these inaccuracies can be hundreds of metres. The lack of accuracy data is important.

 

It should be noted as regards home mooring that in the financial report the key of the home mooring has been included as well as the location code, whereas in the boat movements report only the location code has been included. This would indicate, but not prove, that the home location code was added during the boat logging data upload process. Hence it's historic accuracy in this report.

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There seems to a point about the nature of a computer database not fully grasped by one or two posters in this thread . The data in the database is a mass of incomprehensible (to the untrained person) information.

 

To extract the information in a (hopefully) meaningful manner, a report has to be designed and produced. The reports which have been produced and posted in this thread do not, and cannot represent the full extent of the data in the database, so it is not possible to deduce from those images that the database is 'not fit for purpose'.

 

The best one can achieve is to say that the specification of the report used to pluck information from the database is not fit for purpose.

 

MtB

 

Well said, Mike!

Having read through a lot of this thread I get the impression that a few people are looking at what is recorded, realising that it doesn't suit their requirements and therefore immediately rubbishing it. Take that "attitude" to Court and it will very quickly be ignored.

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They do indeed help.

 

They help, because they show that two of the central accuasations about the logging system are not factually accurate.

 

1) That the home mooring is overwritten each lime it changes - The logs show that the home mooring changes with each sighting, and we can reasonably conclude that the underlying data is correct, but that the other print out isn't using the dated nature of the Home moorintg field in its join.

2) That "the system" replicates each sighting until the boat is seen again. - It may be that people interpretting the reports make assumptions (and certainly the report indicates nothing about "non-sightings"), but zero evidence of the system creating extra entries.

Yes, they (the boat sighting printouts posted by Nigel Moore) do help. The Functional Location column (home mooring or CC'er) starts in 2009 with the boat as a CC'er, changes 12 Nov 2009 to a different Code ( which C&RT won't explain) then on 23 Apr 2010 changes to CC'er again. On 30 June 2011 it changes to a home mooring at Holme Lock. On 1 Feb 2012 it changes to MAC before finally changing to a home mooring at Barton-in-Fabis on 8 May 2012. If you now look at the 19 line X 11 column printout ( for the same boat from 2003 to 2014) it tells a completely different story about that boat's home mooring. So there are two printouts from C&RT, both produced at the same time as evidence to be used in Court, and contradicting each other. At the very least, one of them has to be wrong.

Perhaps you failed to notice the discrepancies because you were too busy "interpretting" rather than reading.

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The boat logging report.

 

Missing data:

 

time of sighting should be included, it is perfectly possible to be logged twice or more when cruising.

Long/Lat of sighting

Accuracy of GPS at the time of sighting

 

The base location recorded by the GPS unit has been reverse geolocated (translated) into a position (location code) at some point in the processing. The consequence is that CaRT have, de facto, defined place., and as a consequence how far a boat must move to be in a different place.

 

GPS can be quite inaccurate in situations with overhanging trees or buildings close by. Sometimes these inaccuracies can be hundreds of metres. The lack of accuracy data is important.

 

It should be noted as regards home mooring that in the financial report the key of the home mooring has been included as well as the location code, whereas in the boat movements report only the location code has been included. This would indicate, but not prove, that the home location code was added during the boat logging data upload process. Hence it's historic accuracy in this report.

I would doubt that an accuracy of +- 100 metres would help in a cliam to have been bona fide cruising!

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If you wish I could expand on the 'piss taker' phrase & dress it up all nice & perhaps score a few more scrabble points?

 

Intelligent debate? No, scaremongering to the extreme more like.

 

Examination of procedures & behaviours in Social media...... Pleassssse, let me go back to 1984 now!

 

You wouldn't score any scrabble points but you might come across as an intelligent human being who's given some thought to the issues.

 

As for scaremongering.... it will be your assertion that Tony Dunkley and Geoff Meyer's problems are simply figments of our collective imagination? (Sorry I forgot they are 'piss takers' and, as such, have no rights at all - your perceptive analysis has me in awe)

 

If you don't understand social media perhaps you should avoid it in future, for your own well being.

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Take that "attitude" to Court and it will very quickly be ignored.

 

True [attitude counts for a lot], and for court purposes the information is only potentially relevant anyway.

 

The Claim is brought on the basis that there is no licence for the boat to be on the waterway, so should be removed.

 

The reason for revocation of the licence was given as failure to abide by the relevant T&C’s of the licence respecting mooring/cruising. The first question to address therefore, is whether that revocation was valid, given that the licence was granted under s.17(3)( c )(i)?

 

It is immaterial, in other words [on one argument], whether he complied with the T&C’s or not. Reasons for legitimately revoking/refusing a licence are limited to those statutorily provided. IF the licence was granted under s.17(3)( c )(ii), then the evidence for breaching the 14 day rule becomes relevant – but ONLY then.

 

In the instant case, the records don’t help CaRT much either. One of the legal letters acknowledging that he moved after 14 days, moored elsewhere for a few days and returned again, claimed that this was not acceptable under the Terms of his licence, because it was not “cruising” as they required – even for those with a home mooring.

 

I may easily have missed it [not really having looked], but it didn’t appear to me that the record was sufficiently detailed to show even that pattern. What will matter will be whatever might be agreed as common ground between the parties.

 

For CaRT’s purposes, they might just as well agree that he moved as per that letter, making the claim, as in that letter, that this was insufficient to qualify under the terms of his licence. I don’t believe there would be any dispute from Tony over such a pattern of use, and it would keep the matter simpler while obviating any need for these records.

 

They would also, of course, still have to justify imposing a non-statutory condition upon licence issue.

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The question of whether the boat logging system is fit for purpose is a composite of many parts.

 

Datalogging integrity, Data upload protocols integrity, database integrity, and report integrity.

 

Overarching those technical points are the periodicity of sightings, granularity of sightings (what physical area is considered the same place) and what level of those 2 items is considered acceptable by the boating public and the courts.

 

Add to that the need to audit the system to ensure that no-one from either side is lying or manipulating data.

 

If all of those points are satisfied then the system should be considered fit for purpose. However it's purpose is nothing more that to provide a factual basis regarding the sightings of boats. It has nothing to do with whether the are there legally, that is for human judgement.

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You wouldn't score any scrabble points but you might come across as an intelligent human being who's given some thought to the issues.

 

As for scaremongering.... it will be your assertion that Tony Dunkley and Geoff Meyer's problems are simply figments of our collective imagination? (Sorry I forgot they are 'piss takers' and, as such, have no rights at all - your perceptive analysis has me in awe)

 

If you don't understand social media perhaps you should avoid it in future, for your own well being.

 

It appears our opinions & the way we express them are polarised.

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The question of whether the boat logging system is fit for purpose is a composite of many parts.

 

Datalogging integrity, Data upload protocols integrity, database integrity, and report integrity.

 

Overarching those technical points are the periodicity of sightings, granularity of sightings (what physical area is considered the same place) and what level of those 2 items is considered acceptable by the boating public and the courts.

 

Add to that the need to audit the system to ensure that no-one from either side is lying or manipulating data.

 

If all of those points are satisfied then the system should be considered fit for purpose.

 

This is exactly right.

 

What we cannot do though is look at a report made up of data picked from the system, and rely on it to prove the underlying system is not fit for purpose. This seems to be Mr Dunkley's intention.

 

MtB

Edited by Mike the Boilerman
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This is exactly right.

 

What we cannot do though is look at a report made up of data picked from the system, and rely on it to prove the underlying system is not fit for purpose. This seems to be Mr Dunkley's intention.

 

MtB

 

The reports are an integral part of the system. If they are inaccurate for whatever reason then the system is not fit for purpose. Think of a chain with a broken link, it is not a good chain.

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