B W The rights and wrongs?

Phoenix_V · May 16, 2005

Nice strong diesel engines can break down as well and, as I can witness, brass props can fall off! A narrowboat can be a bottomless pit when it comes to money but don't let that put you off. If you love the canals - in spite of the rubbish that can collect in them - and really want a narrowboat, then work to achieve your ambition. I'm sure you'll be rewarded in more ways than you can count (unlike the money you'll spend).

Welcome to the forum - it's good to know that there are young people out there who will replace us old 'uns.

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Iv got my eye on a tradional 72 ft narrow boat my dad has a share in (an original made in the 1930's i think) Bargus its called the lister HA3 in that will plow through anything(apart from bed springs!). Id love to restore that back to orginal with boaters cabin when im older!

Phoenix_V · May 16, 2005

Hi Phoenix, and welcome.

From where you are sitting the situation must seem very unjust but you must understand that the situation regarding liability and other issues can be very different with boats compared to many other aspects of life.

When we venture out to sea, on rivers, or onto other waterways we are very largely responsible for ourselves and our property, we can't reasonably hold others responsible for the waters that we use, if individuals or authorities were made fully responsible, that in itself would make for a nightmare situation.

The risks would not be calculable and therefore they would be un-insurable, the logical outcome would be the grotesque escalation of costs to all concerned, the major part would fall on us, the users of the waterways to such a level that many of us would be effectively excluded from using our boats as we would like to do.

Tough as it is we must accept the historical concept of "The captain is responsible for his ship".

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Yeh I a letter saying they would try and improve MY area would be nice though, instead of computer generated crap!

Edited May 16, 2005 by Phoenix_V

gaggle · May 17, 2005

Yeah, id rather BW to NTrust any day!

- Our local wood had just been bought by Natatinal Trust about a year ago. and there moto seams to be "Up with bluebells, down with fun"

GRRRRRrrrr, Stupid people!!

Daniel

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personally i dont think you will ever meet a finer bunch of hard working people than the ones at british waterways.they work there fingers to the bones and all that they get in return is boney fingers. they never falter in there efforts and i for one would like to thank all of them,especially the staff at the north west office. the ones that give the moorings out are a particulary hard working crowd and are the salt of the earth,as a matter of fact i will send a letter to there head office singing praise about them.i would encourage others to do the same.

yes i need moorings but that has nothing to do with anything

Edited May 17, 2005 by gaggle

Chris Hurst · September 8, 2005

i recently had to rescue a guy in Gunthorpe lock who fell off his dutch barge,after i got him safe and his boat secure to the lock i climbed up the steps away from his boat and when i reched the top i was met with a BW"suit" who never even said well done he just stood there blank faced "oh id rather be having a good shit than stood here face" he never even spoke to me i returned to my boat at the other side of the lock and the lock keeper said to me thanks thats all i need my boss watching all this BW get real we pay your wages talk to us we are real people not problems

Carrie · September 8, 2005

I'm sure the individual people working for BW are great. After all, that's a really pleasant job for the most part, I reckon - well, the outdoors stuff. But as a profit-seeking business, and let's not lose sight of that, it is no different from any other: putting money before people, squeezing the maximum in return for the minimum and turning a traditional lifestyle into a money-spinner at the expense of the traditional. I don't believe one decision is made by BW that does not, in some way, profit BW.

gaggle · September 9, 2005

i seen a bw worker at locks on the rufford branch last sunday,the sun was absolutely scorching down and there was not a breath of wind,i do not know the tempertures that day but believe me it was hot.

the man was there to assist people at the locks and although he was not attending to a boat when i approached him he was dripping sweat,he had no where to shelter out of the sun except to climb in his vehicle and no doubt he would cook in that.

no canteen handy for any sort of refreshment,if he had brought a cold liquid refreshment with him it would no doubt have been lukewarm at this point.

i did not envy him doing an eight hour shift.

**DHutch** · September 9, 2005

Ouch, 8hours without shade, thats not good

- He ort to get that sorted, it would be to hard to put up a shelter.

But i guess its one of those things, on a good day, its the best job in the world, but on a bad day, its pritty grim.

Daniel

Nige · September 14, 2005

i seen a bw worker at locks on the rufford branch last sunday,the sun was absolutely scorching down and there was not a breath of wind,i do not know the tempertures that day but believe me it was hot.
the man was there to assist people at the locks and although he was not attending to a boat when i approached him he was dripping sweat,he had no where to shelter out of the sun except to climb in his vehicle and no doubt he would cook in that.

no canteen handy for any sort of refreshment,if he had brought a cold liquid refreshment with him it would no doubt have been lukewarm at this point.

i did not envy him doing an eight hour shift.

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That is absolutely appauling!!!

I know a lot of people love their jobs, but surely BW management should not be expecting their staff to work in such conditions ??? Adequate facilities including toilets, water and shelter are a basic employment right that ALL employers have by law GOT to provide.

I know that there is no current law that limits work in hot temperatures - only cold ones, but surely a basic tarpaulin for shade/shelter and a few thermos's of fresh water wouldn't have gone amiss - or been too difficult to provide ??

Nige

www.SupportServices · September 21, 2005

It may be BW will soon fall foul of the regulator and other organisations...

(Just a few very briefly)

1. BW intends to up the CC Licence by £1200 phased over two years while giving a £1200 discount to small business (less than £60K - not VAT reg), but has not declared any consideration or policy about how it proposes to deal with those forced off the water into social housing (ie: the substantial number of low income boaters with sole homes afloat).

2. BW has not explained any means by which it can successfully mitigate the effect of the proposed 150% increase in the Cruising fees on Tourism, Visitor’s and canal side Retailers and Support Services.

3. Similarly BW has not explained any means by which it can successfully mitigate the effect of the proposed new Higher Fees on small VAT registered businesses (eg: £15K), the Higher fees could swallow the entire profit margin.

As for BW commissioning Oxera Consulting to lead the Licence Review, in view of the quality of the published advice which appears to contain serious flaws (not just the above), some tough questions need to be asked about Oxera’s competence and whether or not they should be paid for what appears to be very amateur and inept work.

Will BW tell us how they will address these issues ?

Carrie · September 21, 2005

If BW become independent of gov subsidies, as they have said they aim to do, do they have to explain anything? Won't they be just another private company offering a service for those who wish to use it, with no say from us?

Does the regulator only monitor public offices?

And isn't BW becoming a monopoly and will therefore be answerable to the Office of Fair Trading if they raise prices unfairly?

Sorry - all these questions at once!

John Orentas · September 21, 2005

Who said anything about a regulator, the problem is there isn't one. BW are not answerable to anyone in any real way. They are in a monopoly position with no shareholders to answer to and with a captive customer base. They are allowed to embark on speculative property development, setting up a chain of pubs and restaurants and they are allowed to be marina operators in competition with their own existing customers. I commercial terms they get away with murder.

It is about time there was a regulator.

fuzzyduck · September 23, 2005

Here's a wrong that really gets up my nose.

online licencing on waterscape.com is still down! its been down for months, when I first got Fuzzy I was able to purchase a licence with a few mouse clicks. now I've got to travel an hour by train and bus, walk 2 miles, buy a licence, and make the return journey. it's almost worth paying any fines I might get, IF i was caught boating without a licence. (I do not) mind you the last time I bought one, the guy selling me the licence was so laid back he let me fill in the form, and didn't check what i'd put down, so I could have got six months for the price of a week.

because Fuzzy lives on private water I'm not required to have one all the time, just when i'm using her on the canals and rivers. and i've had to cancel a trip tomorrow because I don't have time to sort out the licence.

Hence my mini "sack waterscape" Campaign.

Richard Fairhurst · September 24, 2005

I can answer this one fairly openly because I don't work for Waterscape or BW any more.

Earlier this year, when I did work for Waterscape, we threw out the old site and started again from scratch. Lots of reasons, but to summarise, the original site had been developed by a third-party company which knew absolutely nothing about the waterways and (arguably) nowhere near as much as they should about building websites.

What's more, it was ridiculously expensive to run - about four times what we thought the going rate should be. Worse still, if we wanted to change anything technical on the site, we had to go back to the original company and pay them to do the work: the contract didn't give us full access to our own servers. And plenty did need changing - like the fact the maps were rubbish and the search didn't work.

So Paul (webmaster) and I asked the powers-that-be to swallow their pride, admit they'd been wrong with the first site, and allow us to rebuild it in-house. To their eternal credit, they did - very, very unusual for the public sector, which generally thinks that the only way you do IT is by spending a lot of money with a big company. The new site went live at the start of July.

There were two bits missing: the route-planner and the online licensing. For technical reasons, we couldn't just keep the old ones running on the new site (the old server was Microsoft, the new one is Linux), so we had to rewrite them, too. We figured that it would be better to have a month's outage on the licensing, rather than to hold the rest of the site up by a month and pay £10,000 for another month's expensive hosting.

The licensing should have been back up by August 10th, and indeed, our bit was done by then.

Unfortunately... all the actual issuing of licences is done on a SAP system by a third-party company, LogicaCMG. (You might be starting to see a pattern here.) They were late in doing the work required to get their computers to talk to Waterscape. They're still late. I left Waterscape just over a week ago and they were promising then that they were almost finished.

I believe that the licensing should therefore be back on Waterscape fairly shortly. Renewals will be first (which the old system could never do), new licences after that.

Incidentally, the SAP system, as implemented by LogicaCMG, is the very same one that caused the enormous backlog of licence applications last year. You might think BW isn't very good at choosing IT companies to work with. I couldn't possibly comment.

**DHutch** · September 24, 2005

There were two bits missing: the route-planner and the online licensing.
- we had to rewrite them, too.

The licensing should have been back up by August 10th,

- Unfortunately... all the actual issuing of licences is done on a SAP system by a third-party company, LogicaCMG.

- They were late in doing the work required to get their computers to talk to Waterscape.

I believe that the licensing should therefore be back on Waterscape fairly shortly. Renewals will be first (which the old system could never do), new licences after that.

Incidentally, the SAP system, as implemented by LogicaCMG, is the very same one that caused the enormous backlog of licence applications last year.

Ah well. Those pesky 3rd party IT companys!

- My dad have recently been outsoursed, so now is one of them! (acceture)

And its good that the online liesencing will be sorted soon, although we just do our renewal buy post, which is easy, espcially as we have a fixed address.

Daniel

fuzzyduck · September 25, 2005

Hey

Thanks for the reply. even if it's unofficail "I used to....."

why is it IT projects always go belly up when farmed out to a 3rd party supplier?

I work for one, and whenever they get somewhing that works they always seem to manage to mess it up.

Can i quote you elsewhere?

Liam · September 25, 2005

We figured that it would be better to have a month's outage on the licensing, rather than to hold the rest of the site up by a month and pay £10,000 for another month's expensive hosting.

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£10,000 a month???

That is some EXPENSIVE hosting !!

fender. · September 25, 2005

£10,000 a month???

That is some EXPENSIVE hosting !!

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Now we know why they want to put the licences up!

Richard Fairhurst · September 27, 2005

Sadly I think that sort of money is pretty much par for the course for the public sector. The company providing the hosting has a lot of contracts with local councils, and applies a fairly standard rate to them all...

dor · September 28, 2005

£10,000 a month???

That is some EXPENSIVE hosting !!

Sheesh!

And I thought my £200 a year for my Company's site was bad enough (www.minsups.co.uk).

Waterscape probably gets a slightly higher hit rate though !

Matthewmorton · November 1, 2005

Here is an article that was found in

Canal & Riverboat magazine, editoial, November 2002

Should British Waterways have a reguIator?

...we think so

WE THINK the time has come for a Regulator to be appointed by the Government to hold both a watching and executive brief on the activities of British Waterways and its offspring, The Waterways Trust. It's not that we don't trust either BW or TWT… but in their understandable zeal to continue or even accelerate the restoration, or rebuilding of existing navigations or even the creation of new waterways, there seems to be a growing tendency for their Management (and BW Managers now seem to be proliferating in number) to appear to many users to be taking the boater, the true user of navigations, for granted.

No doubt out view will upset if not enrage some in high places. But look at the facts. To all intents and purposes BW is a monopolistic body and for one of their senior staff to say publicly it is not so either shows an incredible naivety or an arrogance that could spell real trouble for the boater in financial terms in the not too distant future. We would suggest that executive carefully considers the Concise Oxford Dictionary's definition of a monopoly – "the exclusive possession or control of the trade in a commodity or service." That is precisely what BW is so far as canal (and many river) navigations are concerned.

The Environment Agency navigations are small fry by comparison and are never likely to carry as much financial or political clout as BW. Neither should it be forgotten that the EA came within a whisker of losing its navigations to BW; today its almost on probation with DEFRA to prove it can perform better than in the past. Or did Secretary of State DEFRA, Margaret Becket, foresee the potential hazard of having BW as a monolithic navigation authority?

We hear there are rumblings within the inner sanctums of the inland Waterways Association and the National Association of Boat Owners that there should be a Waterways Regulator. We hope those rumblings soon develop into A full blown campaign. That is something we have been suggesting for the past two years.

But what of the IWA? Our fear is that it has now been seduced by BW and is now its bedfellow. We were appalled at what can only be described as mutual backscratching at BW's annual meeting.

And for one person to claim the canals are in better shape now than 70 years ago is absolute bunkum. Seventy years ago (1932) there was substantial trade still on Brindley's grand cross; on the Grand Union (which at that time had just been widened) FMC had just built a huge warehouse in Birmingham and on the Shropshire Union long distance boats were also running.

Not Once was the suggested mooring price hike referred to. No longer can it he said the lWA is a totally detached organisation and it may not even dare to campaign for a regulator. Our question is: on whose side does the IWA stand?

If the NABO really wants a campaign subject then the Regulator is the one. And it could find many disenchanted IWA members joining its ranks.

So how can BW's excesses, perceived or actual, be brought under scrutiny? We would urge every boater to write to their MP and the Secretary of State on the need for a Regulator. We would hope that the Inland Waterways Amenity Advisory Council would publicly raise the issue of a Regulator and discuss the matter with DKFRA.

BW say they don't want to price older boaters and those on fixed incomes off the waterways. But that's what will happen. That's the price of a monopoly.

Well!!!!

By the use of this forum it looks like BW is getting everything right or are they. .

Matthewmorton · November 1, 2005

A Philosphical take on BW

BW are simply a concept with a financial structure, with property and with a boby of workers and equipment. In the past they did not exist and in the future they will again be gone. How long they exist depends on their ability to sustain their own body. The ontology of the organisation has some flaws which permiate through to their operating mechanisms. The term 'British Waterways' is nationalistic and suggests ownership by the people of Britain, their seems to be some doubt as to who 'owns' the canal system, is it the people of Britain or 'British Waterways'. How big is their sphere of influence? This depends on the dominant political paradigm and to an extent on the expectations of those involved in the debate. For my part if BW were to expand, I would like first to see an open and live debate on the constitution of BW, more than a mission statement, a constitution is legally binding and any descisions which contraveen it are revocable. Included in the constitution would be the idea of guardianship and some covenent with regard to property. I would like to see an expansion of the canal network allowing a renaisance in the freight component as well as increasing the live aboard population.

The other issue is live aboard boaters and their underutilisaion in managing the waterways. It seems to me that the best way to secure the health of the canal system is to employ boaters first.

BW are experiencing the problems associated with overactive holons.

Matt

this was found, I think it adds to the debate

Canal & Riverboat magazine, editoial, November 2002

Should British Waterways have a reguIator?

...we think so