CaRT to spend less on maintenance
THE Canal & River Trust will spend £3.9 millions less on maintaining its waterways this year, writes Allan Richards.
Next year it will spend £4.1m less and the year after £4.6m less. The figures were provided after narrowboatworld published details of its failure to respond to a request under the Freedom of information Act (CaRT fails to respond).
Hide & seek
On 15 May, narrowboatworld queried why the Trust had published its rolling three year plan in a different format to previous plans (Hide & seek!). The difference between formats meant that the only figure that could be compared between this year's plan and previous plans was total income which showed a massive drop of £58m over a three year period.
The bizarre explanation provided by CaRT was that not all of its total income was shown as total income in the latest three year plan!
However, total income is meaningless to most boaters. What counts is how much CaRT actually spends (or plans to spend) maintaining its waterways.
.... and this was not shown in its reformatted plan.
Core waterways and major works
In the past, the amount that is spent on maintenance has been divided into ‘core waterway' and ‘major works'. Major works are items of expenditure over £50,000 where central sanction is needed. ‘Core waterway', now renamed ‘waterway maintenance and repair', refers to expenditure on smaller items.
Financial projections
Long term financial projections for CaRT are documented in a report dated 28 May 2012. These are based on a British Waterways three year business plan (2011/12 - 2014/15) which is then extrapolated out to 2026/27. The report shows a planned expenditure of £64,729.000 on core waterway and £32,383,000 on major works giving a total waterways maintenance spend of £97,122,000 for this financial year (2015/16).
Partial response
However, in a partial response to the Freedom of Information request, CaRT gives the equivalent figures as £66,336,00 (core waterway) and £26,900,000 (major works). A total waterways maintenance spend of £93,236,000.
That's £3.9m less than was projected in 2012.
Worse still, the difference between 2012 projected maintenance spend and the latest plan increases. Next year (2016/17) CaRT intends to spend £4.1m less than its original projections and the year after £4.6m less.
No excuse
With the Trust bragging about its financial performance being better than expected, one would expect that they would be spending £12m more than projected on our waterways over the next three years rather than £12m less.
There is simply no excuse and the Trust has not even attempted to offer one.
Then again, perhaps they thought they could get away with it because nobody would query why they changed the format of the plan...
[CaRT has still not fully responded to the Freedom of Information request mentioned in this article. They ‘forgot' to provide information relating to last financial year (2013/14) which would allow performance against their previous plan to be evaluated. However, they say that this information will be made available early this week.]