BW senior directors should go

THE Canal & River Trust's transition trustees are asking for reasons for sacking British Waterway's chief executive and other executive directors.

Peter Underwood, the boater behind the Facebook and Twitter inspired Boaters Manifesto has posted on its Facebook page ‘Trustees are asking for reasons—other than pay and perks—we feel Evans and Co should go'.

Meeting

The surprise posting follows an agreement by the trustees to meet with a delegation of boaters on the 20th December. It is understood that the trustees' request relates to one of the key points of the manifesto which states ‘Boaters have lost faith in the most senior management of British Waterways and believe that the government should accept the cost of making them redundant to give the Canal and River Trust a fresh start'.

Government to pay

This theme is expanded later in the document:

‘Boaters and many others have completely lost faith in the most senior levels of British Waterways' management in recent years, and almost all those who contributed to this manifesto want to see the current directors removed before the Canal & River Trust begins to run the system. It is our belief that government should bear the cost of making these people redundant as the new charitable role is essentially different.

Our concern centres on the enormously expensive pay, pension and perks packages of the most senior directors and their willingness to grab bonus payments when staff are being penalised by pay rises well under the rate of inflation, and we believe that their continued presence will make it extremely difficult to create any trust among boaters in the Canal & River Trust. That is especially the case as many of the commercial ventures in which they are supposed to be experts have failed to produce promised results.

 

Boaters do not believe the Canal & River Trust should be willing and will not be able to pay such large scale remuneration, and feel that the removal of a group of directors who have little understanding of waterways or boats would do more to give the Trust a fresh start than any new logo.'

Precedent

There is, of course, a precedent for government paying to make the fat cats redundant. At British Waterways' May board meeting it was divulged that Defra had provisionally awarded British Waterways £2m to fund the redundancy costs of 100 staff (British Waterways figure) sacked in response to reduced grant.

The issue, it seems, is not who pays for them to go but justifying the departure.

Executive and Board

The other issue of course is that the most senior level of British Waterways' management is its Board. They are appointed by the Waterways Minister.

The ten strong board will simply disappear when British Waterways becomes Canal & River Trust. Indeed two Board members have gone already.

However, the Waterways Minister has appointed three members of the Board as trustees with one of them, Tony Hales, as Chairman of both British Waterways and Canal & River Trust. If the executive must go then so must these three as it is the Board who are ultimately responsible.

Reasons

Boaters have already started responding to Peter Underwood's post giving reasons for ‘Evans & Co' to go. It is gratifying to see some prominence given to issues first raised in narrowboatworld. For example, one poster simply cites Gloucester Quays in the expectation that everyone knows that appalling financial mismanagement led British Waterways to write off a £33m investment.

Another mentions the collapse of British Waterways' joint pub partnership again expecting everyone to know that British Waterways used £9m to try and prop it up by buying pubs it already half owns. Someone else mentions the Three Mills Lock which was built at a cost to the taxpayer of well over £20m to carry Olympic construction traffic but remains virtually unused.

BWML

British Waterways Marinas Ltd is cited as another example of poor financial management. What use is it owning 20 marinas and pouring money into them if it does not return profit to British Waterways?

But it's not all narrowboatworld articles. Simon Robbins, who was the first person to publicly question British Waterways' financial performance (at its 2009 annual meeting) points to his own blog which gives other reasons.

Choice

There are lots of reasons for ‘Evans & Co' to go, and no doubt others will be presented both publicly and privately. The Boaters Manifesto will be spoilt for choice! But which to chose? As someone with a vested interest, I would say they are all good reasons but none of them is the compelling reason.

To my mind, the compelling reason is all about what British Waterways under Evans/Hales set out to achieve, and how it has performed over the longer term. Here we are not talking about short term objectives or yearly targets. We are not talking about the conveyor belt of cock-up's that embrace the bollard fiasco, mooring auctions and local mooring strategy. We are not even talking about British Waterways' reverse Midas touch in financial matters. Quite simply we are talking about what British Waterways set out to do over the longer term and how it performed against objectives.

Appalling

In a nutshell, if British Waterways' directors performance against objectives over the longer term has been appalling then they should go, and government should foot the bill.

Has British Waterways' performance over the longer term been appalling? See the graph below showing the target of 'doubling' visitors, yet after all the expense, it still being the same number as it was eight years ago. A mere 3.8 millions for 2010 as admitted by British Waterway to a parliamentary committee.