Welcome comments
WE WELCOME your comments, good and bad, writes Damian Kemp, Boating Communications Manager at Canal & River Trust.
I want to respond to your article 'Get Freeman!' (12 November) which frankly gives a strange view of a straightforward set of circumstances.
Standard procedures
Our standard procedures see us monitor all sightings of boats across the country. Something we do as unobtrusively as possible on a daily basis. If our records don't appear to match the declaration regarding the home mooring for a particular boat, we contact the boater for clarification. We may also contact a marina, which is legal through the Data Protection Act S.35(2). This is all we have done in this case.
To state that we are attempting to 'drive him (Mr Freeman) from the waterways' is simply untrue.
To misrepresent our actions is one thing. To then use them to infer we would target someone in this way because they may have been critical of the Trust, is nonsense.
This brings another recent article to mind. 'CaRT Facebook censorship criticism' (15th November) makes the claim that our staff have deleted messages from our social media site. Again, this is not true.
As someone pointed out on the Facebook thread, comments can drop off and come back—this is due to technical factors from the host of the site, in this case Facebook. If comments are derogatory, as these apparently were, it is possible that they get automatically filtered out.
We, presumably like narrowboatworld.com and other people operating online, have quite clear guidelines.
We have checked the filter however and there aren't any comments that have been blocked.
No problem
We have no problem at all with criticism, debate and complaint. The Canal & River Trust has more ways than ever before for people to get their views heard. Of course it is always better if criticism is constructive and truthful as this helps us improve the services we provide and the decisions we take.
We don't expect everyone to agree all the time, but that's life!