Richard in the North West

THIS time Canal & River Trust Chief Executive Richard Parry was giving a questions and answers session at Burnley, covering the North West waterways:

Wigan Flight

1. (unknown) I find that the Wigan flight is in a terrible state. I have complained about this and I did receive a letter that basically stated that you have no funds to repair it. I take my disabled mother and father and when I have asked for help to go down the flight it has not been given. The help that used to be available from lock keepers is no longer available and we find it very difficult to use the locks as they are in poor repair.

We do know that it is a challenging flight of locks. We are spending money to improve the lock gates; we did work on some of them last winter and have more to do this year. We do want to have people available to support boaters who might find this flight of locks challenging. We are recruiting for seasonal staff to start as soon as possible and I am very keen on getting volunteer lock keepers wherever we can—including Wigan.

We are determined to make it as good an experience as we can, but I can't guarantee that this will happen overnight. Ultimately 21 locks will be physically demanding whatever we do.

(Nick Owen) Can I just interrupt briefly as we run hotel boat business and we go down the Wigan flight regularly. It is a long flight of locks but actually there are a lot of other places with locks in a lot worse condition. You can get down it in under 4hrs. I don't think it is as bad as people that use it occasionally think it is.

CS: We have listened to people's concerns and we have our second phase of Lock gate changes this winter. You can have a look at our consultation list on the website. So that will help, but as Richard said we have also hired seasonal staff who start shortly. We also have two volunteer lock keepers being trained up now and we are advertising for more. We know that we have people that can use it without problems and others who struggle and we do try our best to help, but don't have the staff resources to provide assisted passages.

Handcuff keys

(Unknown) The major issue is the worn handcuff keys. I'm sure that you could fix them and it wouldn't cost a lot. Having said that a lot of people are leaving paddles open and careless boaters cause a lot of problems.

CS: We have had issues in Wigan, some of this is boater error but some is deliberate letting off of water and we are working with the police to target this issue. We have on a couple of occasions locked up some areas late at night to protect the water supply. Misuse by non-boaters has also been reported to be making the handcuff keys much more difficult to use; we do know that this is a problem and are looking at it.

Reporting system

2. (Nick Owen) There isn't, that I am aware of, a mechanism where boaters can report non-emergency issues, so that we can easily see what has been reported and when. I am just wondering if there are any plans to set up an online problem reporting system?

You can do that now by emailing our enquiries@ email address. Any feedback you give is passed onto our engineering teams. I know others have suggested we develop an app to make it easy to report issues. We want to make it easier for you to help us by reporting this information to us.

Allocate funding

3. (unknown) It is pretty clear that the Leeds & Liverpool Canal is the most under-invested and under-funded canal in the country. I just wondered if you could explain how you allocate the funding and what you are going to do about this on your watch?

Factually the data that we have doesn't actually show that the L&L has had less investment in recent years; however that is the past—in the future what we have already started to do is to prioritise works based on the state of the assets regardless of where it is. This financial year the proportion of our spend in the North West (not necessarily just the Leeds & Liverpool Canal) is higher than it would be if it was just based on geographical location. That is a trend that we will see continue as we recognise that where the condition of the assets is poor we need to raise this in order to equalise things between waterways. The other thing that will change is that the money that we will have to spend will grow. In the last two years of lower grant from Government. This will change next April when we will have more money nationally (an additional £10m from Defra) that will help us to catch up with the backlog more quickly.

Urgently needs to be done

4. (Ron Atkinson) The most frustrating problem is that there is no indication of which paddles are working and which aren't. You need to know this before you go in to the lock and this is type of thing really annoys people. This can be dealt with as an experienced boater but for a hire boat this could be very dangerous. I really think that the state of the Wigan flight is horrendous and something very urgently needs to be done.

Thank you for your feedback. In terms of the overall condition of the assets, we recognise that it is not all in the state that we would ideally want it to be in, and that is why we are spending more money on it this winter. In response to your first statement about communication, your point is well made; we should communicate, where we can, to tell you what's working and what's not. This is not always easy across 2000 miles of network and sometimes we can email information out more easily than we can get out on site to put up notices. But that is our problem and we need to respond to that challenge.

Broken paddles

(unknown) Should the Lock keepers not be marking up the broken paddles?

CS: If you do find broken paddles please contact us and we will post information locally. For example today we have had a stoppage on in Wigan and staff have been out posting notices and talking to boaters so that they are aware of the situation. So please do let us know.

Not in remit

5. (unknown) This is regarding an incident at Bank Newton Flight. Contractors were putting new gates in, they were approached by a boater that asked why couldn't they fix a paddle on the lock below while they were waiting for the concrete to set? They said no it's not in our remit. Boaters get very annoyed when they see workers sitting around when they could be fixing another problem.

I appreciate this can seem frustrating—however, there is a balance to strike—when we do not have enough money or man power to fix everything we have to focus on the most essential repairs. We focus on trying to plan and organise works well so that we can get the most important things done and the most value out of our resources. If there are silly examples of people walking past a basic problem they can fix easily because we are being dogmatic then we need to change that. However there is an equal risk that if we are distracted by unplanned works then we won't fix the higher priority jobs that we have planned to do. We might fix the problem for one person but leave ten others with their problem. So we have to have discipline about how we plan and deliver our work. That's not to say that we shouldn't respond but we have to keep some focus on what the priorities are.