Richard at Leicester - A licence

A licence

6. Most of these cyclists belong to a club, why can't they have a licence which they pay for and which includes some kind of fine if they break the rules.

Yes we can work with cycling clubs and associations but I honestly think permits are the wrong solution for a number of reasons: firstly it would discourage families who want to come and enjoy the waterways; secondly it can promote the feeling that ‘I've bought a permit I can do what I like'; and, thirdly, how do you expect me to enforce it? Many of these cyclists are only on the towpath for five minutes at a time. I don't think it would solve the problem and we would be chasing our tails trying to police something I don't have the resources to police.

I do acknowledge there is a serious problem, and we must continue to try to deal with it, mainly through education and specific physical measures where appropriate, but it will take some time.

White line

7. My local park has a white line down the middle of the paths to keep walkers and cyclists apart, could this be done on towpaths?

I'm slightly sceptical that people really pay attention to those lines and, in any case I'm not sure it would work on our towpaths, particularly where sections are narrow, as you say. If it happens in some places where it can work I'm not ruling it out, I appreciate we have to be open to trying things to try to address this.

8. Going back to London, I've complained about stuff in the water between Little Venice and Bulls Bridge but didn't get any response. It wasn't until pictures got in the local paper that you were interested.

I thank you for contacting us but I can assure you that we don't just deal with things because they are in the local paper. In most cases, where there is something in the water we are already aware of it but are not prioritising it if it isn't causing a hazard. We have to target our effort on the things that make the most difference and if something is in the way of navigation then we'll deal with it but we can't spend our time tackling everything. As you know we have lots of help from volunteers in dragging items from the canal, but I fear it will be a problem that never goes away.

Match fishing

9. You seem to be focussed on creating as many income streams as possible and you've encouraged a local angling club to use the canal for match fishing twice a week; every 20 yards on the canal which I think is over the top. You may have made a lot of money out of it but we as residents and boaters are suffering.

I don't think we will be making a lot of money out of it, though yes a tiny amount. I understand what you're saying but activities like this bring new people to the waterways who, in turn, will help to encourage others to come which will increase that level of local engagement and help to reduce problems such as anti-social behaviour.

So it's not about income it's about engagement and people having a relationship with their local waterway. Our canals are far better ecologically than they've ever been, which is a fantastic thing, so the fish-stocks aren't at risk of being damaged. Fishing does have an important role to play on the waterways and there's actually less of it taking place than there was in the past so, while we're looking to increase engagement in this way, we're not doing it over-intensively.

Volunteer recruitment

10. Please can you tell me how the recruitment of volunteers is going?

We think it's going really well. Volunteers contributed over 50,000 days last year which beat our target and we're working with more and more people every year. The range of roles is growing also. We have over 400 volunteer lock keepers and Explorers education volunteers—we have 150 and rising—but we also have more volunteers in professional functions such as planning, web development and our environment teams.As well as the added output this provides, enabling us to do more things, its also helping us to change the way we think as an organisation. If we're trying to get things done we now think how can we mobilise, recognise and respect volunteers. We've also had volunteers doing more challenging work; volunteers did a great job recently helping to repair a lock wall on the Stratford flight that we didn't have the resource to do otherwise. Waterways have a tremendous tradition of volunteering of course, every restoration over the past 50 years has been based on the effort of volunteers.

Community adoptions are the next step, where we work with established local groups so that they can organise things themselves and do things on their local waterway that are the priority for them. We've nearly 60 of those in place now. So all in all we're very positive about that progress.

The reason I asked is that I wrote in to volunteer before Christmas and I haven't heard anything since.

I'm very sorry about that. The process may have been stretched at that time but I am really sorry. Our research says that 87% of our volunteers say they're satisfied with the experience of volunteering with us so I think there is evidence that we're getting it mostly right but again I'm sorry for that. Please speak to one of the team at the end.