Richard at Leicester - Least friendly canal city

Least friendly canal city

11. Leicester is the least canal friendly city there is—there are no facilities, limited moorings, nowhere safe to stay. Boaters make an extra effort to go through the city all in one go.

What can CaRT do to improve the situation?

This is where our waterway partnerships come in, they are all about working with local authorities and other local organisations to develop our make things better. It needs more of an effort from boaters, the local IWA are pushing for these things but they need more members.

I'm a boater and a member of both the IWA and the local Civic society. Castle Gardens is a fantastic mooring as you have the whole park to yourself at night but there's no waterpoint.

The City Mayor is a keen boater and there is a city waterway strategy but more needs to happen, it needs more pressure. I started a campaign to have another mooring down from Castle Gardens but no-one grasps the nettle, I brought it up at the waterway strategy meeting and the Mayor passed it onto CaRT and it goes round in circles. People need to come together.

It does seem that we need to try and do more. There are no blank cheques but we need to look at inexpensive ways of doing some of these things. Let's agree that we should try and find some ‘footholds' we can deliver to move things forward. The key is that we've got to make it relevant and convince the city that this is important. We need to develop our evidence that shows how the waterway will benefit communities and we're working on that.

SM: The local Partnership is focussing on moorings on the Soar. We may not own the land but our experience elsewhere has shown that, working with the partnership, we can make relationships with these organisations. It's not going to happen overnight but it's not been forgotten about.

As well as a lack of facilities North Lock, just outside, has been out for five years.

DF: North Lock is on the list to be done this winter.

Help roving traders

12. Can CaRT help the roving trader? I have 35 weeks a year to trade but I'm told I can only stay two days at a time so I'm travelling longer than I'm trading.

I think—and from conversations I have had with traders—we do a lot to help, but are we going to give you freedom to stay on moorings longer than we do anyone else? I know we've compromised in a few places to give traders more time without inconveniencing other boaters but we need to strike a balance so we're being fair and giving everyone opportunity to use the space. There are often other visitor moorings available for longer than 48 hours that may not be prime moorings but are still quite accessible.

The problem is that I can't put signs up showing people where I am except for immediately outside my boat and I don't need it there.

That might be something we can look that. Roving traders bring an added life to the water so we want to work with you to support you but we do need to balance it with the needs of other boaters. I don't want one rule for one group and another for everyone else.

Interactive guides

13. The interactive guides you've now got are horrible. The previous PDFs could be printed and were fine but the interactive ones are rubbish. I don't know why you thought they needed updating.

That's not the first time I've heard that actually and we need to fix it. I think we may benefit by bringing a boating group together to look at it so they can be made better for your use. We've also done a digital appraisal with some website advisors and you'll be pleased to know that has also pointed out that the maps/interactive guides need improving. I can't promise how quickly we can fix it but we'll certainly look at it.

Could you cooperate with Canalplan instead of reinventing the wheel?

I agree with the sentiment and I'm all for making our raw information available for others to turn into useful maps, guides or information but we have to be careful that we don't favour one supplier over another as we're so powerful in the market. But that shouldn't be an obstacle to finding the right way to helping people get the best possible information.

Linear moorings

14. You have a policy of taking away one linear mooring for every ten berths created in new marinas. I moor on the Coventry Canal and six boats have gone in the last six months and they're replaced by people not paying and it's not fair. Are you going to keep this policy, do you want us all in marinas?

This is a long standing formula that goes back to around 2005. At that time there was a real shortage of berths available so we, with the industry, felt we needed to do something to generate interest in creating marinas. A New Marinas Unit was formed and one thing they had to get across to potential developers was that they weren't going to be in competition with our online moorings. So we agreed to remove 1 for every 10 marina berths provided. We still provide over 3,000 long term moorings.

You take them away from the wrong place.

We are reviewing our overall approach to online moorings and I'm awaiting findings on that as we need to decide on the best overall balance of moorings alternatives for customers. We have a real mix of locations where we offer long term moorings that has grown up over time rather than a clear plan, and it doesn't really make sense to customers so we need to look at it overall. I hope you can appreciate that we've often taken berths out where we have vacancies as it's the easiest way of doing it rather than displace people from their mooring.