Today was the British Waterways Annual Meeting.
The morning was a fairly standard BW AGM: here’s what we’ve done over the last year, times are tough but we are committed, our staff are great, we’ve reduced our headcount over the last few years, etc. You know the sort of thing. It was presented well, though most people - or, at least, those of us who ask questions at AGMs - really just wanted to ask about bollards.
Anyway, “times are tough” actually means “we need to find £29m from somewhere, fast”. So the afternoon session was a full-on panel debate called “Waterways for the 21st Century”, in which panellists presented their ideas on the future for the waterways,
The four panellists were John Gummer, former Conservative Environment Secretary and head of their Quality of Life Commission; John Edmonds, former chairman of the GMB, director of the Environment Agency, and chairman of the Inland Waterways Advisory Council; Carole Souter, chief executive of the Heritage Lottery Fund and former English Heritage director; and Richard Fairhurst, some bloke what writes a blog and stuff.
Eek.
I don’t mind admitting I was something verging on terrified. A monthly pontificate from the (admittedly messy) comfort of the editor’s chair is one thing. Telling an entire audience of people, half of whom have been going there doing that and getting the T-shirts for more years than I’ve been alive, exactly what they should be doing to sort out a 240-year old, 2,200-mile heritage asset… is another thing entirely.
It went ok, I think. I find speaking so much more difficult without slides: I’m not really confident in the spoken word, so I like to be able to embed the jokes and the surprises in the slides. But though I was worried I garbled it a bit, people afterwards had understood exactly what I was getting at, which is the point.
So what was that point? I’ll summarise. The £29m isn’t going to come from Government. It should, but it won’t. Government is too busy pissing away money - on flying things in Iraq and Afghanistan/bailing out dumbfuck bankers/enriching PFI firms - to have extra cash left over for the waterways. I didn’t actually say it in quite those words; maybe I should have done. (At the end of the debate Tony Hales, BW chairman, referred to our seating on the podium with “On the left, John Edmonds - that’s appropriate - and Carole Souter, and then on the right” - much laughter - “John Gummer”… at which point JG turned to me and said “And on the extreme right…” to more laughter still. Heh. As if.)
And it isn’t going to come from commercial activities, not solely. This last fortnight has surely proved that. Property was the one BW venture that really paid, but no more.
So how do you fill a £29m funding gap? Well, if you treat it as a resource gap, then I think you can do a National Trust.
The National Trust gets 2.3m volunteer hours (count ’em) every year. According to the ancient and venerated science of Barrellonomics which I learned in my Canal Boat days (i.e. how to prove a waterway-political point by multiplying one arbitrary number by another), if all your volunteers are unskilled - i.e. minimum wage equivalent - that’s worth £13.3m. Almost half the shortfall. If you assume some of your volunteers are skilled people doing administrative, engineering and creative stuff, rather than just picking litter, you’re actually getting a lot nearer to that £29m.
It works because so many waterway people are volunteers to begin with. It works because it is, finally, the holy grail of “how do you get walkers/cyclists/whatever to contribute to the waterways?”. It works because others do it: National Parks, preserved railways, Sustrans, UK Athletics, the National Trust. It works because there are already volunteer-run waterways.
As a wise man once said, “it’s a long shot… but it might just work”.
I’d been thinking this was going to be what I’d say for a couple of weeks. This weekend, I was a bit anxious that it would just be me going off on one (wouldn’t be the first time). Then I stumbled across a Canal World thread saying pretty much the same thing. Then A.N. Other waterway journalist independently e-mailed me suggesting WW discusses the idea. And then, today, people started to inch towards it in the morning Q&As, and I had a long chat with BW’s National Volunteering Manager over lunch.
But the really interesting thing was that all four panellists were roughly coalescing around the same core - that of widening public involvement. We weren’t all saying the same thing by any means: Carole Souter’s comments were probably closest to mine, and even then there was a difference in that she thought waterway volunteer involvement didn’t have to be marshalled through BW. (I do see what she means, but that would just be expanding the existing, “additional” voluntary work rather than incorporating volunteers into BW’s core work; and you need an organisation with national reach to really get the 2.3m volunteer hours.)
I didn’t expect the assembled BW directors to instantly say “hey, why didn’t we think of that?”. Of course not. What I was most concerned about was the reaction from other waterway users. Would they say “gah, we give enough time/money/blood/sweat/tears to the waterways anyway, and you think we should pay more”? Would they say “no chance, we’re not working with that lot of bollard-installing scrots?”. Actually, no - or at least not the ones that spoke to me; by and large they agreed.
So will anyone run with it? I’ll think about that when I’ve had some sleep.
