New laws could see the end of boaters living on English and Welsh canals according to the National Bargee Travellers Association (NBTA).
The NBTA is raising the alarm as Canal & River Trust (CRT) announces a new review of boat licensing that could see the end of the itinerant boating community.
The CRT is pressing for changes in the law to address what it terms the ‘problem’ of boat dwellers without home moorings.
The CRT states that this community has ‘created challenges’ for the Trust both from ‘an operational, financial and reputational perspective’.
An independently led commission has been appointed by the CRT to review a future legislative framework for how boats on its waterways are licensed.
Legislative reform
The commission will ‘identify and evaluate alternative models for how to regulate the use of the canal network for boating that reflects the changes to its use over the past 30 years and the likely range of future uses’.
“If CRT is successful in lobbying government for the kinds of legislative reform that it clearly seeks, thousands of boaters – including the large numbers of pensioners, families and people with disabilities who live on boats – will be made homeless and isolated from their community, their way of life and the waterways on which they’ve lived for years, decades or their whole lives,” said an NBTA spokesperson.
However, the CRT states that ‘a significant and growing number of those boats licensed as a continuous cruiser cannot reasonably be said to be genuinely navigating throughout their licence period and, instead, remain in one relatively small part of the network for most if not all of the time, to live and work in that area without obtaining a home mooring’.
The CRT also refers to the increasing number of boats on the network over the last 30 years, however the NBTA believes the total number of continuous cruisers stands at less than 7000 boats across the 2000 mile CRT network.
