The long running fight to get all our canals and navigable rivers under one management got a big boost when the EA and the CRT agreed to start talking about how it could work.
Sunken boat marked by buoys on EA Great Ouse – photo courtesy Alison Smedley, IWA
According to a CRT Press Release (22.2.16) the Government’s ambition still is to transfer the EA’s responsibility for navigation of the rivers to the Trust, subject to affordability and approval by the Trust’s Board and the Minister. This will help realise the benefits of a sustainable navigation and give the public greater involvement in the running of the waterways. The Environment Agency (EA) and Canal & River Trust (CRT) have now established a joint working group to explore different options for running the 620 miles of EA-managed river navigations.
The working group will begin with an information and data gathering exercise looking at all of the EA’s navigations, including: the non-tidal River Thames; the River Wye; the non-tidal River Medway; the East Anglian navigations and Rye Harbour. The next step will be to investigate the various potential options required for such a complex move and to understand the aspirations and views of users. No decisions have yet been made on the details of a potential move, however the EA, the Trust and Defra are committed to finding a sustainable future for the EA’s river navigations and to working with the communities who use them.
The Inland Waterways Association has welcomed the announcement. It has long campaigned for the transfer of these navigations from EA to CRT, and before Christmas asked its members in constituencies with EA waterways to write to their MPs in support of the transfer. It believes that Budget reductions over recent years mean that conditions on EA navigations have deteriorated and will only get worse after the recent round of cuts.
IWA’s National Chairman, Les Etheridge, said “In the light of recent floods there has never been a better time for CRT and EA to start talking about the practicalities of how the transfer would happen. Transfer of navigation responsibility would also allow EA to concentrate on their regulatory functions of pollution and flooding.”
The Environment Agency was established in 1996 to ‘protect and improve the environment’ and has a wide range (many would say too wide a range) of responsibilities, including regulating major industry and waste, the treatment of contaminated land, water quality and resources, fisheries, inland river, estuary and harbour navigations, conservation and ecology and managing the risk of flooding from main rivers, reservoirs, estuaries and the sea.
Thanks to the CRT and the IWA for information in this report.
