Not enough press coverage of the BW property 'sell-off'

A day on from yesterday's BBC Politics Show video report (about the planned Treasury sell-off of British Waterways' property endowment), I'm surprised by the lack of press coverage.  Google News lists only the Press Association story:

Waterways resist sell-off plans

... followed by a quick 'amen to that' from the British Marine Federation:

BMF urges government rethink on sale of BW assets.

My new bestest friend Narrowboat World has combined the two stories above into Brown wants BW's property, and tailed it with an excerpt from Allen Richard's recent piece on the subject:

BW has been starving the waterways of maintenance to feed its ambition of self sufficiency.

It gambled that we would not notice the slow decline. It gambled that by 'stealing' £30m of maintenance money each year to provide equity for its risky regeneration schemes (joint ventures) and other commercial undertakings it would be in a position of being largely independent of government funding (and probably government influence as well!).

As BWs' loss of almost £100m last year and its forecast of further massive losses this year shows, it has all gone horribly wrong.

I can't find the original Allen Richards story, so can't link to it here, sorry   Allen says his full story is here. 

I'm surprised no-one tacked on last weekend's Caldon Canal breach to the story, so I'll do it here.   The press argument is about where the money's coming from, but the breach highlights where it's going.  In this case - literally - down the drain.

[An excellent photo, courtesy of the BW press office, thanks!]

 

Comments

[Andrew Denny]

Iain,

I've got another post about the breach coming up shortly - mentioning exactly your point about the depth of the mud, etc.

[iain smith]

the picture of the breach is very good.showing as it does the bank makeup ,basically it seems earth,it also shows how shallow the canal is.How much of that mud do you suppose is there to waterproof the canal and how much potential dredging?

As for the program on the property sell off i was very disappointing in that it showed nothing of what was potentially going to be sold off,more a pretty film about the canals.

[Heather]

Or could be that Gordon Brown(nose) wants it for the Olympic site instead? Would come as no surprise that he should steal from Peter to pay Paul & even then it's never enough...

H

[Martin Clark]

It could be that the reason for so little press coverage is because it is a non-story. The programme makers have simply run with an old story.

I don't think a sell-off is any more (or less) likely this week than it was last week. Nothing has actually been said to make this newsworthy. The only newsworthy thing from our point of view is that this was the subject of a Politics Show item.

[Allan]

If I may be permitted to add a second comment with regard to the Caldon breach - I suspect this will be "a breach too far" and boaters will begin to ask if the breaches and leaks causing unscheduled stoppages this year were due to BW's under funding of the system in previous years.

It stands to reason that you are going to get more asset failures (as BW calls them) if you skimp on maintenance. However, a confidential report to BW's board blames everything else but underfunding.

[Allan]

The reason there is so little press coverage is that BW have issued a press release which contradicts what the chair, Tony Hales, said on the program!

The quote at the bottom of the Narrowboatworld article comes from -

http://www.narrowboatworld.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=932:better-shape&catid=19:features&Itemid=27

Also, if anyone wants to know where over £200m that should have been used to maintain the system went then read this -

http://www.narrowboatworld.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1070:guts&catid=30:news-flash&Itemid=38

Regards

Allan