Boaters in Hackney have fought off a proposal for a nightly mooring fee on top of their £1,000 a year licence fee.
The Canal & River Trust (CRT), the king’s canal charity, has said that it would not go ahead with its “previously mooted” plan to impose a £25–£35 nightly surcharge for “continuous boaters” to moor at Broadway Market.
Continuous boaters have to pay a separate fee of around £1,000 a year to be allowed to stay at any given mooring on Britain’s 2,700 miles of waterways for up to a fortnight.
Colin Legge, 42, a representative of the National Bargee Travellers Association (NBTA), welcomed the “good news” of the scheme being scrapped.
“people like to imagine [that continuous boaters] can go anywhere, but in reality people have jobs [and] schools to get to”
Mr Legge, continuous boater
Mr Legge, who is a continuous boater in London, said, “people like to imagine [that continuous boaters] can go anywhere, but in reality people have jobs [and] schools to get to.”
A Freedom of Information request made by the NBTA showed that the number of boats using moorings in Camden has declined 16.5 per cent since the introduction of a mooring fee in March. Boaters used this data and coverage in national press to argue against the surcharge at Broadway Market.
The CRT had proposed the charge as a way to raise funds for its work across British waterways. While it was previously a government funded organisation, since 2012 it has operated as a charitable trust mainly reliant on income from licenses, mooring fees and donations.
Mr Legge said that a lower occupancy rate makes “people feel less safe on the towpaths” and leads to “a lot of crime”.
Sinead, a volunteer at the CRT, said that while she sympathises with the continuous boaters, the work the CRT does in making the canals “habitable and navigable” is “expensive”.
Cosmo Adair is a postgraduate journalism student at City, University of London. He writes about Haggerston and very little else.