TrueBlue
Well-known member
Don't get me wrong, I support the volunteer option, yes it makes economic sense to exploit willing, enthusiastic people with time on their hands. All I am stating is how things used be, it seems there are a diminishing amount of people (and many thousands of others that don't use the media of this forum to express their views) that remember how well things used to be run on the Thames when things were busy, don't forget there have been other serious economic slumps in history during boaters living memory, (including mine!!!!!) The four day week of the 1970s, the 1980s with over 4 million unemployed, the market crash of the 1990s and the Thames still managed to weather these storms, and still keep the family Jewels (lock Houses, dedicated staff etc) I thought we were supposed to learn from history. It would be interesting to know how budgets were once spent in previous economic decline and compare them to today.[/QUOTE]
Running a serious risk of being taken to task (again...) for probable historic inaccuracies o ), my interpretation is that when the River was managed by an organisation whose sole task was to run the Thames - The Thames Conservancy. Being a "local" enterprise it was able to focus on getting local support and its funding was local as well.
Then it got gobbled up by
Thames Water who was gobbled up by
The National Rivers Authority who was gobbled up by
The Environment Agency who was gobbled up by
DEFRA
Thus it is a very tiny part of an huge organisation with many, many layers of management and "our needs" are insignificant in the scheme of things. I'm not attacking what the local EA team are doing (per se), just pointing out that they are well down the pecking order..
I hesitate to say this, but I wonder whether the transfer to CART might not be a bad thing; it might have more scope to raise funds than EA do.
However, seeing that the BW takeover is to be hugely underfunded (getting half what they need just to keep the infrastructure running) - so perhaps not......