Troubled Waters – The Many Struggles Of The Canal And River Trust

“We’ve had quite a few water birds… Some survived and some didn’t, but it’s part of nature. Other boats have rescued deer that have fallen into the water – you have the little muntjacs here, they’re really cute... Another boater, he actually had a kingfisher fly into his boat and sit on top of his mantelpiece.

“Down in Rye House, there’s a pair of ducks that are so tiny, they move on to our boat when we’re there, and the male likes walking across our skylight so we can really see his feet…”

Christina Hemsley is talking about the wildlife on the River Lea, where she and her family are moored. Nine years ago, suffering “total burnout” from a high-level job, she decided to re-evaluate her life. She and her partner, Tom, bought a 45-foot narrowboat and set off up the Thames.

“We had no clue, which is probably why we were brave enough to set off,” she says. “She was the slowest thing ever. She kept breaking down… We spent one night duct-taped to some river reeds.

“It’s a weird thing about boat life,” Hemsley reflects. “It’s on the water, but it just grounds you differently. You can’t pass on responsibility… If your water tank is empty, you can’t procrastinate or sweet-talk it into filling up.” 

Two years later, Hemsley’s son was born. Their lifestyle made the pandemic easier, she feels. A nursery worker told her she didn’t know how lucky she was: “When so many kids are on screens all day, a kid who has this lifestyle where so much outdoors and environment is included… That’s just such a benefit.”

Next came school. Hemsley had now been cruising on the Lea for six or so years. She got in touch with the “lovely” Hertfordshire Access to Education officers. From a defined spot on the water, they helped to get her son into Hemsley’s first-choice school. She and her partner were delighted.

But the ordeal that followed left her confused and scared as well as feeling persecuted. “You can see this still gets me emotional,” she says, fighting back tears as she finishes her story.

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There are nearly 5,000 miles of navigable canals in Britain, of which around 3,000 are connected in a single system. A total of 395 parliamentary constituencies have navigations, as navigable waters are called, and 108 have restoration projects.

Inland waterways date back to Roman times, but the Industrial Revolution was behind their rise; canal boats were a safer way to transport huge quantities of freight than the poorly maintained and bumpy roads. As the routes became invaluable, so the technology improved; locks and aqueducts allowed the boats to travel over valleys and up and down hills. 

The 19th and 20th centuries saw decline, as the roads and railways became better options. But in the postwar years an unlikely transformation took place. Boat-hire companies began to make use of the canals for leisure boating, and local societies – along with the newly formed Inland Waterways Association (IWA) – reversed the flow of closures and drove through a host of restoration projects. They found an ally in Labour’s Barbara Castle, then transport minister and a narrowboater herself. Her Transport Act of 1968 made canals viable recipients for public money. 

A canal boat holiday means days spent breathing in British history and nature. The network is studded with masterpieces of civil engineering like the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct (featured in a recent Wallace and Gromit film), breathtaking lock flights and tunnels, such as the Caen Hill flight and the Standedge Tunnel, the latter a watery labyrinth running through the Pennines. And teeming around this living industrial history, a rich ecology: kingfishers, otters, dragonflies, water voles, bats and more.

The cruisers bring cash. According to figures from the IWA, the combined economic contribution of the inland boating sector and associated tourism in the UK was £7.6bn in 2022/23. The sector provides 41,166 jobs directly, with a further 295,886 in associated wider tourism.

Yet thousands of miles of ageing infrastructure needed constant maintenance and investment, with a backlog of work beginning to build up over decades of underfunding. 

In 2009, British Waterways’ government grant of £57.5m was reduced by £10m despite campaigners’ claims the grant was already insufficient. The spectre of privatisation had loomed in the 1990s and then receded, but the underfunding remained a constant. 

Robin Evans, then chief executive of British Waterways (BW), began to enjoy success in advancing a solution that looked like the best of all possible worlds. This well-regarded civil servant pushed a vision in which Britain’s inland waterways were run as a charity – while they could still receive a government grant, the system was free to monetise itself and find new revenue streams in much the same way as the National Trust. 

And so on 2 July 2012 all of British Waterways’ responsibilities and assets in England and Wales were transferred to a new charity: the Canal & River Trust (CaRT). The government would provide around £740m in a 15-year grant, with the current annual grant of £52.6m fixed but, crucially, not increasing with inflation. Any shortfall would, in theory, be made up by CaRT’s various commercial ventures, of which there could be plenty with the canals now at arm’s length from the British state. 

Critics of this scheme made a compelling argument about the comparison between CaRT and the National Trust. While the latter has commercial properties, thousands of paying members, and huge amounts of tourist revenues, CaRT had a property portfolio that was costly to maintain and hard to rent out, huge running repair costs from the Victorian infrastructure, and a small amount of income from the rents paid by moored boats. Nevertheless, British Waterways’ financial modelling suggested that it would be bringing in £187m a year by 2027, and spending about the same amount on repairs, maintenance, management and pensions.

A curious beast had been created. CaRT would take over the lion’s share of the inland waterways in England and Wales. No other charity has as its primary responsibility the upkeep of so much critical infrastructure, the failure of which could have catastrophic results, and with responsibilities analogous to those of a landlord.

An immediate challenge for CaRT was the rules and their application to those living on the waterways, particularly in how they pertained to itinerant boaters. These continuous cruisers have been a fixture in one form or another since at least the Victorian era. From its inception, CaRT has been at odds with those who don’t pay for a permanent mooring, represented by the National Bargee Travellers Association (NBTA). 

Tensions centre around a single element of the relevant legislation: Section 17 (3) (c) (ii) of the British Waterways Act 1995. 

Continuous cruisers are expected by CaRT to engage in “bona fide navigation”. This means that they cannot stay for more than 14 days on a regular stretch of canal, and are expected to be genuinely navigating the network, rather than shuttling back and forth within a small area. 
What is “bona fide” navigation?

“The answer is not as simple as anyone would like,” CaRT admits on its website. The 1995 legislation does not set out a minimum distance or range, so regulation is carried out based on what CaRT deems a “fair interpretation of the law”.

“We don’t set a rigid pattern – that would be going against the relaxed spirit of cruising,” it offers, but all the same, “You’ll need to continually move from place to place on a journey, rather than just shuttling back and forth between places and remaining in a small area,” CaRT says.

For further clarification, boaters are referred to the conditions of their licence, to which they are subject under Section 43 (3) of the Transport Act 1962. Upon consulting these, they will find a link to a separate document with guidance for those without a mooring. It states: “The law requires that stops during such cruising should not be ‘in any one place for more than 14 days’.” It describes “place” as “a neighbourhood or locality, NOT simply a particular mooring site or position”. It goes on: “What constitutes a ‘neighbourhood’ will vary from area to area”. 

“It is not possible (nor appropriate) to specify distances that need to be travelled, since in densely populated areas different neighbourhoods will adjoin each other and in sparsely populated areas may be far apart… A sensible and pragmatic judgment needs to be made,” the guidance concludes, perhaps optimistically.

In a recent submission to a forthcoming commission into licensing, the NBTA say various judgments “support the proposition that ‘navigation’ is not defined by the achievement of a specific range, pattern or distance of travel”. They claim that “communications between CaRT and… boaters [have] become increasingly bizarre, with CaRT staff tying themselves in knots trying, in response to anguished communications from boaters, to explain what exactly the boaters had done wrong in terms of the [legislation].” 

One boater was told that 15 miles during their licence was an acceptable distance in 2015, only for another to be told 20 miles a year later, they claim. “CaRT does not and should not have the legal power to supersede legislation and specify a range or distance required for compliance, let alone keep increasing it…”

“CaRT is fomenting prejudice against boaters without a home mooring by claiming that they are not complying with the law when they are complying. CaRT has created a myth and is using this myth to argue that legislative change is needed when it is not,” they add.

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This was the legal morass into which Hemsley and her family had fallen. 

The first she knew of it was an automated “do not reply” email: “Unfortunately, we are not satisfied that you have been meeting the requirements of your boat licence as a continuous cruiser. This is due to your cruising range, cruising pattern, or a combination of these factors, which are explained in our guidance…”

Described as an “opportunity to improve cruising behaviour”, the email restricted her to the ability to buy a licence for six months only, with the next licence only granted after a review of her cruising behaviour. 

“At first we were puzzled,” she says. “We were actually really proud of ourselves that year… The local spotter [CaRT staffer responsible for monitoring the boaters’ movements] stopped one day and went, ‘You know, you’re one of the few boats doing everything right.’” She assumed some sightings of their boat had been missed, which had happened before and been rectified.

“It just got very confusing,” she goes on. “We couldn’t really understand what we had done wrong. We didn’t get a response until… we put in an email that we were likely to talk to Access to Education, to the local council representatives and so on to bring this up. And then we got contact back, and actually got through to the welfare officer.”

Having agreed an increased cruising range with the welfare officer, she thought the issue would go away. Instead, a second six-month restriction followed.

It was at this point that fear began to kick in. “What CaRT likes to highlight is that the six-month licence restriction is not an explicit penalisation as such,” she says. “It is only an opportunity for people to correct their behaviour, and it doesn’t have any financial implications, as the cost of the six-month licence is half the annual cost.”

However, winter was coming: the restriction prevented her from reserving one of the winter mooring spots along the river that CaRT offered, which only exacerbated the problem. It seemed she’d be forced into areas where local waterways chaplains (who offer support to boaters) had warned were unsafe: “[the canal in Tottenham] is not somewhere you really want to walk with a child at certain times”. 

Her local council picked up her case and met with CaRT, as did her local waterways chaplain, who told them they’d made the situation worse. At one meeting, Hemsley says, rather than loosening the restrictions, its representatives suggested the council should pay for taxis for itinerant boater families with children.

Despite these interventions, at the end of the six-month period, her licence was refused. Hemsley’s family stood to lose their home.

Section 8 (2) of the British Waterways Act 1983 grants CaRT the authority to seize and remove boats from its waterways if they are sunk, stranded or abandoned, or if they are left or moored without lawful authority – for example without a licence. 

For the NBTA, which says that its casework team deals with hundreds of cases a year, this creates a punishment out of proportion with the law: “Tenants of houses do not get made homeless because they have not cleaned their windows, even though this is a common term in tenancy agreements. Boat dwellers, on the other hand, are being made homeless for trivial reasons such as visiting the same place too many times; turning round too often; or only travelling a range of 19 miles in their licence year,” they say. 

People have been boating with broken arms, broken ankles… because they’re scared.

Some argue that CaRT is a de facto landlord, with the responsibilities that entails. The licence fee is, for those living on board their boats, to all intents and purposes, a form of rent, according to this argument – meaning they should have the rights of tenants. 

Lib Dem peer Baroness Miller, a former canal boat dweller, put forward a Private Members’ Bill in the Lords to “recognise the rights of boat dwellers on Britain’s rivers, canals and coastal waters to have their dwelling recognised as their lawful home with the rights and protections attached to that”.

Having failed to win in the ballot, she hopes to use clauses from it as amendments to other pieces of legislation. “Boat dwellers who do not have a permanent mooring but whose boat is their only dwelling should have, at a minimum, the protections afforded to others who live in a similar situation but on land afforded by the Housing Acts of 1985 and 2004,” she tells The House.

“The situation has been exacerbated by the fact that Defra are responsible for the waterways but have no housing responsibilities, and successive government housing departments have not seen boat dwellers as homeowners,” she adds.

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What does the boating community look like? There are many who, for personal reasons, simply want to get off the grid. Not all are complimentary about them: “A group of people who don’t want to engage,” is a common refrain. “A difficult customer base,” another. 

It is not a picture Hemsley recognises. For her, the boaters in her area might be in constant transit, but they are a community: “the longest village”. She is upfront that some itinerant boaters “only manage to be functional members of society” because of the lifestyle: “We will grumble about moving, but as soon as we start to move, it makes sense again.” 

Further down the river there are local upkeep projects that she and other boaters are part of: “One of the wonderful entitlements of constant cruising is actually where we are… that two feet of towpath is ours. So you’ll have boaters do lovely upkeep… some have strimmers… you see this spot was full of brambles, another boater managed to chop some of them down, we managed to clear a bit more, making it a nicer spot for others.” 

Hemsley also says that they make use of a system that’s designed to be used: “It’s not like roads… he waterways don’t get used up by a certain amount of movement… You’ll see that in areas with less movement, the locks have more problems. You’ll have the overgrowth of algae and so on… Even the fish travel with the boats through locks. I’ve seen that. It’s amazing.”

We also know this community faces a lot of challenges. CaRT’s 2022 Boater Census states that a significant minority of boaters are disabled: around a third, as opposed to around 18 per cent of the general population. The licence conditions can be particularly burdensome for them. 

“I have to move regularly and am blamed for wear and tear due to this enforced movement… Imagine social housing where you are moved every fortnight and where you end up is entirely in the hands of the gods if all local accommodation is already taken,” writes one boater in a text message to The House.

Hemsley says the vagaries around the rules and their enforcement are creating a climate of fear. “What we have is people coming out of their cancer treatments in hospital to move their boats because they’re that scared… We’re feeling scared, depressed. Some people get really angry. It’s not fun… and that support is just not there… That very clear communication tone that it’s us to blame. We’ll always have done something wrong. People have been boating with broken arms, broken ankles… because they’re scared.”

As she speaks, a fellow boater, who’s been running along the towpath, stops and vents to her about an arbitrary licence restriction, which CaRT eventually rescinded. “I promise that wasn’t staged,” she says.

She claims the enforcement system defies logic. “Two boaters [I know] basically moved together. One got a restriction, one didn’t… From a rational standpoint, I don’t get the benefit of that.”

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“I think some people think all we do is chase people up and down the towpath, making their lives difficult,” says Richard Parry, CaRT’s outgoing CEO, who is being succeeded by Campbell Robb.

“I’ve wrestled with this for 12 years: how do you take a finite space that people want to be in, and manage it equitably? That is fundamentally our problem. And I wouldn’t accuse every boater of this, but there is a sense in which people are trying to find the most desirable way to live, and sometimes that puts them against our duty.”

He says CaRT is up against “people who don’t really want to move because they want to be somewhere, close to work, close to school, close to services, whatever, and [they’re] saying, ‘We haven’t got a mooring, because, you know to get a mooring in this area is… £15,000, and they’re hard to get sometimes’”.  He continues: “That doesn’t mean you can just take such a dogged, entitled view and refuse to move because you don’t want to. That’s not the terms on which you entered into this.”

He says that recent housing trends have exacerbated the problem. With deposits hard to come by, rents high, and savings to be made on utility bills, narrowboats have become an increasingly viable housing option. 

The most recent census of boaters by CaRT revealed that around 75 per cent of the UK’s 38,075 licensed boaters have a home mooring, and a quarter of these, in turn, live aboard their boats. There are roughly the same number of continuous cruisers, who make up around a fifth of the UK’s licensed boaters. 

While overall growth in boating numbers has been relatively low for years (an FOI seen by The House suggests the total number has risen by only around 8,000 in the last 30 years), CaRT argues there are “more boats on our canals now than at the height of the Industrial Revolution”. The NBTA disputes this claim, as it does many of CaRT’s assertions around numbers. 

Parry says the point is less about volume, and more about distribution. The growth of continuous cruisers as a population, he says, has put pressure on the system, particularly the “concentration of people in areas of greatest activity”. 

CaRT says the total number of ‘liveaboards’ has risen by 15 per cent compared to 2011, and its national boating manager, Matthew Symonds, has said about two-thirds of the increase is driven by continuous cruising in London and the South East of England. “You know, every interview you see in a [Sunday supplement] is ‘I live on this boat, it’s great, it would cost me £1,000 a week to live somewhere, now it’s costing me £1,000 a year,’” says Parry. 

“There’s no doubt a lot of people [are] on boats because it’s the most affordable way to live in parts of London that would otherwise be inaccessible to them… There’s definitely something going on that’s changing that use, and we’ve been trying to manage that as sympathetically as we can. I know that’s not the perception,” he adds.

Currently, 16.5 per cent of continuous cruisers have an open enforcement case (ie not moving in line with requirements), down slightly from 20 per cent at the start of the year. “It’s a big caseload,” claims Parry. The question of whether this is due to boaters’ behaviour or the application of the rules depends on who you believe.

It’s a similar question when it comes to the demand placed on the system. CaRT’s assertion that continuous cruisers “are more reliant on facilities provided by the Trust, leading to increased costs to meet their needs” has to be set against the argument The House repeatedly heard on the towpath: that boaters like Hemsley and others are net contributors because of the upkeep and community work they do. Parry is unconvinced: “It’s a struggle to believe that is a universal characteristic.”

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Nevertheless, Parry accepts that the rules are “not as clear as they might be” and that they generate “ill feeling”. The Trust began to explore changing them via a Transport and Works Act order [TWAO], which, The House puts to him, was set to include powers to flat-out refuse boat licences, as suggested in redacted minutes from a trustee meeting. A step-change in power, and perhaps an overreach?

Parry says CaRT “just wanted to understand [the TWAO] route… we weren’t terribly clear what we would do”, but paused it because they saw “a bigger opportunity”. They wanted to review the rules in a way that is “a bit more disarming… look, we know it’s not great. We know it’s not… in 2025, and, for the future, fit for purpose”. He continues: “Why don’t we see if we can design something, taking a fresh look that is better for us all?”

And so in December 2024 came CaRT’s announcement that an independently-led commission would review the future framework for boat licensing. It is expected to run until September. It did not, at least at first, quell the friction, not least because its terms of reference state that the itinerant boating community has “created challenges for the Trust… from an operational, financial and reputational perspective”. A “mask-off” moment, one itinerant boater told The House.

Parry accepts this phrase “may be unhelpful”, noting: “We’re not saying the boaters are a challenge. The Trust’s treatment of them represents a reputational challenge… If we have a constant noise about us being nasty characters who are doing these terrible things in the foreground, that is going to… toxify that whole narrative about us as a national charity, trying to do this amazing work with special places and nature and… communities.”

The NBTA is also suspicious about the commission, because there are no itinerant boaters on it. Parry points to Penelope Barber, who, though he accepts, is not an itinerant boater, “comes from a perspective of wrestling with policy around living afloat”. He claims they tried to make the commissioners as diverse as possible.

It all adds up to a suspicion that CaRT’s real intention is to force the continuous cruisers off the system and replace them with boaters who are more likely to provide a revenue stream, as well as increase chargeable towpath moorings for holidaymakers, and sell off land. 

“Look, I understand the cynicism,” says Parry. “You know, I think I could walk up and down the towpath handing out £50 notes and a lot of people wouldn’t take them. There’s a lot of mistrust, isn’t there? I’m genuine. All I can say, in all honesty, is I do not know where the commission is going to land.”

That CaRT is facing financial pressure is indisputable. Its accounts for the 2024 financial year show success in its original aim of providing a diversity of revenue streams, but in a more expensive world than was predicted in 2012. Government funding for the canals makes up £52.6m, but there is also £51.5m from boating and mooring, £44.9m in utilities and water funding contracts, £55.4m in investment and property, along with £6.3m in donations, and £26.6m from other funding.

However, the charity spent £43.7m just on raising these funds – administration, customer service and so on. It all amounts to a total income of £237,300,000 – but a total expenditure of £252,400,000: roughly the same shortfall the canals faced over a decade ago.

Despite this, the government’s efforts to wean the canals off the public purse continued unabated. In July 2023, a new settlement was announced, spanning 2027 to 2037, to follow on when the current agreement ends. The annual grant will be reduced to £50m in 2027 and cut by five per cent each year after that, falling to £31.5m by the 2036/37 financial year. This new settlement represents a reduction in funding of over £300m in real terms over a 10-year period from 2027: a 40 per cent cut in a grant which makes up a quarter of CaRT’s funding. 

What has not been revealed until The House investigated is the fact that the settlement could have looked very different indeed, and that the faltering negotiations behind it are a point of contention to this day. 

Parry describes a frustrating process in which CaRT was “held at arm’s length” while Defra failed to hit its own deadlines, before coming up with an inadequate settlement. 

But there is an enduring feeling in Westminster that CaRT could have walked away with a large lump sum of cash instead, which would have given it more long-term financial freedom. In this telling, an offer was made, firmly rejected by an intractable CaRT, who wanted almost twice as much, and “the moment passed” before a better agreement could be reached.

Parry’s version of events differs: “Thérèse Coffey [then environment secretary] started speculating outside of the agreement about whether a lump sum would be an option. So it never, ever emerged in any constructive way in a negotiation with officials; it became a story that I heard.” 

He goes on: “It never materialised to anything of substance. And to be honest, the problem I always had with it was I could not see the notion that the Treasury would want to do the cash flow-type analysis, roll it all up and say, ‘here’s a very big number’.”

Thérèse (now Baroness) Coffey doesn’t see it this way. She tells The House: “I spoke to Mr Parry about a lump sum and he seemed interested in it.”

Coffey’s reading of the Treasury’s will to provide a lump sum also differs from Parry’s: “I know a paper eventually was sent to John Glen [then economic secretary to the Treasury]. I spoke to him. It was agreed.”

What really seems to be in dispute is the level of engagement between the department and CaRT. Having initially failed to recall any contact at all with officials, Parry would later tell The House that Defra civil servants “gradually woke up” to the prospect of a lump sum after he’d heard the speculation and, prompted by him, asked CaRT to make an informal submission, but “we never received a proposal we could get proper sense out of”. It appears CaRT did offer them a range of lump sum options, before communications dried up.

He also initially said he was “astonished” by Coffey’s claim that she’d spoken to him about the offer, but then recalled how: “I saw her at a parliamentary reception that July, and she floated past me… She may have said in passing some sort of cryptic remark that might have included the words ‘lump sum’.”

The exchange with Coffey was, he says: “Completely free of any material follow-up. There was never anything that said ‘The secretary of state made an approach to you… let’s have a serious conversation.’ Nothing remotely like that,” says Parry.

Coffey says: “Perhaps civil servants lied to me about CaRT’s response, but I doubt it. As for Mr Parry, I don’t doubt his word that [no] contract was drawn up. I doubt it would have been drawn up until there was agreement from CaRT. All I know is I acted in good faith and succeeded in getting a lump sum.”

To further complicate matters, The House understands that while this process was ongoing, senior figures in No 10 were indicating to CaRT that the Defra settlement could potentially be increased to around £600m. This was just under the lower end of the options CaRT then proposed to the department.

Ultimately, there was no lump sum, nor was there a settlement that CaRT felt was sustainable. Its public response to the eventual settlement said it would “threaten the future of the nation’s historic canals, leading to their decline and to the eventual closure of some parts of the network”. Parry warned it would “turn the clock back on one of the nation’s greatest heritage regeneration stories and lead to the loss of substantial public benefits”.

Parry feels the episode is endemic of the struggle CaRT has with central government: “It wasn’t the best process a government department has ever run… Years of work was, if not jettisoned, parked by the end. The formula they came up with was developed rather hurriedly, not in my view really informed by any analysis or evidence at all.”

He says he has always found the lack of importance ministers and senior Defra officials have put on the canals “baffling”, adding: “None of the ministers, none of the senior officials seem that interested in engaging directly with us; we’ll be fobbed off with meetings at deputy director level, very occasional ministerial contact, and then you’d hear about much more peripheral organisations being called in for meetings at a much more senior level, and you’d sort of pinch yourself and ask, ‘Am I doing something wrong here?’.”

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The bleak financial picture is being exacerbated by, according to CaRT, climate change. The charity’s 2023/24 annual report emphasised the “continued effect of climate change taking its toll on our ageing canal infrastructure,” reflecting on how “following prolonged hot dry weather the summer before, a succession of winter storms caused significant damage, with an aggregated impact of £9m in emergency works”.

The cost of failing to maintain this infrastructure could be rather more than a drop-off in tourism. 

In the summer of 2019, around 1,500 people were instructed to leave their homes in the Derbyshire town of Whaley Bridge immediately after heavy rain caused a large section of a nearby dam’s spillway at Toddbrook reservoir to fall away. There were fears that the whole structure could collapse: if it did so, there was a real chance the entire town could be wiped out. Catastrophe was only averted after emergency crews pumped water away from the reservoir and sandbags were dropped from RAF Chinook helicopters. 

There was considerable coverage, but if anything the incident should have generated rather more headlines than it did.

“It is quite terrifying how that incident could have ended: the sheer volume of water contained in the reservoir presented an immediate danger to life. Our internal research suggests the volume of water was comparable to 551 Olympic pools, or equivalent to the daily water consumption of 8.6 million people. That volume of water is unimaginably powerful,” says Charlie Norman, director of campaigns and public affairs at the IWA, which remains the only national charity acting on behalf of all canals, and acts as the secretariat for the Waterways APPG.

In speaking to The House the IWA has, for the first time, issued a warning to government that cuts to funding for the canals could lead to fatalities. “It is not an overstatement to marvel that so far there has been no loss of life – ageing infrastructure is expensive to maintain without anything going wrong, and that’s the point: investment now will save money in the near and distant future… When adding up the costs, we should be thankful that those costs for the moment don’t include loss of life,” says Norman.

Parry is not prepared to go as far as the IWA, but nor is he prepared to contradict them. “I’ve got an extremely capable and very experienced and very committed board, who are very clear. They would not put public safety at risk… That assertion has to obviously be backed up by action.”

However, he describes Whaley Bridge as a “cloud” over the organisation, though subsequent reports did not suggest any culpability on CaRT’s part: “The reports we all agonised over did identify underlying design flaws, we’d only recently had an inspection that hadn’t spotted anything… There’s lots of evidence we weren’t… to blame. However, it fundamentally changed the financial landscape for us.”

The IWA points out that the risk is not just confined to reservoirs. On New Year’s Day, a section of the Bridgewater canal embankment in Greater Manchester collapsed after heavy rainfall, meaning a huge volume of water flooded the nearby sewage works. The canal remains closed at the time of writing. 

The costs keep coming. The Monmouthshire and Brecon canal is now costing £100,000 a week because it is using an emergency water supply, owing to a change in legislation that restricts the amount that can be funnelled from the River Usk and its tributaries for environmental reasons.

Parry fears more of these “onerous” environmental hurdles, including increased fish screens for water abstractions. “I don’t want to be casual about [environmental regulations] but because we sit outside government, [there’s] a growing sense of we should do more… and we just don’t have the money,” he says.

He says, without a solution, the canal will eventually dry out: “Who knows what the impact of that would be? I mean, our fear is not just the ecology would be irrevocably harmed, but you probably also get canal walls drying up and collapsing, there’s the safety aspect too.” 

He fears getting caught in a “vicious circle”, adding: “If you don’t invest enough in the network, and it starts to fail in places, the cost of addressing those failures is much less efficient than doing planned work, and you have to slash and burn your plan to release the funds to react to the emergency.  

“And then of course, people start to feel, well, not so well inclined towards the canal network now, because… it’s not well looked after, or it’s falling apart, or too much of it is closed, or whatever. So then your income stream starts to go.” Toddbrook alone, he says, will cost “north” of £50m.

This balance, between essentially unseen maintenance and the stuff boaters see and use is, Parry says, at the heart of recent disappointing approval ratings; satisfaction has only recently risen to 55 per cent from 46 per cent last year.

“We’ve had little choice about some of the things we’ve spent money on,” he says. “We haven’t underinvested in facilities. I think it’s been difficult to keep facilities to the standard that people expect today.” 

He says some of this is the “intensity” with which they’re used: “All too often, it’s not that the facility itself hasn’t had the investment, or was not being maintained or cleaned or cared for. It’s just that someone’s done something they shouldn’t have, consciously or otherwise.

“We probably haven’t managed to respond adequately to the growth and change in demand, and we’ve got to keep working at it, because we know how important it is.” He says that “eye-watering” amounts have been spent on maintenance, and that a recent £4.5m investment is about getting ahead of “fault-fixing”. 

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Hemsley is one of those who feels the standard of facilities has declined; another reason, she says, why an overzealous enforcement plan is unfair. The need to fill up water and empty sewage has meant “further ranges have been crazy” given that points can frequently be out of order. A licence typically costs around £1,000 a year.

What she wants, above all, is better collaboration with CaRT. “It’s very much also an us versus them, which is not in any other form of co-operative and productive relationship in that way… there’s no investment in shared goals.”

Still, the situation around her child’s school has reached a resolution of sorts, after she submitted a cruising plan (having had two rejected previously). 

She says: “The email with the third cruising plan I sent in [was] very clearly worded that we are only doing this because we see no other choice under the threat of homelessness. And we’d very much like to point out that following this cruising plan is likely to endanger the life of a five-year-old child. To which the response was, ‘This cruising plan is approved.’” 

Under the new plan the school run takes anything between 10 and 90 minutes. “He whines less than I do,” says Hemsley. “Still, winters and the darkness are hard on him. Trains run only once per half hour so timing is an issue… frequent cancellations don’t help either.”

CaRT would not directly comment on her experience, as part of a blanket policy of not commenting on individual cases. 

“Choosing to raise a family on a boat, especially without a home mooring, does bring with it some logistical challenges and we’d urge people to carefully consider whether this lifestyle will work for them – notably how they will balance the requirements with the other factors in their life,” a spokesperson says. 

“We have worked with some local education authorities to highlight ways that continuously cruising boaters with school-aged children can access education while moving around.”