Government to Mutualise British Waterways
The Government announces plans to create a new ‘national trust for the waterways’.
Among the budget announcements last week was one that is particularly significant for Britain’s historic waterways. The UK Government proposes to transfer the 200-year old canal network of England and Wales into the hands of a ‘mutual’ organisation such as a charitable trust. British Waterways, which cares for over 2200 miles of historic waterways on behalf of the UK and Scottish Government, has welcomed the announcement. Its recent consultation on ‘waterways for everyone’ explored how better use and more public engagement could bring benefits and wider use of the enormous recreational, natural and heritage value of the canal network.
BW’s Chairman said
This is a significant moment in the history of our inland waterways, which helped put the great into Great Britain as an industrial nation. A mutualised canal network will give the communities that have grown up around the waterways since the 18th Century an increasingly important role in the way they are run in the future. The proposal reflects a widely-held, cross-party and stakeholder view that the waterways are a national treasure which should be moved into the third sector if we are to unlock the enormous public support that there is for them. This is a tremendously innovative model for reinvigorating the waterways, it will ensure their continued revival and safeguard against a return to the decline and dereliction which they faced in the last century.
Discussions are also underway with the Scottish Government on how Scotland’s waterways can also reap the benefit of a change to charitable status for its historic canal assets.
The CBA has championed the industrial heritage since its early days, through the first industrial archaeology research committee set up in 1959, and has a keen focus on protecting historic industrial buildings and areas in its casework in England and Wales as a national amenity society.
The CBA’s Director, Mike Heyworth, commented:
We welcome this far-sighted proposal and the opportunities that it will bring for local communities and volunteers to be fully involved in caring for and protecting an enormously valuable historic and environmental asset. The canal corridors through the historic industrial quarters of our towns and cities are a vital ‘green link’ with the countryside and preserve the important historic connections between industrial manufacturing centres and their rural hinterlands. The network is made up of thousands of individual canal structures and buildings from its 18th and 19th-century heyday and their transfer into the stewardship of a new charitable body should help to safeguard their future.
