I sincerely hope that if that happens then you have a better experience than the one we have in Lincolnshire! You will be dealing with an organisation where it's not a case of the right hand knowing what the left hand is doing it's more a case of the left hand not even knowing that there is a right hand! That lot have made delaying applications into an art form, or would have if they could ever get round to it. The ultimate example being a meeting of EA bods where the Fenland Link was mentioned, at that point one of them said 'what a stupid idea it was and whoever had thought of it'. It was then that another of them told him that it was actually one of the EA's most high profile projects! Hmmm..... Steve
--- On Wed, 23/6/10, Steve Wood <[email protected]> wrote: From: Steve Wood <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [canals-list] Re: statement from new waterways minister To: [email protected] Date: Wednesday, 23 June, 2010, 23:22 Adrian Stott wrote: > On Wed, 23 Jun 2010 19:45:55 +0100, Steve Wood > <[email protected]> wrote: > >> So if EA and BW merge, what happens to all the other areas of >> responsibility that EA have? They are far from just being a navigation >> authority. I guess one option which might have a cost saving would be to >> move all the navigations to BW and the rest could stay with a reduced >> size EA. > > I'm afraid you've misunderstood the proposal. > > It is only EA *Navigation* that would be taken over by BW. Isn't that what I said in the last sentence above? ;) I've not seen the details of any proposal (link anyone?) but that would seem to be an obvious way to do it, though absorbing BW in its entirety into an enlarged EA would intuitively have the biggest cost saving (though would seem to rule out any third sector move.) >From my perspective an interesting opportunity would come if the whole lot merged as EA are going to have a huge say in whether or not the Uttoxeter Canal restoration succeeds or not. (It crosses an EA managed river and passes along the edge of an EA monitored flood plain.) A navigation authority might look on us more sympathetically :) Steve NB Bream [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
