£500,000 for the Pocklington Canal

THE Heritage Lottery Fund has granted £500,000 towards the Pocklington Canal—but not a single penny of it will go towards its restoration!

The massive grant will only pay for surveys and to improve nature conservation including cutting down tress that are giving 'excessive shading' preventing vegetation growth, David Davis tells us.

Great disappointment

This is a great disappointment to the many volunteers that form the Pockington Canal Amenity Society who have been struggling for years to restore this nine miles waterway.

The volunteers have restored most of the locks, and recently a swing bridge was back in action for the first time in 80 years. However there is no water in canal as it needs badly dredging and other work that CaRT will not undertake, though it owns the waterway.

Too expensive

The half million grant will include nothing that will extend the waterway that needs the restoration of another two miles, that had been judged too expensive and was removed from the proposals at an early stage. In response to this decision, the Pocklington Canal Society has been developing its own proposals for works that will extend the navigable length by the two miles, and has estimated that these works could be undertaken for less than £250,000, which is very much less than the CaRT estimates.

A meeting was held with CaRT where there was some recognition that the involvement of CaRT in the undertaking of such projects invariably inflated the costs due to the high level of its overheads and procedures it uses.

Remarks David of this situation:

"This state of affairs may have seemed more understandable when British Waterways were in charge, but now we a situation where one charity dedicated to 'preserving our waterways' (CaRT) is preventing another charity from restoring them to use, because CaRT wants to do things more inefficiently and expensively. Let's hope the Pocklington Canal Society are successful in persuading CaRT to take a more pragmatic approach.

Of course, this raises questions about the nature of these 'Third Sector' public bodies like CaRT. Is it really a 'charity' or did the government just privatise a quango...?

David