Even sillier
REFERRING to the Canal & River Trust (CaRT) claim that its visitor numbers have increased by 30% last year, narrowboatworld asks ‘How silly can it get?'. Well,it gets even sillier when you compare the ludicrous claim to information published in its latest Annual Report, writes Allan Richards.
Heard them before
One would have hoped that, with the announced retirement of Marketing and Fundraising Director Simon Salem, the Trust would stop making such claims. It's not as if we have not heard claims of massive increases in visitor numbers before from both British Waterways and CaRT. Using three different measures for visits and visitor numbers only serves to add to the confusion.
Three different measures
To give an example, on 17th October 2013 the Trust claimed that it had broken previous records with 5.4 million people visiting in a single fortnight. How does that relate to its latest claim that the number of visits has increased by 30% from 300,000,000 to 360,000,000. Even the arithmetic is wrong as it is a 20% increase. To add to the confusion of figures in the hundreds of millions and single millions we also have figures of 10,000,000 (or is that 13,000,000) visitors.
Does CaRT deliberately present visitor and visit figures using three different measures to bamboozle government and public into believing that it is delivering greater public benefit?
One measure
The rolling telephone survey which is used by CaRT (and BW before it) initially asks if the person who picks up the phone has visited a waterway within the previous two weeks.
The results are published in both BW and CaRT annual reports as the average number of visitors per two week period for each financial year. It is this figure that determines performance in delivering public benefit. It was this figure that was used as a cornerstone of BW's vision of doubling the number of visitors from 3.6 million to 7.2 million to the waterways by 2012.
The Evans achievements
Two year ago, narrowboatworld published ‘The Evans achievements' which considered the long term performance of BW's chief executive against targets set for him.
On the second page is published a graph and table showing how he failed every year to deliver public benefit by increasing visitors number. The table is reproduced below:
Year Target Actual
2003/4 3.6 3.2
2004/5 3.7 2.85
2005/6 4.0 2.85
2006/7 4.5 Not published
2007/8 5.0 Not published
2008/9 5.7 3.4
2009/10 6.5 4.3
2010/11 6.9 3.8
2011/12 7.2 3.6
As can be seen from the table, BW not only failed to double visitor numbers, after ten years effort it was back where it started on 3.6 million. Worse still numbers have been declining since 2009/10.
CaRT figures
So how are CaRT really doing on visitor numbers. Well the latest Annual Report gives the 2012/13 figure as 3.2 million and 2013/14 figure as 3.5 million. Perhaps the best that can be said is that the fall in visitor numbers has been arrested and are now increasing.
However, 3.5 million is nowhere near the 2011/12 target of 7.2 million and is less than BW achieved in 2003/4!
[However the figures are all 'claimed' of course....]