Shock number of closures

THE Canal & River Trust has finally released the number of unplanned closures to its waterways last year—1,647 days!

That is the official number of days of unplanned closure to its navigation network during 2013.

Campaign

This follows the narrowboatworld campaign exposing the high number of failures, with now CaRT monitoring the ‘days of unplanned closure to navigation' and reporting it bi-monthly to its Board of Trustees.

More than anything this shows the lack of preventative maintenance now being the norm at Canal & River Trust, where such lack of regular maintenance means that there are more and more failures to the system, where money instead of being used to maintain the waterways is being spent on completely non-navigational matters.

New jobs

Should you be wondering where our money is going, narrowboatworld has discovered a list of new positions that are advertised:

Heritage Advisor at Fazeley at £27,000
Customer Support at Devizes at £23,000
Ecologist Project Officer at Rochdale/Huddersfield canals at £23,000
Ecologist at Newark at £25,000
Head of Museums at Ellesmere Port at £65,000
Five Development & Engagement Managers at an unknown cost.

There will be extra money for entitlements, bonuses, etc, and managers need staff.