Official—CaRT does not respect boaters

A year late, Canal & River Trust (CaRT) has published the report that confirms that only one in four boaters feel they are respected by the Trust.

Publication follows the narrowboatworld article CaRT doesn't respect boaters and a request under the Freedom of information Act.

One in four

It was this report that caused interim Head of Customer Services, Dean Davis, to report to the Board of Trustees:

This new regular tracker survey is to monitor attitudes and ‘advocacy' amongst boaters and identify the key drivers affecting it. The key results from wave one are:

Familiarity—two thirds (65%) of boaters say they know very little about what we do; this indicates we need to promote a better understanding of the varied work of the Trust.

Respect—only one in four (24%) boaters say they feel respected by the Trust; this will help drive the changes to our engagement, tone and ‘culture'.

B.O.A.T.

The Boat Owners' Attitude Tracker (B.O.A.T.) was announced in June 2014. The survey was to be held at regular intervals over a two year period with the first survey report dated July 2014 giving as its two key objectives:

Measuring advocacy (speaking for or against the Trust) at intervals over a two years period.
Measuring what drives advocacy to enable CaRT to understand what it can do to influence advocacy.

A standard statistical technique, Key Driver Analysis, was used to rank what was important to boaters in determining advocacy.

Poor response

Invitations to take part in the initial online survey were sent to 4,000 boaters with the expectation that 1,000 would respond. However, only 615 boaters (15% rather than 25%) did so. The initial survey found that the top five key drivers of advocacy were:

• Overall upkeep of the waterways
• Non-email written communication from the Trust
• Helpfulness & friendliness of the Trust (other non 0303) office staff (telephone)
• Feel respected by the Trust
• Information to help understand more about the Trust

The two year project was abandoned after just six months following two further surveys at a total cost of £27,300.

Last three years

CaRT have refused to provide information relating to actions taken as a result of B.O.A.T. Instead it offered a summary of how B.O.A.T. has helped to shape the Trust's decision-making for the last three years.

Rather a bizarre offer when you consider that the oldest of the three B.O.A.T. reports only dates from July 2014 and was not received by the Trust until August 2014!

Gross incompetence or a lack of respect?

Responsibilities

Reading through the reports, one can not help but notice that boaters rate CaRT poorly in discharging its responsibilities as a navigation authority. The initial report uses a traffic light system green/yellow/red to rate how CaRT performs its responsibilities under 12 headings. In every case more boaters rate CaRT ‘poor' than ‘good'.

Perhaps little wonder then, that in the initial report, just 17% of boaters rated the overall upkeep of the waterways as ‘good' (31% said it was ‘poor').

Something Dean Davies failed to tell the Board about despite it being the highest driver of boater advocacy...