Foreword

Foreword from Interim CEO Jonathan Smith

By the time you read this, I will have been Interim CEO for about six months – in that time an awful lot has been going on in the association with campaigning, staff, members and volunteers. We now have a new Volunteer Manager (Jenny Hodson) and a new Communications & Marketing Officer (Georgia Howe). You can read more about them in this and upcoming magazine issues but, simply put, they are both experienced in their fields and aware of waterways. I’m sure both will be a great asset to the association, and will play key roles in reinvigorating IWA. We should also have appointed an Operations Manager by the time you are reading this, which means the staff team should be up to strength and functioning normally. This is both a great relief and also key to the continued success of IWA.

Without all the work our members and volunteers do, the association would not function. They are key to everything we do – and the ability for the office to work with them and publicise everything that is done is crucial to our success – Jenny and Georgia will play key roles.

The ‘Only IWA’ theme is core to our message about who we are, what we do and why we exist – as I wrote last time, only IWA can do all the things we do for waterways including: Waterway Recovery Group, Essex Waterways, Restoration Hub, Heritage Advisory Panel, Planning Advisory Panel, insurance for societies and restoration groups, Certificate of Boat Management, All Party Parliamentary Group for Waterways, Inland Waterways Freight Group, Sustainable Boating Group, Navigation Committee, the teams running Canalway Cavalcade and the Festival of Water, IWA’s shows team and, of course, the branches themselves and all the work they do on the ground.

However, we have to be honest with ourselves – we have not been the best at telling either our members or the world at large what we do, why we do it and what the waterways would be like if we didn’t do it! That needs to change and ‘Only IWA’ is the banner under which we can bring together all our good work. You will see this message developing and growing throughout everything we are doing over the coming months.

Those of you who are regular boaters on the waterways will all have their own views on the current state of them, but even allowing for an exceptional year with drought, the general trend of messages I am hearing is that the condition is worsening rather than improving. While the review of the Canal & River Trust grant has been ongoing, IWA deliberately kept a lower profile, preferring to point out that waterways are an underfunded asset – which is true. However, we continued to lobby behind the scenes at various levels and have had some successes: for example CRT is now using data on how many paddles are marked as faulty and how many of these are actually being fixed as a performance indicator, and has shared the data with IWA. Hopefully, paddles will now be fixed more quickly and reduce the number of stoppages resulting from paddle issues.

One of the other issues that has been taking a good deal of my time has been the association’s financial position. For IWA to continue, some hard decisions had to be taken – put simply, IWA has consistently spent more than it has generated in regular income and has lived off profits from its investments and legacies. The legacies have continued to come in, however it will be no surprise to anyone that our investments have significantly fallen in value this year – this is nobody’s fault, it is a global issue with the pandemic and Ukraine. In fact, our investments have performed comparably well. However, the impact of a fall in investment value is critical to IWA – just as we have taken the benefit of the growth in these over the years (and spent the money on campaigning) we must also take the pain of the loss.

To mitigate the impact of these losses, we have found significant savings that include reduced staff costs, changes in our IT contracts and relocating the office (as our 15-year lease ends in March 2023). However, this alone is not sufficient, and our membership fee will, regrettably, have to increase. The membership fee has not changed for ten years (the switch to a single rate was income neutral) and simply not keeping pace with inflation has cost IWA over £400,000 in lost membership income. From January 2023 our membership fee will increase to £4.25 a month (or £51 per year), rates for corporate membership and lifetime membership will increase similarly. I realise that this is a very significant increase, and is coming during the worst economic crisis for 25 years or more, but it is necessary to the continued survival of IWA, and the continued survival of the IWA is critical to the waterways.

Ten years ago when CRT was formed, with IWA support, many people thought that perhaps IWA would become redundant – it is clear now that IWA is needed just as much as it ever has been because: n Only IWA can be the national voice for the waterways. n Only IWA can campaign for improvement in all the current navigable waterways. n Only IWA can support all the waterways that are being restored.

As our newly launched report Waterways for Today makes clear, there are 5,000 miles of navigable waterways across England, Scotland and Wales – 500 miles of derelict waterways have been restored since the 1960s and there are another 500 miles that can be restored, with all the benefits that inland waterways bring to the country and the general public. Only IWA can support all these miles!