Help get MPs on side – National Bargee Travellers Association

With the option to change boater legislation on the table for CRT, we need to get more MP allies to help stop any law change. We have put together an easy-to-use online form for you to write to an MP and to collect information on what MPs have said about boaters to help us direct how we lobby them. Here is the form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSewVyrdHRYXE9WA0HYlkB_rgPNVDcFWOLHP779xmUF0QD7XRg/viewform

If you don’t have a permanent address, your MP is the MP for where you are now; use a nearby postcode such as a boatyard, Post Office or pub and say you live on a boat with no fixed address. You don’t have to be registered to vote to contact an MP. To find your MP, see http://findyourmp.parliament.uk/ or http://www.writetothem.com/

Here is a template letter you can use:

Dear [insert name],

I am writing as a constituent (postcode [insert postcode of e.g. pub or boatyard in their constituency]) and as an itinerant boater – someone who lives full-time on a narrowboat without a home mooring. I am deeply concerned about the Canal & River Trust’s current Licence Review report and its agenda to introduce licensing changes that will be very destructive to the itinerant boating community. The report is has now been published and includes a whole raft of policy which if acted on would have greatly detrimental effect on the nomadic boater community.

This License Review seems very biased as evidenced by the CRTs Terms of Reference document for the review – where they label itinerant boaters as a ‘financial, reputational, and operational risk’. This review’s report has given legislative changes that would undermine our way of life, forcing many liveaboard boaters into homelessness. There isn’t even any proven need for licensing review other than CRT’s clumsy engagement with relevant law. This is a boating community that contributes positively to waterways safety and public access, and also to cultural life in these areas. It is my view, and that of many others including non-boaters, that the CRT is pursuing a discriminatory agenda against itinerant boaters under the guise of operational reform.

This bias has been increasingly evident in recent years, through:

The imposition of financially-exclusive chargeable moorings in areas where mooring has long been essential to continuous cruisers – despite these moorings now remaining abandoned and unused.
Restrictive mooring times designed in ways that disproportionately affect liveaboard boaters without permanent moorings;
Ever-increasing licence surcharges that target itinerant boaters specifically, making the livelihoods of many unaffordable, particularly those on low incomes.
In some cases, CRT openly acknowledges their biased intentions. The Licence Review Terms of Reference document openly describes itinerant boaters as a problem that needs to be managed – yet, at the last boat count, boat numbers are decreasing. CRT issues their opinion as if it were fact. For many people, the boating community is not a ‘financial, reputational and operational risk’ – but a thriving, diverse and open community of great benefit to wider society.

I am asking you, as my MP, to contact CRT to request that they address this institutional discrimination. At the very least the community they are seeking to destroy should be represented in their Licence Review – yet not one member of the Licence Review Commission is an itinerant boater. As the world-wide saying goes, ‘nothing about us without us’.

The itinerant boating community is a unique and diverse minority under threat from a biased governing organisation. We ask not for special treatment, but for fair treatment—free from prejudice or policy designed to marginalise our way of life.

I would welcome a response from you on this matter, and would be happy to provide further detail or discuss it in person.

Yours sincerely,

[insert name]

And if an MP replies to you with a response from CRT you can use this template letter: response to MPs if CRT respond to them