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Public Bodies Bill [HL]

My Lords, I rise to support my noble friend Lord Faulkner in this amendment. He has outlined the role of and described the people involved in the Inland Waterways Advisory Council extremely well and he will be aware from the briefing that we have all had from Ministers that two secretarial staff are involved in the council. To abolish something because two people are employed there seems quite extraordinary. The role of the IWAC seems to fit very well with the Government’s plans for localism because canals are a wonderful local amenity. However, there are challenges in maintaining them. We have all read of how volunteer labour is used so often because canals are expensive to maintain and do not produce a lot of revenue. Their transport was rather taken over by the railways about 150 years ago, but they remain a wonderful amenity for leisure purposes and for what they provide to communities. We shall debate this issue again when we talk about the future of the British Waterways Board, but there will be some tension when the BWB becomes a charity. We have not been and we probably will not be told where it will get its funding from and it struggles hard to find funding at the moment. Indeed, there are occasions when I see it turning itself into a property company to the detriment of people trying to use the canals. I heard about an example of this a couple of years ago in Brentford on the Thames. Some of the BWB people had done a deal with a property company to build some very nice waterside houses at Brentford. To make them even more attractive to the buyers and to make more money, some pontoons were put into the canal so that lots of canal boats could be moored there. The problem was that the pontoons and the boats together were so wide that it was almost impossible to get a canal boat into the canal, which is after all the point of the lock connecting to the River Thames. There are quite strong tides there. Anyone who has driven a canal boat will know they are not like motor cars. They respond to the wind and the tide and they do not steer very well, so you need a bit of space not to hit things. But these people were quite happy to put these pontoons in the river at the entrance to the canal and to allow things to moor, because that would make more money. There were allegations, which I do not want to pursue, that people were making personal gains but, regardless of who got the revenue, it affected navigation. I do not know how this will work when we have a charity running it. One always believes that charities are good things and that nobody will try to make money or stop the organisation doing what it is supposed to do. That remains to be seen, depending on what this charity is going to be doing. In the mean time, as my noble friend said, surely an independent advisory body is important. The department’s briefing paper says that abolishing this body will improve transparency and effectiveness in policy development by enabling the Government to engage directly with stakeholders. With the greatest respect, that is total rubbish. It will mean one or two officials—the few who are left in the Department for Transport—having to engage directly with the experts all over the country whom my noble friend told us about. That is just not going to happen. It is sad that, for the sake of saving the cost of two secretarial posts, this body is going to be abolished. I hope that the Minister will at least grant a stay of execution, if that is the right expression, for several years until this charity is established and we can all see how it is going to work and whether the charity needs independent advice costing it virtually nothing. I also hope that the Government will make sure that the canals stay open and operational so that people can enjoy them. They can get as much money as they want from other revenue, be it from developments that do not block the canal, cables laid along the footpath, telecoms or whatever. I hope that there will be a transition period of several years after the charity is established before this body is abolished.