The meeting seemed very productive to me. Courteous, too.
The Chairman's introductory speech was a small masterpiece of not
saying how opposed he was to the cuts whill making it plain what he
really thought of them.
The audience united with BW in its dismay over the funding cuts, and
there were many offers of support. The representative of the union
covering BW's workers rightly expressed his distress over the job
cuts, and requested strong efforts to find other ways to make savings,
but at the same time offered to work with BW (rather than against it)
to achieve this.
There were many interesting ideas suggested for dealing with the
funding problem, not the least that BW is clearly in the wrong
department (i.e. DEFRA).
The DEFRA civil servant who was there didn't do badly, and deserves
credit for taking the flack IMHO. He had to present the official line
in answer to questions, of course, but he did explain things quite
well (his best line was "We do have a contingency fund. It is called
'the contingency fund', which is unusual in government, as these
things normally have names you can't understand."). It became clear
that the real problem is political - Miliband had decided that the
farm payments fiasco had to be handled within DEFRA's budget (even
though the EU fine was on the UK as a whole), after which the civil
service had no choice but to divide up the pain among the outfits
within DEFRA's responsibility. However, the DEFRA man didn't explain
the logic of penalising the relatively well-run BW to cover the
payments agency's incompetence..
However, I'm sure you will join with me in admiration for the most
impressive performance - how effective Barry Gardiner, the so-called
Minister for Waterways, was in disposing of potentially awkward
questions at the meeting. He didn't attend.
Has anyone heard *any* comments from him about the cuts? Bring back
Larry Whitty!
.
Adrian
Adrian Stott
07956-299966
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