Chris wrote: > I have just done the following exercise. My first boat was 25 feet long and acquired in 1967 my licence fee then was £12.10 s and that included mooring which was not charged separately then. My present boat very slightly shorter and in the next lowest category cost this year Licence £352+mooring of £608 giving a grand total of £960. Applying the inflation indicator from 1967 to now, a factor of X 13, or in licence terms £162.50 the real increase in this part of boating costs is £795.50 or 490% and would have been even higher if my boat was few inches longer. > How much more of my pension do they want before I give up?
You make a very valid point but the sad thing is that BW don't care how many long-term boaters have to give up. As long as you can sell the boat, they continue to receive licence/mooring income from that boat and, all the while, there are more boats coming onto the system. So, in reality, there will always be an increasing boat population. It doesn't matter to BW whether your boat is owned by someone called Chris or someone called Roger........as long as it's licensed (and they don't seem good at enforcing that either). I was given info last night that suggests that Amber Boats alone (built in Gdansk, Poland) are importing one boat per week, and that's just one boatbuilder of the many producing for the canals. Are the boats being scrapped off the system that fast? I'll leave you to judge. Roger
