Why should the price of a mooring vary with the cost of running the mooring?
That simply isn't how the market works. That price will depend on supply and demand. At present, demand exceeds supply, so the price will go up (and is doing so in most places, I believe). I would expect that to be the basis of BW's defence in any Ombudsman complaint. And I would expect BW to be successful. Adrian The flaws of the market have been known for decades and were fluently expressed in Hardin's 1950s paper 'The Tragedy of the Commons'. Hardin's point was that where there was a 'Common' - a good which all benefited from but no-one owned - without some regulation for the common good, the market would ensure that the resource was destroyed. Examples are fisheries policy and climate change, where attempts are now belatedly being made to ensure that the market does not destroy the food and survival of all. Two current spectacular failures in national transport policy are air travel (where the market ensures fares do not reflect their environmental cost) and rail travel (where the market ensures that fares are pitched so high that car travel is a cheaper choice despite its environmental costs). The difference is that the demand for holiday travel is 'elastic' (people will travel more if they can afford it) but the demand for travel to work is 'inelastic' (people have to get to work). The moorings market has a high 'hysteresis' (lag in responding to pressures) because of the capital tied up in boats - at present people will pay what they have to moor the boats they have bought but this assumes boats will hold their value. Especially in the case of historic boats, with high metal prices, their scrap value may exceed their resale value. The issue for the waterways is whether they are seen as a 'Common', i.e. whether all benefit from access to them and their history, or whether the destruction of a system, which could have benefited all, by the market should be accepted, in the way which has occurred for fisheries, climate and transport. Specifically, I do not feel that Adrian, as a Canadian, should be speaking for the interests of market forces in the UK waterways, at a time when the Spanish owners of BAA appear to be subordinating the UK national interest in favour of their own market-driven cashflow. The history of whaling shows that, where a resource grows slower than market interest rates, the market favours destroying the resource and investing the profits elsewhere. BAA and BW executives will probably move on once they have taken their profits and destroyed the resource. Sean
