“What does BW do that needs to be in government hands?” BW’s core purpose is to look after immensely important national heritage assets. There are two obvious models for that: the National Trust and English Heritage.

I’ve been arguing for a while that the NT is the one to follow (and gave an address to that effect at the BW Annual Meeting last month). The waterways in general, not just those administered by BW, need more funding to stay still, let alone to get an “expanded” system (which actually means “reversing some of the 60s and earlier”). Significant extra funding isn’t going to come from Government, certainly not right now. There were a few glory years around the Millennium, aided by some very competent BW management at the time, but not now. So the only way to keep them going is massive volunteer involvement and harnessing wider public enthusiasm – at present the only non-negligible financial contribution is from boaters and there ain’t that many of us.

But in the early 90s BW (which, don’t forget, started life as part of the British Transport Commission, the same division as the docks and nestling next to the railways and road haulage) was run more like English Heritage: Government grant-in-aid kept things just about ticking over. Later that decade BW evolved to become English Heritage with a bit more commercial nous, so you got a series of fairly restrained canalside redevelopments, water transport, and the like helping to fund the core heritage task.

Since then the commercial angle has come to dominate, as a look at the changing make-up of BW’s Board demonstrates; and it’s far from clear that this has been a good thing. You’d expect that commercial property investment would have seemed like a clever plan until a few months ago, but actually BW was clearly in trouble this time last year (and embroiled, somehow, in an extraordinary public spat with an admittedly fairly bumbling DEFRA minister). And if you look carefully at the message coming out of BW in recent months, it’s changed significantly: no longer “largely self-sufficient waterways”, it’s now “40 years of public service”.

So to answer the question: there’s not much that BW does needs to be in Government hands; but a lot that does need to be outside the private sector. What’s interesting is that the OEP (Treasury-managed, seemingly – not Shareholder Executive, never mind DEFRA, so imposed from a long way away) is zeroing right in on the massive property estate. Will we see a rump “Waterways Conservancy” somewhere in the third sector? It might not be a bad thing.

Now about the OS…