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IWA Survey Shows Growing Participation In Waterway Restoration

In the summer of 2009, The Inland Waterways Association's Restoration Committee distributed a survey questionnaire to voluntary bodies concerned with waterway restoration and construction schemes in the United Kingdom; the vast majority being IWA Corporate Members.

The questionnaire was in three sections; one seeking factual information about each restoration scheme and its voluntary body, another seeking opinions of IWA’s assistance and relevance to each scheme and a further (new for 2009) asking about the training needs of the bodies.

Over 90% of restoration bodies responded. An analysis of opinions expressed has been circulated within IWA and will be considered by IWA’s Restoration Committee when making future plans and changing procedures. The responses to the training questionnaire will be used in developing a skills training scheme for waterway restoration. The analysis of the factual information provided gives some useful information about the scale and growth of waterway restoration as well as indicators of which policies might be of benefit and of ‘what the others do’. An analysis of the factual information has been distributed to every restoration body that responded to the survey.

The survey questionnaire and factual analysis are available to download from the IWA website HERE

The survey factual analysis is intended to enable voluntary restoration bodies to identify those general characteristics of restoration bodies that lead to success and to enable them either to apply those characteristics to their own schemes or to compare their progress. The survey also provides accurate indicators of the current scale of restoration. Perhaps the most significant of these is that the membership of restoration bodies responding to the survey has grown from 17,400 in 1995 and 27,400 in 2002 to 32,700 now (excluding IWA and voluntary labour provided by IWA's Waterway Recovery Group).

Other headline indicators of the growth of waterway restoration are that 1179 miles are now under active restoration, compared with 1039 miles in 2002 and 770 miles in 1995 with 555 miles of navigation fully restored and re-opened since the IWA was founded in 1946.

Speaking on behalf of IWA Vaughan Welch chairman of Restoration Committee said:

"The survey shows a healthy growth both in numbers of waterway supporters actively involved in supporting restoration around the country, and despite a lack of funding from government and navigation authorities, underlines a determination by volunteers to make restoration happen as witnessed by the growth in the length of waterways under active restoration. We have come a long way from the early days when IWA was founded to prevent waterways from being closed and filled in, but there is still much to do”.