5 Breaking down the barriers The target barriers Our research has identified in four specific locations the principal barriers that deter urban residents from using their local waterways. Tackling these barriers requires more progress to be made in: Providing attractive, accessible and well-maintained waterway environments; Developing a pro~active approach to reach out into local communities to provide information on the waterways and encourage regular use; Offering activities to provide positive experiences of the waterways and their potential; Targeting initiatives to tackle fears for personal security and concerns for the safety of children; We believe, however, that more than this will be needed. Tackling social exclusion requires changes in attitudes and policies at a wider level than the individual waterway and before we turn to the mechanisms to tackle the specific barriers we look first at this wider context in terms of four key players: Government: Local government; Navigation authorities; Organised waterway user groups. Mechanisms for inclusion: the wider context Government Integra! to Government's Waterways for Tomorrow [June 2000] is a commitment to encourage more people to use the inland waterways for leisure and recreation, tourism and sport, to promote them as a catalyst for regeneration, and to increase access to the waterways for the young, the disabled and the disadvantaged< This last is an important and welcome commitment but the public navigation authorities have been given no additional funding, other than for safety-related maintenance, to make this non-statutory commitment effective and no national guidance on how it should be best pursued< The Government sees it being achieved through partnerships with others (see below) but it is by no means certain that these partnerships will generate the resources for the crucial on-going maintenance of the waterway environment, even if they can be successfully deployed to finance its upgrading and improvement. 18 More recently, the Urban White Paper 'Our Towns and Cities: the future. Delivering an urban renaissance', has highlighted how most deprivation and exclusion occurs in urban areas. Its proposals include a wide variety of initiatives to tackle this problem< lt places great importance on the new Community Strategies which are to be prepared by local authorities, on the quality, design and value of open spaces (although it does not mention urban waterways), and on the need for community involvement Although it appeared late in our work, there are many connections between our findings and the issues it raises. Local authorities The White Paper gives a central role to local authorities in urban areas. Local authorities are key players as service providers, planning authorities and funding partners. The growth of their active involvement in waterway regeneration has been one of the most positive factors on the waterway scene in recent years: they are clearly the leading player on all issues relating to community development and therefore on the particular issue of social exclusion. The new Community Strategies which they are being asked to prepare will be essential tools in taking these issues forward. Waterways are part of the social as well as the physical fabric of local communities and therefore effective partnerships between the waterway authority and local authorities are crucial for achieving greater community use of the waterway. We say more about this below Local authority support is also vital to navigation authorities, commercial operators and voluntary groups in developing and maintaining the infrastructure which makes possible greater use of waterways. Boats require boatyards and wharves which on the Thames in particular, but also on waterways in other urban locations, are under pressure either from new neighbours or from the threat of redevelopment from more lucrative uses. If these are lost, passenger and community boats cannot be maintained to the required standards and will be forced to cease operating< Navigation authorities The smaller authorities Of the 30 or so navigation bodies which are members of the Association of Inland Navigation Authorities (AINA) only a handful of the smaller authorities responded to our request for information on initiatives they were undertaking< Of those who did so, for example the Basingstoke Canal Authority, the maJor activity appears to be modest but useful measures to improve access for physically disabled users and visitors. We suspect that the picture elsewhere among the smaller authorities is very fragmentary. Most are indeed very small with severe resource constraints on their activities but we believe that there may well be potential there for them to do more through partnerships with their local authorities and the voluntary sector. The situation for the three largest public navigation authorities- British Waterways (BW), the Environment Agency (EA) and the Broads Authority (BA) is, not surprisingly, very different British Waterways BW, whose waterways senve almost all the largest industrial cities in Britain, already operates by far the most varied package of community-oriented initiatives of the three< 'Our Plan for the Future 2000-04', published in July 1999, detailed progress on a variety of measures pledged in the previous (and first) plan< They included the progressive regeneration of the canal corridor in major cities such as Birmingham, London, Le1cester, Leeds and Sheffield through partnerships with city authorities; the partnership with the Fieldfare Trust in the Waterway Access for All project to improve access for those with disabilities, and a number of community-based education initiatives. The new pledges made in that plan included developing waterside events and festivals to enhance community interest in the waterways and new training and certification procedures to improve the contribution which volunteers make to them. We strongly support the BW focus on the improvement to the waterway itself and its adjacent environment because this creates the basic resource for the local community and we applaud the commitment in the Waterway Access for All partnership because this is not only valuable in itself but offers benefits to other users< We believe that BW now needs to fashion, area by area, initiatives for particular groups (the disabled, children and so on) into strategies for sustained use by the wider community. The Environment Agency and the Broads Authority We would expect the picture for the EA and the BA navigations to be unlike that for BW because neither operates in the BW environment and the balance of issues they face is differenL Both are nonetheless active on a number of fronts. The Agency, at its September 2000 AGM, adopted six action points to promote 'environmental equality'. They include: mapping out and identifying where there are social and environmental inequalities and sharing this information; providing better information and consultation techniques to contribute to community plans: working with key national and regional initiatives which are tackling social exclusion; further developing the skills and capacity of staff to work with stakeholders< We understand that these commitments are now being taken forward through the Agency's developing social policy framework into specific areas including navigation and recreation work. The Agency is actively promoting angling in inner cities as an activity which meets many of the objectives to overcome social exclusion and is turning the findings of the 1999 Fieldfare Trust report on recreation sites into practical guidance for disabled users< There are also a variety of noteworthy initiatives in the various Agency regions which combine outreach activities to excluded communities (e