As far as I know, no new marinas with over 100 berths came on stream anywhere in that year. There were a couple of minor extensions to existing marinas and one or two new mooring facilities of the order of 50 berths, and that was that.

Meanwhile at least 750 new narrowboats have been built.

Maybe there were a thousand.

And the same in the year before that, and the year before that? The statistics are pitiful. No one really knows.

The Canal Boatbuilders Association, which I have pressed on a number of occasions, certainly don't - they blame the hull builds by non-members and private fitouts. And even BW's licensing department cannot tell us how many new licences they issued to new boats, rather than boats moving from other navigation authorities.

And now there are the Polish imports, in which BW's marina operation is happy to act as agent - although it seems to be in no hurry to build the berths to take them.

Meanwhile, part of the cunning plan to make BW selffinancing by 2012 is to increase the number of boats on its canals and rivers by roughly 12,000 - a staggering increase of 40%. And the entrepreneurial Chris Hill's The New Boat Co will kick-start the exercise by putting 200 new British and 50 Polish built narrowboats onto the system in 2005 - if all goes to plan.

Holy Gridlock - with no room at the marina-inn - seems just around the corner. How can this be when the canals are booming? Where are those stars of wonder, the new marinadevelopers - both British Waterways' new marina flagship BWML and the private sector operator?

The explanation is the common misconception amongst boaters, landowners, planners and others, that marinas - both coastal and inland - are moneymaking machines. On the canals, the evidence of very limited returns on investment is all there for the asking. Despite some 2,000 miles of canal and, associated with that, 4,000 miles of bank side - and most of it in rural locations, where agriculture is in meltdown-mode - few marinas have ever been built.

Huge increase This may seem improbable given the huge increase in the restored network - 200 miles alone came on stream in 2002, which BW proudly told us was more than was built in the peak year of historic canal construction.

But there are long stretches with no marinas of any size and few, if any, canal services - and little prospect of this changing. If you think this is an exaggeration, try finding a mooring or just breaking down on the restored Kennet & Avon Canal.

Of greater concern, most of the marinas that have been built were completed by the early 1980s. A classic case is 120 berth Fenny Compton Marina, which was built in the early 1970s, and to this day is the only moderately large marina on the whole of the South Oxford - one of the most popular canals with boaters.

(A small 32 berth marina is currently under construction by Kingsground Narrowboats at Enslow Mill Wharf - the only new even modest development in over 30 years. ) Whilst the associated parish and district councils may congratulate themselves on seeing off marina developments, their victory has been an own goal. Demand has been met by a proliferation of linear moorings - for which no planning permission is required - growing in density in the southward direction, until they are at their ugliest in the heart of historic Oxford, where importantly the canal meets the Thames.

And these eyesores are repeated throughout the canal network - especially in the London area - with BW in desperation seeking more linear moorings as the only pressure release valve for the growing demand - not to mention the additional revenue it then receives.

BW's South East service manager Murray Geddes says he has a three year waiting list of 547 boats on his books - versus 569 BW official long term moorings in the whole region.

He is looking to identify more "short-term" long term mooring sites until the prospective 641 new offline berths - potentially being built by the private sector - come on stream.

Angry response This has brought an angry response from users and the trade. How long is "short term"? And - realistically - will even half those moorings ever be built?

The canals are littered with broken dreams in terms of marina schemes which may have made the planning stage, but got no further - and are consequently log-jamming other possible developments.

Our Byzantine planning system has much to blame for what has happened, open as it is to blatant political manipulation - of the type the Bard described as "that blunt monster with uncounted heads, that the discordant wavering multitude can play upon".

I am constantly having brought to my attention the antics of planning authorities, with the lone developer facing a raging sea of local hostility.

If nothing else it takes years to get anything through. I have had my own taste of it at Braunston Marina - 10 years in the case of our marina extension and 12 to get the car park to go with it. Mike Cook's extension to Upton Marina has been on the drawing board for 15 years, with five spent in the actual planning process, and it will only finally be going ahead in the summer of 2006.

Ken Oatley, of the proposed Lower Foxhangers Marina on the Kennet & Avon, says it has taken him over 14 years and £70,000 in professional fees just to get to the start line for a scheme for which he obtained outline planning permission in 1989.

Sometimes the planning process takes so long, that death intervenes. The late Peter Pratt battled for years with yet another bloody minded district council to build his marina on a coal extraction site on the edge of Tamworth - which he sadly never lived to see in its finished form as Alvecote Marina.

The late Graham Enfield met a similar fate with his unfinished 68-berth marina at Gayton Junction, which is now up for sale at an asking price of £950,000 including the former Navigation Inn. His son is quoted in the local newspaper as saying, "Unfortunately because of inheritance tax we have to pay, we have had to sell the property. There is no way we could afford to finish what my father started."

Public enquiry Par for the course in obtaining planning permission is the huge cost of a public enquiry, when £20,000 or more can disappear - just like that. I and my neighbours at both Welton Fields Marina and the new Wigrams Turn Marina, have had our taste of this.

A crumb of comfort has been offered by the 2002 publication of the report Water-based Sport and Recreation: The Facts, commissioned by the Department of Environment Transport and the Regions (DETR), as part of its wider research into access to the countryside. It stated:

There is much concern about the lack of planning policy guidance (from central government) on water-based sport and recreation ? that has resulted in an unfavourable planning environment for some operators, particularly inland marinas.

The report recommends the urgent need for that planning policy guidance for what it saw as "much needed improvements for water-based sports and recreation".

These Whitehall reports have a habit of doing little more than gathering dust. But with an independent endorsement like this, it is time for all those who speak for the canals to bring home to central government the urgent need for change - and none more so than by BW, which like it or not, is part of that government.

It seems little short of the absurd that millions of government money is being poured into canal restorations and everything possible is being done by local government to frustrate their full re-use by the boater.

With the gift of hindsight, anyone who ever wanted to build an inland waterways marina should have done it before 1995. I emphasise that year, as it marked a watershed for the canal marina industry through the implementation of the Landfill Tax.

This added enormously to the cost of carting spoil away to landfill sites. It more or less killed off any potential development where the spoil could not be spread and lost within the "cartilage" - a big word which most of us had to look up - of the site.

Bitten the bullet One of the few who has bitten the bullet of carting the spoil away is Tim Parker of Black Prince with his new 200 berth marina at Wigrams Turn, on the Grand Union Canal in Warwickshire, which opens in March 2005.

The cost of removing 120,000 cubic metres of spoil to make the eight acre water-space was £1.2million, a near doubling of the quotation he received in 1994, when he first submitted his plans - most of which was due to Landfill Tax, with a topup from higher diesel and road fund licence costs.

With planners now increasingly hostile to the creation of mounds in flat landscapes future potential sites will be confined to those few places which meet a number of criteriae. These will have to include a downhill slope away from the canal where a cut and fill marina basin can be achieved on site.

As a reverse whammy to the Landfill Tax, if you do not have good clay on site then getting hold of it to line a marina basin is very difficult and costly, as quality quarried clay is in demand to line the new environmentally friendly landfill sites.

Also without good clay, BW will insist - quite reasonably - that the basin is lined with plastic sheeting, which is then covered for at least a metre with good quality compacted clay. The consequence is that low-cost fixed pontoons built on scaffold poles driven into the ground are out.

Instead it's high-cost floating pontoons - anchored to concrete blocks craned with great care to their exact position on the good quality clay - and mind you don't pierce that plastic sheeting.

But even if you do have a downhill slope site on good clay, you think you can comply with all the planning policies, and the landowner is prepared to be sensible with his price - there is now the hurdle of having to complete a successful Environmental Impact Assessment (EIS).

Whatever its original worthy intentions, the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIS) has all become a bit of a face saving exercise for planners and those with deep pockets who are behind massive development schemes - many on flood plains - for which the EIS is little more than another incidental development cost. Driving these studies is a new breed of expensive professional - the ecologist.

Horrendous cost However for canal marina developers - which, bar BW, are private family businesses with very limited capital - the cost of carrying out a full EIS is horrendous. The going rate for 10-15 acre development is around £10,000 for the initial "scoping document" and £40£50, 0000 for the final report.

And there is no guarantee at any stage that that £60,000 report will even support what you want to do - or even be acceptable to the planners or BW which, wearing yet another hat, is a consultee to the planning process.

Mike Cook of Upton Marina has spent considerably more - £300,000 on the EIS for his proposed 350 berth extension which includes 200 waterside properties on a 60 acres site, which took nearly two years to complete as it had to go through a whole year's nature cycle.

He reckons that the marina alone absorbed half of it, and he is still paying out £6,000 a year for the continued monitoring of two badgers who will need to be moved when construction finally starts in the summer of 2005.

Ken Oatley now wants to increase the size of his proposed K&A marina basin to also include 40 holiday homes and a pub, in order to make the marina viable. He is now confronted with a £120,000 EIS cost. The cost of the whole development - with the intention of simply financing an on-going marina, with a build cost of around £1 million - will be £4.5 million.

The damaging effect of the new EIS requirement is already becoming apparent. A BW regional manager told me of a proposed new marina he had been consulted on by a farmer, which had been abandoned because the farmer simply did not want the risk of carrying out an abortive EIS. Indeed the addon cost of £60,000 of dead money was enough to make the development not worth the candle anyway.

The proposed development was to join some old gravel pits together and link them to the adjacent canal to form a new 200-berth marina. The farmer has now instead turned the ponds into a Koi fishery, which required no EIS, no disposal of excavated material and no huge infrastructure investment.

Opportunity lost The BW manager said in his opinion this was the only site on a particular major canal to the west of Birmingham that had all the necessary ingredients to develop as a new large marina - and that opportunity had now been lost forever. He was particularly sad as the canal restoration projects nearing completion in the area would now be devoid of local boating facilities that would give new life and vibrancy to those painstakingly restored waterways.

And talking of BW, it is appropriate here to consider its role in the EIS. Under planning regulations, BW is now automatically a consultee on all development applications around the canals. It therefore receives copies of the supporting EISs, on which BW's growing army of ecologists is expected to comment. Indeed with its perceived expertise on waterway environmental issues, planners look to BW to give a lead in responding to EISs, as the planners themselves do not have the in depth experience here.

So BW's role becomes pivotal.

I am of the view that BW, with its many chums in government, should be more proactive in seeking a less draconian planning regime. I would argue that the EIS requirement should go, and that it should simply be replaced by the requirement that BW's ecologists approve proposed schemes - as they always did in the past.

With agriculture and the countryside in crisis and the need for farming to diversify, now is the time to act. It is a nonsense that those couple of canal-side fields, to which no one had ever previously given a passing glance, and where the farmer could plough, pesticise and pollute with muck spray to his heart's content, should suddenly be treated as if they were nature reserves.

However at the root of the problem is the low financial return on the huge infrastructure investment, assuming you ever get the scheme through the purchase and planning mazes and build it - something I gather that even BWML is starting to recognise.

Mooring income received from the boater - which some perceive as manna from heaven - is probably after petrol, alcohol and tobacco, the most heavily taxed income in this country.

There is firstly VAT, then business rates linked to mooring income, and BW's 9% connection charges. If you have still made a profit after costs, then there is income or corporation tax. Added to this is 4% stamp duty on the land purchase. Then there are those huge construction costs, which are not tax deductible. There is 40% capital gains tax when you sell the business. But if you die still owning it, there is 40% inheritance tax, which as we have seen, could take the business from your successors.

So few prepared It is not surprising that so few are prepared to put their heads above the planning parapet, let alone build new marinas.

One of the few public bodies to recognise the low returns is, of all things, the Rating Valuation Office. After years of lobbying by The Yacht Harbour Association, marinas are now no longer left to the mercy of local valuation offices. Instead they are dealt with centrally by a small experienced body, which understands them - the head man himself being a keen Broads dinghy sailor.

Only recently the office has agreed to a new, even lower formula that reflects the limited returns marinas make on their disproportionately high capital investment - if they make 10% they are doing well. This is proof indeed that marinas are not flowing with quite the milk and honey that some would have us all believe.

All this brings into sharp focus the issue of just what is the future for large scale canal marina developments, which can offer the full range of services including slippage and dry docks and off-line moorings to cater for the 750 plus new boats coming onto the canals each year?

Tim Parker of Black Prince Narrowboats estimates the cost of his new 200 berth marina at Napton at £2.5 million, a sum that stretches the traditional canal family business beyond its limits.

Today there is no major leisure group involved on the canals. After Hawley Leisure's disastrous involvement with Ladyline in the early 1980s, the PLCs have come and gone, with only BW's BWML and the private sector operators - most family businesses - still there.

There is only one body capable of addressing the scale of problem and that is BW. Last year, to general astonishment within the trade, BW invested £21 million into a canal-side office block in Camden, London - with no perceivable benefit to its main customers, the various canal users.

Taking the Napton figure of £2.5 million, the money used buying that Camden office block could instead have been used to build about nine marinas, which could either have been leased to BWML or the private sector.

This after all is what French regional governments/municipal authorities have been doing for years with their marinas - both coastal and inland - and it has worked well.

BW has a massive property portfolio; enough to attract the attention of the Tories as a target for potential government sell-off. If BW is serious about increasing the number of boats on its waterways by 40% in eight years, then it should begin unlocking some of its property portfolio and investing the proceeds into urgently-needed boating facilities - and thus keeping its money safe from the Tory sharks who, next time, could just be back in the water (the Waterways Minister Alun Michael has certainly helped that process, wearing his anti-foxhunting hat. ) At the moment, for BW it seems to be anything else but - be it pubs, office blocks or even fishponds. It begs the question, are the planning risks of building new marinas even too big for BW? Or are the investment returns just too small?

So a final word from BW's James Froomberg, - who is controversially both commercial director of BW and chairman of its marina subsidiary BWML.

This was in response to my emailed question, "Do you have a new build marina likely in 2005 - or at least starting one?"

His reply: "I don't think BWML will be opening a new build in 2005 but hopes to secure some deals resulting in brand new marinas dug out and opened soon after?. The BW team round the country have a number of 'hot prospects' from 3rd parties who want to progress new developments or expansions."

Jam tomorrow, or log-jam?