The authorities decide to quell the disquiet by opening up four pieces of footpath around the country. However, you cannot just decide to go for a walk because it’s a pleasant day.

The new pieces of footpath might be very short, might only be for a couple of days a month, might only be for members of the local branch of the Ramblers’ Association, might require tickets to be bought and paid for in advance, including the third party insurance, and might require identification numbers to be displayed so that walkers can be identified in case they misbehave.

Ludicrous as this scenario might seem, it is similar to what is currently faced by canoeists in England and Wales on rivers and canals, the canals accounting for most of the 2% for which use is permitted. It also applies to all other boaters. It is just that most other boats cannot reach waters which are as narrow, twisting, shallow, steep and rough as those which canoeists can use and they usually cannot be portaged round obstacles.

While the Land Reform Act has confirmed that all Scottish rivers are public rights of way, south of the border the situation has continued to deteriorate. In the 1980s there were public demonstrations by the Campaign for River Access for Canoes & Kayaks to draw public attention to the situation. CRACK was told that this was not the way to behave and that quiet diplomacy would bring an equitable resolution to the problem.

Two decades on it has achieved virtually nothing, despite a promise by Elliot Morley in 1997 that a Labour Government would help whenever possible.

DEFRA commissioned Brighton University to look into the situation and the subsequent report showed there was little unmet demand for access although they accepted that all the guidebooks to private rivers must be bought by somebody. They claimed that the problem could be resolved by access agreements.

After more than half a century of making negligible progress on agreements with an army of access officers, mirroring the lack of success on access agreements by ramblers, canoeists were highly sceptical. Nevertheless, Brighton University was again taken on under Dr Neil Ravenscroft, this time to produce some access agreements to show how it could be done.

Unenthusiastically

In October the results were presented in a launch at Bungay, hosted enthusiastically by the Environment Agency (EA) and attended by two government ministers, Barry Gardiner from DEFRA and sports minister Richard Caborn.

Success was claimed because agreements had been reached on all four of the rivers selected.

Canoeists were less enthusiastic. The four agreements covered less than a quarter of the paddleable water on those rivers. The ones for the Teme and the Wear were rejected out of hand by the British Canoe Union as being totally unacceptable.

It has been suggested that future proposals have more to do with limiting current uncontrolled use than to do with releasing new water.

The Teme offered less than 2km on a river which currently has widespread unapproved use, as long as use of the rest of the river ceases. The use would be allowed for six hours six times a month.

The 9km agreement for a section of the Wear is already used by so many rowers, hire boats and others that it is being called a boating agreement although the terms seem to apply only to canoeists. It is for members of approved clubs and allows four evenings a month in the summer plus winter mornings, with closure for over three months per year and whenever there are angling matches. All use of the upper river must cease and there is to be no rolling or such manoeuvres. The agreement stops short of the 16km of legal tidal river down to Sunderland. The adjacent Tyne has the only whole catchment access agreement in the country and still produces the country’s highest salmon catches without causing the value of angling licences to plummet, facts not mentioned in the report.

The third agreement is for the Waveney. Canoeists set up a 48km source to tidal water agreement in 2001, including installation of six launch platforms. The new agreement is only 33km long but is claimed to have located and obtained the permission of 95% of landowners, far more than canoeists managed with their meagre resources.

However, the new agreement stops 3km short of the lower tidal half of the river, isolating the Broads Canoe Hire centre and other touring craft from the Broads. It has been said that the whole agreement will be terminated if there is any use of this intervening section. The report is almost silent on the 2001 agreement.

Neither does it mention the fact that powered craft users want to take their navigation over the watershed to link the Broads with the rest of the inland waterways system.

Too polluted 

Finally, there is a 28km section of the Mersey. Until recently it was too polluted for fish. The banks are largely in local authority ownership so it is not clear why the public were being kept off in the first place. However, it is the only new water.

To the surprise of Brighton University, canoeists are showing little interest in this one, except for clubs on the river which now have some home water they may use legally. The team that advised the government of what canoeists want and do not want had not expected them to be more interested in clean white water touring rivers, largely missing from this report.

Everyone is keeping tight-lipped about the cost of this study, although a previous figure from Brighton University was £12,000/km to seek permission, not necessary successfully.

There is anecdotal evidence that DEFRA officials have been putting pressure on the various parties to have something to show and the whole thing has been done under the gaze of government ministers yet even the claimed total of 72km is only a tenth of 1% of rivers in England and Wales and there is no guarantee that the agreements will hold.

The timescale, manpower and funding needed to turn us from having the most repressive river access legislation situation in the world is mindblowing.

Whenever faced with intransigence, Brighton University has backed off even though it has picked easy rivers with claimed previous navigation histories. It is clear that landowners are more willing than anglers to permit access. Those who do not wish to share our rivers have no need even to talk about it.

An early action of the National Rivers Authority (NRA) was to publish a handbook to tell canoeists how to set about making access agreements. It was replaced by an EA booklet to do the same job. That has now been superseded by a Brighton University website toolkit on how to make agreements.

Canoeists who have been unable to make headway since the middle of the last century doubt that Brighton University has found something they have all missed, especially after a proportion of Waveney landowners have still not even been identified and threequarters of the selected rivers remain closed.

It is not clear whether all boaters and river swimmers need to comply with canoeists’ agreements or to set up their own.

If there is only one agreement, how will other users be represented and why should canoeists do all the work?

Having rejected the Wear agreement, will all Durham’s boaters now be ejected from the river?

Do we need some kind of agency to represent the interest of boaters? 

What is beyond question as far as boaters are concerned is the need for a change of river access legislation to meet the needs of a civilised country in the 21st century and bring England and Wales into line with Scotland and most of the rest of the world.