Rebuilding trust before the Canal & River Trust consults

The Canal & River Trust plans a 14-week consultation on the future of boating from December 2026, but its build-up matters as much as its questions. An independent commission found relations with boaters strained by distrust, and that finding is now reshaping engagement design before a single formal question is asked.

What is the Canal & River Trust consulting boaters on?

The Canal & River Trust’s boater consultation is a 14-week exercise planned for December 2026, covering boat safety, support for boaters, navigation requirements, fair sharing of waterway space, and management of the canal network. It will be an important period of pre-engagement built around a new Citizens’ Boater Panel of around 40 boaters.

That panel, along with national boating organisations, boater representatives and local groups, will spend months helping shape the questions before they are formally asked.

The scope is broad by design. Behind the headline themes sit substantial questions about licensing reform, enforcement, congestion and welfare, all connected to a single underlying issue: how the Trust manages a network built two centuries ago for freight, now serving a much wider and more varied boating population, including a growing number of people for whom a boat is also their home.

These questions can be grouped under four themes: relationships with liveaboard boaters, clarity around navigation requirements, fairness in how waterway space and costs are shared, and the effectiveness of the tools available to manage the network.

That breadth is not incidental. Nor is the decision to spend months preparing the ground before asking a single formal question. Both reflect where this consultation came from.

What did the Independent Commission on Boat Licensing find?

The immediate catalyst is the Independent Commission on Boat Licensing, an independently led review of the legal and operational framework for boat licensing, whose report was endorsed by the Trust’s Board in late 2025. Its conclusions went well beyond licensing technicalities.

The Commission described relations between the Trust and a significant number of boaters as poor, marked in places by distrust and suspicion. It highlighted particular tension with people who live aboard their boats and concluded that the relationship needed a reset, not simply new rules.

Even the Commission’s own creation illustrates how deep that distrust runs. Some boaters suspected it existed to legitimise changes the Trust had already decided upon. The Commissioners rejected that interpretation, but the fact the concern arose at all says something about the starting point for everything that follows.

Where institutional trust is fragile, the process used to reach a decision becomes as contested as the decision itself. Who wrote the questions. What has already been decided. Whose evidence counts. Those questions shape how any consultation will be received, largely independent of its eventual content.

That is the environment the Trust is now designing a consultation into, and it explains why so much attention has gone into the period before the formal exercise begins.

How is the Trust designing engagement differently this time?

The Trust’s response has been to treat consultation design as something to build with boaters, not just for them. The Citizens’ Boater Panel will not simply react to draft proposals.

Members will explore how current arrangements affect daily life, identify practical problems, review draft questions and test whether consultation material is clear and neutral, then reconvene after the consultation closes to consider the findings alongside the Trust.

Panel members are being chosen using a stratified random-selection tool supplied by the newDemocracy Foundation, a method that selects participants to reflect the wider population’s mix of characteristics, rather than relying on those most willing or able to volunteer repeatedly for engagement work. The aim is a panel that reflects different boating lifestyles, ages, backgrounds, locations and mooring arrangements.

Alongside the panel, the Trust is running parallel workshops with national boating organisations, boater representatives and its Navigation Advisory Group, and gathering feedback through local boating groups and events across the network. The panel sits within that wider structure rather than replacing it.

The Trust has also committed to a “comply or explain” approach: incorporating feedback where it can, and publicly explaining where legal, financial or operational constraints prevent it from doing so. Used consistently, that has the potential to move the eventual report beyond a familiar “you said, we listened” formula towards a clearer account of what changed, and why some things did not.

What does this history mean for the consultation ahead?

None of this guarantees an easy process. But it reflects a specific lesson drawn directly from the Commission’s findings: where trust in an institution is contested, how a consultation is built matters as much as what it eventually asks.

For practitioners elsewhere, the transferable point is not the specific mechanics of a citizens’ panel or a random-selection tool. It is the sequencing. Testing draft questions and material with the people affected, before they are locked into a formal consultation document, can surface problems that would otherwise only emerge once the exercise is already facing criticism.

Whether that investment in design translates into a consultation that boaters actually trust is a separate question. It depends on how the Trust handles a set of difficult trade-offs once the formal process begins, from questions of representation to the breadth of what is being asked.

How tCI Can Help

Advice and Guidance
A tCI faculty member will work alongside you to support the development of your decisions and engagement approach. We provide independent, constructive advice at critical stages, helping you strengthen stakeholder mapping, test communication strategies, and plan robust post-decision engagement. Our role is to act as a critical friend, offering practical recommendations grounded in consultation law and good practice that build confidence in your process.

Risk Assessment
Early identification of legal, political or reputational risks in your engagement approach. Using tCI’s five-risk methodology, we spot gaps before challenge arises, helping you strengthen stakeholder communication and demonstrate procedural fairness from the outset.

Executive Briefings
Concise updates for senior leaders on consultation law, engagement duties and post-decision risks. Helps boards and leadership teams make confident, defensible decisions when under pressure, with clear guidance on what good engagement looks like after difficult choices are made.

Whether you’re preparing for a high stakes service change or building defensible evidence for complex decisions, we can help.

Contact tCI: hello@consultationinstitute.org