Crown Estate as dominatrix: ‘Once people have regulation, they like it’
published this on 2:02 am, Thursday, 5th November, 2009Business| Community News| Marine Environment| Sailing| Tourism activities | Comments (rss) | Respond | Ping |
In the ongoing case against the stubbornly independent Kames Bay holders of unlicensed moorings, these were the words of Peter Korbel, a marine consultant who acts for Bidwells LLP, the Crown Estate’s Scottish sea bed management company. Mr Korbel spends his time travelling Scotland’s west coast ‘ trying to persuade moorings owners of the benefits of Crown Estate regulation’.
From Mr Korbel’s evidence to Edinburgh Court of Session today, some are persuadable and many are not. Among the free spirits are the boat moorers in Bute’s Kames bay. They have traditionally put down moorings there for nothing, have Royal Charters to point to – giving Rothesay the right to be a free port, operating in the waters around the island – and see neither legal necessity nor advantage in paying the Crown Estate for a mooring licence.
In addition to its status as a test case, this has all the visceral attraction of David and Goliath and the men of Sherwood Forest.
Poor Mr Korbel’s activities smack of a character from Dad’s Army – from his own mouth in evidence. ‘Every time I went into the bay I would look to see if there were licensed mooring tags and I would see people on boats and try to convince them of the benefits of joining a system of regulation’.
You don’t have to laugh. You just can’t not laugh.
Much of what has been emerging comes equally close to pantomime. The picture is of a Crown Estate operation, thin on the ground, late to engage and busily motoring around unlicensed moorings talking up to deck-height recalcitrant boat owners, ‘trying to persuade them of the advantages of Crown Estate regulation’. Such conversations would be worth overhearing.
Then there are the obstacles set in the path of the upholders of the joys of regulation. Dr Darren Hurst, Bidwells west coast manager for the Crown Estate, said plaintively that: ‘It is very difficult to find out who owns the vessels themselves because there’s no registration system for leisure craft’.
Somehow the image is conjured of a little inflatable with an outboard, buzzing about an anchorage like a demented bluebottle, slapping stickers on mooring buoys ‘which are highly visible and not things you wouldn’t notice’ – and finding them completely ignored.
A chartered surveyor at Bidwells, Andrew Wood, accounted for the early lack of engagement with the issue by the Crown Estate by saying: ‘… there are a number of areas where people haven’t voluntarily come forward to enter into licensing agreements’. Well, this is the season where turkeys withhold their vote. The Crown Estate just haven’t clocked that in Bute it’s perpetual Christmas.
We reported on the background of the case as it began on Tuesday 3rd November – and we have covered the dispute on earlier occasions. Basically, challenged – on the basis of the Royal Charter issued to Rothesay by James VI – on its right to charge for sea bed moorings in Bute waters, the Crown Estate lodged a petition at the Court of Session in Edinburgh, asking for the right to lift and remove unlicensed moorings in the island’s Kames Bay.
The unlicensed mooring holders have a fighting fund raised by public subscription and the services of Kevin McBrearty QC, acting as Amicus Curiae in their defence against the Crown Estate Commissioners.
MR McBrearty produced some heavy hitters for the defence. One such was Michael Shand, a GIS cartographer from Glasgow University. He testified that the sea boundaries, of Rothesay, according to the Royal Charter, included most of the Firth of Clyde, including Pladda in the south and the Cloch in the north.
A Mr Harry Ellis, 16 years a resident of Bute and a prime mover in the resistance to the Crown Estate not only said that he had himself moored free in Kames Bay for 16 yars but that he had seen photographic evidence of moorings in the bay dating back to the late 1800s.
George McKenzie, former Corporate Services Manager with Argyll and Bute Council, gave evidence that moorings in Kames Bay had been used in the 1930s by laid-up liners and in the 1970s by redundant oil tankers. (Note that the current layups in Loch Striven are anchored not moored. By law, all retain the right to free and unhindered navigation and anchorage in British waters.)
John McMillan, Chair of the Port Bannatyne Moorings Association testified that his family had moored boats in Kames Bay for over two hundred years.
The case continues tomorrow, with counsel starting their closing submissions.
Perish the day we get to like regulation.
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