The UK Canal & River Trust has published its ‘Canal & River Trust Annual Report for 2024/25’ which sets out the scale of work undertaken to safeguard the nation’s historic canals and their modern-day contribution to society. The Canal & River trust is the charity that cares for 2,000 miles of waterways across England and Wales.
Over the year, and in the face of the rising cost of materials, additional environmental regulation and more extreme weather events, the Trust delivered wide-ranging maintenance to care for the canal network whilst prioritising the service the charity provides to boaters and local communities.
More than £60 million was invested in winter maintenance across more than 200 projects, from installing 135 new handcrafted lock gates, to major inspections at landmark sites and repairs to centuries-old bridges, tunnels and wash walls. A further £21 million was spent upgrading 22 of the charity’s 74 large, raised reservoirs.
Alongside this, the Trust introduced its Better Boating Plan, developed with boaters and backed by £3 million of targeted investment to improve navigation. The charity’s dredging programme removed over 60,000 tonnes of material and improved over 40 miles of waterway, while over 6,800 tonnes of waste were collected, of which 98% was recycled or recovered through waste to energy.
The charity has also been campaigning to secure a sustainable future for the Monmouthshire & Brecon Canal, where new abstraction legislation threatens water supplies. It was also part of a multi-agency response to a major pollution incident from a canal-side business in Walsall.
David Orr, chair of Canal & River Trust, said: “Maintaining this nationally important infrastructure, keeping it safe and open, in turn allows the canal network to contribute positively to significant national challenges and policy goals, such as water security, protecting and enhancing biodiversity, and providing access to open space and nature for millions of people.
“We have engaged closely with the Labour government, aiming to build a new partnership exploring how we can contribute to their policy goals, while also enabling the canal network itself to remain resilient and a net contributor to the economy.”
As the nation’s largest canal charity, the Trust benefited from just under three-quarters of a million volunteer hours, with volunteers playing an essential role in repairing and maintaining canals and helping the organisation across nearly all aspects of its work.
The Trust continues to strengthen its financial resilience. While continuing to manage its designated investment fund responsibly, the Trust amended its investment policy to release more of that fund for its charitable objectives. This means that, although income was slightly lower than 2023/24, it maintained the uplift in charitable expenditure seen over the past six years. There were increases in spend on dredging and vegetation management across the network, whilst spend on day-to-day operations and customer service, and caring for the waterways, remained largely consistent with the prior year.
More than half of the charity’s income now comes from property, investments, utilities, donations and other funding – with an ambitious strategy to grow voluntary income tenfold over the next decade. With government funding reducing in real terms, income from boating exceeded the grant received from government, with each making up almost a quarter of the charity’s funds.
With boats and navigation at the core of the Trust’s work and recognising the significant changes in the use of the canal network over the last 30 years, the Trust set up an independent Commission to review the framework around boat licensing and the service delivered to boaters more generally. The Commission is expected to report in November.
Download the report: Canal & River Trust Annual Report 2024/25