Dear P Smith,

Thank you for your request.

We are treating your enquiry as an Information Request under the
Environmental Information Regulations 2004/Freedom of Information Act
2000.

Your request will be dealt with by our National Request Team under
reference NR215881.

The Environment Agency covers England only.

For Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, please see the links below:

[1]http://www.sepa.org.uk/

[2]https://www.daera-ni.gov.uk/northern-ire...

[3]http://www.naturalresourceswales.gov.uk/

If you have provided any personal information (also called personal data)
in your enquiry, the Environment Agency will follow all applicable UK and
EU data protection laws in how we treat it. We may use your information to
help you with your enquiry, if necessary.

More details on your rights and how we will process your personal
information can be found in our Personal Information Charter:

[4]https://www.gov.uk/government/organisati...

We aim to provide you with the requested information as soon as possible
and no later than 20 working days after the date of receipt of the
request.

In the meantime should you have any queries regarding this request please
contact us at: [5][Environment Agency request email]

Kind regards,

Maria Bisby

Customer Service Adviser, National Requests, NCCC

Contact Centre Services - Part of Operations, Regulation & Customer

( Tel: 03708 506 506

: Web Site: [6]www.gov.uk/environment-agency

Click an icon to keep in touch with us:-

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Dear P Smith,

I am writing to you in relation to your request for information NR215881
which we received on May 4 2021.

Please be assured that we are looking into your enquiry but have
encountered delays that mean we are not currently in a position to
respond.

Please accept my apologies for this delay. We will be in touch as soon as
we are able.

Kind regards

National Request Team

National Customer Contact Centre

Contact Centre Services - Part of Operations, Regulation, Monitoring &
Customer

Environment Agency

External:  03708 506 506

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic affecting staff and resources we may
take longer than the 20 working days to reply. We will aim to provide an
answer as soon as we can.

Follow us on:

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Information in this message may be confidential and may be legally
privileged. If you have received this message by mistake, please notify
the sender immediately, delete it and do not copy it to anyone else. We
have checked this email and its attachments for viruses. But you should
still check any attachment before opening it. We may have to make this
message and any reply to it public if asked to under the Freedom of
Information Act, Data Protection Act or for litigation. Email messages and
attachments sent to or from any Environment Agency address may also be
accessed by someone other than the sender or recipient, for business
purposes.

References

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Dear P Smith,

Request for information about Environment Agency boat removal

Thank you for your request received on 4 May 2021 for information about
Environment Agency boat removal protocols on the River Thames and on
Anglian Waterways and please accept our apologies for the delay in our
response.

Please find attached 2 documents.

The ‘vessel removal specification’ is in use on both the River Thames and
Anglian Waterways, whilst the ‘vessel removal site checklist’ is used on
Anglian Waterways.

Please refer to [1]Open Government Licence which explains the permitted
use of this information.

If a boat is unregistered then under Article 16 of the Environment Agency
(Inland Waterways) Order 2010 we have the power to relocate or remove the
unregistered boat from our waterways.

The procedure is set out within this legislation. Article 16 (7) also
includes a power to sell the boat to recover the costs incurred in the
process.

We have stated publicly that, in relation to residential boats, we will
not exercise our Article 16 power until we have consulted on a national
process setting out how we will exercise this power in relation to
residential boats. Work to develop this is currently in progress and we
will consult upon it this year.

On the River Thames, we have the power to remove a boat that is “sunk,
stranded or abandoned” under Section 16 Thames Conservancy Act 1950.

The procedure is set out within this legislation. 

On Anglian Waterways, we have the power to remove a boat that is “sunk,
stranded or abandoned” under Section 21 Anglian Water Authority Act 1977.

The procedure is set out within this legislation. 

In relation to a boat moored to Environment Agency land we have the legal
right to apply for the people on the boat to be removed as trespassers
under a Civil Procedure Rules Part 55 action.  

If the boat is not removed at the same time then we may have the power to
seize and sell the boat under the court warrant.

Alternatively, we may serve the owner of the boat with a Torts
(interference with Goods) Act 1977 notice, telling them to collect the
boat.

The owner will also be informed that if they don’t collect the boat within
the specified time, then we will sell it and take our expenses out of the
sale proceeds.

We are unable to provide you with the following: ‘Anglian vessel removal
checklist flowchart’.

We are withholding ‘Anglian vessel removal checklist flowchart’ because
this is a draft piece of internal thinking that is not in use. It will be
replaced by the national process described above, which will be subject to
consultation.

As a public body we are required under the Freedom of Information
Act/Environmental Information Regulations to give reasons for this
refusal. 

We also need to show that we have considered the Public Interest balance
between refusal and disclosure. 

You can find the details in the appendix below.

If you are not satisfied you can contact us within 2 calendar months to
ask for our decision to be reviewed. We shall review our response to your
request and give you our decision in writing within 40 working days.

If you are still not satisfied following this, you can raise a concern
with the Information Commissioner, who is the statutory regulator for
Freedom of Information and the Environmental Information Regulations.  The
contact details are:

Information Commissioner’s Office

Wycliffe House

Water Lane

Wilmslow

Cheshire

SK9 5AF

Tel: 0303 123 1113

Website: http://ico.org.uk

Kind regards

National Request Team

National Customer Contact Centre

Contact Centre Services - Part of Operations, Regulation, Monitoring &
Customer

Environment Agency

External:  03708 506 506

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic affecting staff and resources we may
take longer than the 20 working days to reply. We will aim to provide an
answer as soon as we can.

Follow us on:

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Appendix

Relevant exceptions

The exceptions that apply to the withheld information are: EIR Regulation
12(4)

EIR Regulation 12(4)(d) applies because the request relates to material
which is still in the course of completion, to unfinished documents or to
incomplete data. To release information at this stage would be misleading
as the flowchart has never been introduced or used. We anticipate that a
new proposed national process will be completed and consulted in 2021.

The Public Interest Test

We have weighed the public interest factors in favour of maintaining the
exceptions and find that they outweigh the public interest factors in
disclosing the information. In carrying out the public interest test we
have considered:

1. Factors in favour of releasing the information:

·        General presumption of openness. The Environment Agency would
only withhold information if it is sure that disclosure would cause
substantial harm. Here the harm is the risk of disclosing early ‘thinking
in private’ influencing the decision making process by releasing
provisional stages and early thought processes ahead of the final
proposals and consultation.

2. Factors in favour of withholding the information:

·        Whether information would be misleading or cause alarm. There is
a public interest in ensuring that any documentation we disclose is
factually correct and not likely to be misleading to the public. This
factor is relevant to the release of the draft document referred to above.
The final proposals are due to be issued this year and consulted upon.

As indicated, upon assessing the factors in the public interest test, we
have assessed that in relation to the ‘Anglian vessel removal checklist
flowchart’, we find that the factors in favour of withholding information
outweigh the public interest factors in disclosing the information.

Information in this message may be confidential and may be legally
privileged. If you have received this message by mistake, please notify
the sender immediately, delete it and do not copy it to anyone else. We
have checked this email and its attachments for viruses. But you should
still check any attachment before opening it. We may have to make this
message and any reply to it public if asked to under the Freedom of
Information Act, Data Protection Act or for litigation. Email messages and
attachments sent to or from any Environment Agency address may also be
accessed by someone other than the sender or recipient, for business
purposes.

References

Visible links
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2. http://www.facebook.com/environmentagenc...
3. http://www.twitter.com/EnvAgency
4. http://www.youtube.com/EnvironmentAgencyTV
5. http://www.flickr.com/photos/environment...
6. http://www.linkedin.com/company/environm...