EA have announced the outcome of the ‘Consultation on Environment Agency Navigation boat registration charges from January 2025 at an extraordinary joint National Waterways Forum and National Waterways Advisory Group meeting. This included representatives from Area Stakeholder Groups.

They will increase charges by 9% for 2025 for River Thames, Anglian waterways and Medway navigation. This despite that many customers did not support the proposal to increase charges by 9%.

They say:

We ran the consultation for 12 weeks from 25 May 2024 to 16 August 2024.

We received a total of 1,726 responses to the consultation. This represents approximately a 10% response rate from our customer base. We would like to thank all those who participated in the consultation and took time to give such valuable feedback.   We thoroughly reviewed all the responses, including all the comments made. We considered all the information before making our final decision.

It was clear from the responses that many customers did not support our proposal to increase charges by 9%. However, after careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to progress as outlined in the consultation.

We have approval for this approach from the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Defra and HM Treasury. It has also been approved by the Environment Agency board.

This means we will:

• increase by 9% for 2025 for River Thames, Anglian waterways and Medway navigation
• increase in line with inflation using the Consumer Price Index (CPI) in subsequent years unless we consult on a different increase
• use this increase for negotiations about our national joint registration agreement

Our full consultation response document​ on Gov.uk details the responses to the consultation, the outcome and our response to the key themes raised​.

The revised legal charging scheme is also on Gov.uk