Sort yourselves out, you are all in the same box!

We all have our strengths and Accounts are not mine (is it a coincidence that the numbers at the bottom are exactly the same?); so I am normally abroad when the Harbour Board considers its accounts and sets the budget for the next season. However, not this year.

Apart from the formal signing off, there was the start of an intriguing debate which centred on the relationship between the Harbour Board and South Hams District Council. As I am sure well-informed readers know, the Harbour Board is formally a sub-committee of full Council and the Council is the Harbour Authority. The job of the Board is therefore to advise the Council how to be a good Harbour Authority (there is a Yes Minister version of this which is much longer).

So far so good and, because the Harbour Board needs to build up reserves, there is a glass wall between the Board’s accounts and the Council’s, with the Harbour Board being self-financing, and required by law to operate a balanced budget (which, being interpreted, means not making a profit).

Under the current arrangements, the Harbour Board is responsible for everything wet (like pontoons and moorings) and SHDC is responsible for everything dry (like slipways, quays and the Jubilee Pier). The requirement for a balanced budget means that the Board should not make a profit even to pass to SHDC to repair a slipway. But what if SHDC were to allow some shore-based assets like a slipway to be slipped to the other side of the glass wall? The budget would still be balanced, no profit would be made – but the slipway would be repaired. Obviously there would be a small increase in Harbour charges; but the Harbour would end up in a better place and would be able to move forward in times when local authority funding is locked down.

Will any of this happen? Who knows? But it is becoming increasingly clear that, just as holiday accommodation has to be of the highest class to be able to be let, so visitors and residents alike increasingly expect a harbour to have slipways and shore-based facilities which are as safe, well-maintained and modern as the pontoons and equipment afloat. They see the Harbour as a whole and aren’t too interested in the niceties of the distinctions between SHDC, the Harbour Authority and the Harbour Board. As my father used to say when grinding the gears of his Wolseley “sort yourselves out, you are all in the same box!”.