Our citizens’ boater panel

We want boaters to play a genuine role in shaping the consultation before it opens. 

The panel will help us understand how different licensing arrangements and navigation requirements affect people's day-to-day lives, draft and test consultation questions, and ensure the consultation is fair, balanced and easy to understand. It will then reconvene after the consultation, to help us review the outcomes and determine any future changes, ensuring lived experience is at the heart of any changes.

We want the panel to reflect the diversity of the boating community. This includes people with different boating lifestyles, ages, backgrounds, locations, types of boat, mooring status, and types of boat use, including leisure, liveaboard and business boating.

Applicants will be asked to provide some information about themselves and their boating lifestyle. 

Applications will then be anonymised before selection takes place using an independent random selection tool designed specifically to create representative citizens’ panels. 

This helps ensure the panel reflects the boating community and that no single group or viewpoint dominates.

The panel will be selected using a stratified random selection tool provided by the newDemocracy Foundation, an organisation that supports representative citizens’ panels and assemblies.

Panel members will help us: 

• Explore how licensing arrangements affect day-to-day life on the waterways
• Identify practical challenges faced by boaters
• Review draft consultation questions
• Test whether consultation materials are clear and neutral
• Ensure lived experience is reflected throughout the consultation design

No. The panel will not have final authority on decisions. It will help shape the consultation and ensure a wide range of boating experiences are reflected before the wider public consultation begins. Members will also work with us to review the consultation outcomes to make sure any changes work on the cut.

The Citizens’ Boater Panel will reconvene after the consultation to review the findings and help us consider how feedback from boaters can be reflected in future policy development.

We are committed to a “comply or explain” approach. This means we will seek to incorporate feedback received through the panel and wider consultation wherever possible. If we are unable to do so because of legal, financial, operational or other constraints, we will explain clearly and transparently why.

The panel is one part of a wider engagement programme. Alongside the panel, we will continue to work with national boating organisations, boater representatives, local boating groups and individual boaters to help shape the consultation.

The Citizens’ Boater Panel helps shape the consultation before it opens. The public consultation, launching in December 2026, will be open to all boaters and stakeholders, giving everyone the opportunity to share their views.

No. The purpose of the panel is to help shape the consultation before it is launched. Panel members will help test ideas, challenge assumptions and ensure the consultation reflects real experiences from across the boating community. The consultation itself will remain open to all boaters, and no decisions will be made before feedback has been considered.