Stroud District Council committed to Severn and Thames canal plan

The council says it remains committed to the plan for a canal link between the Severn and the Thames

A council has said it still "supports the general principle" of restoring a canal link despite councillors failing to adopt it as part of its local plan.

Stroud District Council and partners have been working on restoring the canal network between the River Severn and the Thames since 2008.

So far, the project has received almost £10m in national lottery funding.

But councillors did not adopt the scheme in the 20-year local plan saying it fell outside of that time scale.

'Unrealised and unprotected'

Conservative councillor for Berkeley Vale, Haydn Jones, said that without the amendment, the vision of restoring the canal link between the Severn and the Thames would remain "unrealised and unprotected," the Local Democracy Reporting Service said.

"The restoration project has been a rare theme of common cross party agreement since the turn of the millennium but after last night that appears to have drained away," he said.

A spokesperson for the council said the end goal of joining the two rivers was beyond the time frame of the 20-year plan.

"The council's current local plan covers the next 20 years and supports the general principle of restoration of the canals within the district," they said.

They added, at the moment, it was focused on reconnecting the area's canals with the national inland waterway network.

The plan to link the two rivers 'could take decades'

Vice chair of the Cotswold Canals Trust, John Newton, said he was confident the council was still supportive of the project.

He told BBC West it could be decades before work on reconnecting the two rivers could start, and that it would need the input of multiple local authorities, land owners and the public.

"It is a much longer-term vision, and currently there is no planning application to continue the work east of Stroud - that could take years."

Mr Newton added: "I think the district has the same vision, but is so far into the future that at the moment there is no current plan for it - in due course we are looking to (connect the two rivers) but it could take decades."