John Bailey: Licence fee time - so here are my Top 10 EA failings

I guess hundreds of us, thousands even, are receiving our notifications around now. We’ll probably cough up the £30 or £40, double that if you fancy a cast for salmon, have a private grumble and get on with life.

It was the same last year, it will be the same next year, an angling Groundhog Day that is as reliable as the cuckoo used to be. I always feel a stab of guilt when I chunter about the EA because we all have known great on-the-ground people who have worked for it - has there ever been a nicer, more fish caring person than ex-fisheries member Graham Gamble I wonder?

But my regard for Graham, Nick and many more shouldn’t obscure the Agency’s endless failings. Here are my top 10 of those, grabbed off the top of my head... were I to think on, I could probably make up a top 100.

Barbel! Remember when we had loads of them? We’d like them back please (Image: John Bailey)

1: There’s endless whinging from the EA, a constant moan that there’s no money in the pot for anything worthwhile. Yet the annual budget is just shy of £2bn and not many of us can see where much of that is spent with many obvious good results on our fisheries. Indeed, does the money collected from us actually pay all the bureaucratic effort involved in raising it? Many suspect not. And indeed, is all the money collected from us in East Anglia spent on fisheries in East Anglia?

2: The Agency has just made a big deal of putting a Herefordshire farmer in jail for the dredging damage he did to the river Lugg. Excellent, but doesn’t this smack of simple PR? The Agency can flex its muscles and give a 70-year-old farmer a good kicking, but the seemingly omnipotent water companies that have appalling pollution records have an easier ride of it. If a fine ever is levied on one of them, it will be always be jokingly small.

3: If we look at general fishing offences, poaching and the like, the numbers ending in court are risible. And if there should actually be a case, the fines too are pathetically small. Enforcement surely should at least pay for itself?

4: What money the Agency does have, has all too frequently been spent on crackpot schemes or, if there has been sense behind them, they have been left to moulder with no attempt at upkeep. Surely it would be better to have fewer projects, seen through to the end?

5: The Agency also has a track record of spending enthusiastically on projects that have merit, but come in at eye watering expense. If money is as short as we’re told, perhaps better housekeeping is called for?

6: In part, this expenditure is down to a fixation on health and safety. Fine. We all know how such considerations dog every institution, but there have been some of the strangest examples that we anglers have seen... not least the bizarre mechanical hoist installed at one of the weirs so operatives can clean sluices in supposed safety.

7: Many fishery owners I know report log jams in the EA’s bureaucracy. Fishing Break’s latest newsletter details the hoops that the owner had to go through before he could stock his annual consignment of trout. All time consuming, stressful and of course, once again costly.

8: I think we’d all agree there’s an obsession at the Agency with doctrine and a determination to do things by the book - their book that is. A reluctance to even admit there’s a predation problem. Stocking restrictions that make little sense to anglers. The desire to remove our water mills that have served us well for centuries.

9: Canoeists pay no licence fee, nor do wild swimmers, just us lot. At least let us have some say in how our money is spent.

10: I’d happily pay my licence for an Agency that ran a tight ship, that listened to anglers, that spent our fees on visible projects that we could see sense and purpose in. I’d like less secrecy, more open debate and a great deal more flexibility. But will we ever get any of this? Will we be in exactly the same position next year? I guess we all know the answer to that one.