A very interesting debate. I'm new to this forum and am going to stick my neck out and admit to working for the EA. I'm not a bailiff but a Pollution Officer and much of my work over the last 13 years has been sampling and monitoring rivers, estuaries and the sea and dealing with incidents of pollution which occur in each of these areas. I did a lot of sea angling in my teens and am returning to the sport after about a 20 year break.
There are some very good points made here and a small fee to properly monitor and protect the fish stocks I think would be accepted by most responsible anglers. However I would want to see a REAL benefit from parting with an annual fee and this is something which I am concerned about. There is a drive by the Environment Agency's paymaster i.e. DEFRA to ever reduce the EA's budget and the EA has to make up the loss from charging more people or stakeholders(I hate that word)who interact with the environment.
We, as anglers, need to ensure that the driver is to get REAL things done and that the EA is seen to be accountable for the amount of money it would take from anglers. We don't need another stealth tax. Course anglers do benefit from the EA's activity, particularly with re-stocking. Equally, so should sea anglers.
The EA's jurisdiction is upto 3 Miles out so it won't be "staking out" Russian trawlers which scoop vast numbers of fish which concentrate in large numbers in deeper water. You are paying tax for another organisation to do this already.
Moving off in another direction slightly: we've all seen,in the hunting debate, how accepting a licence in the first place could have diffused attempts to ban the activity altogether.
Perhaps we could learn something from this?????
Cheers!
