Copied below is a letter I received earlier to-day from the E.A. after an incident on my local river last week-end with anglers fishing out of season without rod licences. Hats off to the E.A. for acting upon this quickly.
Hello Shaun,
It was good to hear that our boys were able to resolve the issue on the river last weekend. I’m pleased that the system we have in place in Midlands is catching offenders.
I thought it would be useful to let you know what we do with information that we receive.
We encourage all reports to be made on our incident hotline 0800 807060. This line is manned 24hrs every day of the year. Using this line ensures that every report is recorded and forwarded to an enforcement officer. We endeavour to get a fisheries enforcement officer to speak to the informant as soon as possible after the call is received. We have people on duty every day of the week. We don’t aim to deliver a 24 hours attendance service but during the daytime there is a good chance that somebody who is a fisheries enforcement professional will call back to get more information and assess whether attendance is appropriate and practical. It may be that our enforcement officers are at the opposite end of the region, in which case the report is still valuable to us as it will be used to plan our future operations. We constantly review intelligence received to pinpoint hotspots and emerging threats. Since adopting this approach 18 months ago, our rod licence evasion rate has jumped from 1.5% to over 6%. Increasing the threat of detection encourages more anglers to buy licences and this is reflected in our sales figures.
There will be many anglers who are not checked in a lifetime. As you will appreciate it depends on where you fish. I have had my licence checked twice in 37 years and I would not expect to have it checked again in my lifetime. Considering the remoteness of where I fish it would not be good use of bailiff time to walk 3 miles of the River Wye to find a lone angler who might be there, or may not. High footfall combined with known high evasion waters are where we concentrate most of our effort – but not exclusively.
There was a national licence blitz over the recent bank holiday weekend and we checked 1,110 licences at popular waters in the Midlands alone. 82 offences were detected.
It would be useful if you could help spread our gospel amongst your audience. The key messages are:
1. Report promptly on 0800 807060.
2. Give specific details such as what people are doing, descriptions, how many, vehicle reg, methods being used, any fish seen removed.
3. Every report is valuable to us.
4. If we don’t know about it, we cannot do anything about.
It’s surprising how many reports that we get are second hand, happened 3 weeks ago, vague, not an offence etc. As you can tell, I am on a bit a mission to try and improve the quality of reporting to help us better target our work.
Lets hope for more success. Keep in touch.
Regards
Al
Al Watson
Environmental Crime (Fish) Team Leader
Environment Agency Midlands Region
01684 864375 / 7-22-4375
al.watson@environment-agency.gov.uk
Report what you’ve seen promptly!
Who, what, where, when, why, how.
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