Is it the Environment Agency who should adapt or die?

 

Greetings!   I’m not old enough to remember the Dick Barton radio detective shows of the 1940’s and 50’s. Nor do I suspect is Emma Howard Boyd, Chair of the Environment Agency (EA), but my goodness how she invoked the spirit of Barton as, with one mighty bound, she freed the EA from responsibility for the pollution in our rivers for the next 30 years in her press release last week ahead of COP26 entitled, Adapt or Die.   It a classic of its kind, invoking global problems as an excuse for local failings. Large on Doomsday rhetoric it both says there is much to do whilst saying the EA is already doing plenty. There is all usual guff with buzzwords aplenty, but Boyd has definitely been to the gov.uk Covid School of Sloganeering. She urges us to “prepare, act and survive.” Give me strength. At this rate Boyd, who’s qualification for running the EA is 25 years in fund management compliance, will have us clapping every Wednesday evening for underpaid water company executives.

 

 

Emma Howard Boyd

 

But it is in the section of her report that sets out five climate “reality checks” that Boyd really throws the rivers of England & Wales under the bus. She says,   “Climate change makes it harder to ensure clean and plentiful water: existing issues with water stress will be exacerbated by climate change bringing altered temperature and rainfall patterns.”   As I have often written here, and in a recent article for The Spectator, attributing our current water problems to changing patterns in respect of the British weather is bunkum. But let us put that to one side for a moment and accept the EA report that states winter rainfall is expected to increase by approximately 6% by the 2050s and by 8% by the 2080s and summer rainfall is expected to decrease by approximately 15% by the 2050s. That 8% figure represents less than one inch of extra rain, one third of the average December English rainfall. That 15% decrease is just 1.2 inches of typical English summer rain, exactly half the amount that falls in an average June.   If accurate, and that is doubtful based on the fact the EA have extrapolated half a century ahead with little evidence, these figures are literally a drop in the bucket, deliberately framed out of context to fan alarmism. Essentially what Boyd is saying that fifty years from now the average English annual rainfall will be 32 inches as opposed to 33 inches with a tiny bit more in the winter than the summer. Errrr, with the greatest respect to the EA boffins, is that really going to make it harder to ensure clean and plentiful water?   The only thing hard is how hard it seems for the EA to get their act together. In the short term they need to beef up the regulatory regime to measure pollution and enforce the legislation that already exists. How far we are currently from this apparently simple task of measurement was shown earlier in the week with evidence given to MPs on the Environmental Audit Committee who asked how much sewage is going in our rivers.   The simple answer is nobody knows or perhaps not saying. Yes, the water companies will tell you when discharges start and finish but they don’t (or won’t) tell you the volume. The EA, who permit the discharges, do not seem to be inclined to press the water companies to measure the flows and the water companies themselves say they have an ‘ambition’ do so by the 2030’s.   Ashley Smith, founder of campaign group Windrush Against Sewage Pollution, who knows far about this than I, said the suggestion that water companies lack technology to measure their flows is “laughable”.   It seems to me if you want more clean and plentiful water a good place to start would be by stopping pollution. But for the EA the simple solution is not the one that suits their current narrative. Adapt or die? I think it is a phrase the EA should adopt for themselves.

 

 

Swapping Patricks   Many years ago, in that age long, long ago when David Beckham kicked a ball for a living, he was in Japan to play. Would he, asked a reporter from the press pack, learn a few Japanese phrases to bond with the locals.” I would if I could”, said Beckham, “but frankly I still have enough trouble with English.” I’m with David in that respect which leaves me in awe of anyone who speaks a second language.   I was put in mind of the shared verbal inadequacy Goldenballs and myself last week when I was chatting with Charlie Patrick as he wrapped up his 41st, and final season, as river keeper at the Compton Chamberlayne Estate on the River Nadder in Wiltshire. Charlie is a rare breed; a river keeper who is retiring before the job takes its heaviest physical toll in an overstretch of final years. He is also a keeper with an unexpected hinterland, fluent in French and a home in central Brittany where he will spend a portion of each retirement year.

 

 

Tom & Charlie Patrick

 

Charlie was born and bought up near Thirsk in north Yorkshire. Never much minded with books he was, by 13 years old, already helping on a local shoot and poaching on the local beck. He jokes that he was a well-mannered poacher, practicing the delicate art of upstream worming. God’s Own Country may well have remained his home for the remainder of his life but for an advert his Mother saw in the paper for a course in Shoot, River and Sporting Management at Sparsholt College in Hampshire. This was back in the days when a Sparsholt course was down and dirty; a practical year that was way different to the three-year Ba(Hons) of today.   Finishing with a Distinction Charlie was still just 16 years old, but he lucked out when beating on the Broadlands Estate as a Saturday job which landed him his first river keeper position working under Harry Grass back in the era when Lord Mountbatten was alive, and Royalty were regular visitors to the River Test. At £45 a week Charlie thought he was doing alright until he met a pal working as a game keeper in France, on a 10,000 acre estate, an hour north of Paris for a £100 a week plus a house. Got any jobs he asked? Well, yes. So, with his new wife Gina Charlie, only fluent in Yorkshire, headed to France. But after two happy years as a budding Francophile, for personal reasons and the death of the owner, they returned to England to take the job at Compton Chamberlayne just past his 21st birthday.   What’s different, I asked Charlie, forty years on? Unequivocally he says it is the state of the river. More dirty water. Less varied fly life. An absence of ranunculus. A dearth of rising fish. In short, the Nadder is less like the chalkstream that it should be, or the river Charlie recalls from his early years. He also rues the passing of the characters who used to fish though, having heard his tales of bare bottoms gyrating where they should not, maybe a less characterful fishery is no bad thing.   The changing of the guard is always a sad moment especially when, if like me, you have known someone for nearly all their watch. However, the family connection remains. Tom, Gina and Charlie’s 25-year-old son, is the successor moving into Dinton Mill Cottage, the house in which he was born, as the new river keeper.    We wish Gina, Charlie and Tom all the very best in their shared new adventures.

 

 

Welcome to Dorset   The history of Dorset is mixed. Yes, it was often the rural idyll of Thomas Hardy novels; Casterbridge was the fictional name he gave to Dorchester, the town of his youth. More recently, fired by the Jurassic film franchise of the 1990’s, the coastline has latched onto the value of all things prehistoric. But I suspect the first time most of us, unaware of the existence of Dorset, first became aware of its existence was due to a school history lesson concerning the Tolpuddle Martyrs.   I must admit I was one of those people; I knew nothing of Dorset in my childhood days. Not even its chalkstreams; tolpuddle literally means toll bridge over the River Piddle. As far as I was concerned Dorset was a county somewhere beyond Wiltshire which, as the story of the Martyrs evolved, I wanted to visit less and less. In 1834 six agricultural labourers, having been arrested for forming a union in protest at a cut in farming wages, were sentenced to seven years transportation to Australia. Such was the outcry, with marches and a petition signed by 800,000 people (British population was only 15m at the time), that the sentences were commuted after three years allowing then all to return to England. It is no small irony that five of the six later emigrated to Canada, only one, James Hammett returning to Tolpuddle, dying in the Dorchester poorhouse in 1891.   I’ve always thought the story of the Martyrs, often cited as the beginning of the modern-day trade union movement, as an isolated instance of judicial brutality. But was it? Crossing the River Allen earlier this summer, another Dorset chalkstream and in many respects the twin of the Piddle, I saw this sign. Maybe the sentences handed down on the Martyrs, based on an obscure Act from the 1700’s, were more common than generally supposed?

 

 

A friendly welcome

 

Fishing for Schools   For those of you who do not know of Fishing for Schools it is an amazing project run by my old friend Charles Jardine for the Countryside Alliance which offers a short course for children aged between 10 and 16 and of all abilities.   Every time I see or talk with Charles, he is either on the way to, or on the way back, from one of the many schools in England and Wales that he and the team have visited over the 14 years the project has run.   Fishing for Schools operates a funding scheme where schools can apply for funded sessions using an online form. They are now accepting applications from schools interested in taking part in 2022.   If you have children or grandchildren who are aged between 10 and 16 years of age, please do let their school know about this fantastic opportunity and encourage their school to apply. Applications are invited from schools in Avon, Bath and North East Somerset, Somerset, Cambridgeshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Hampshire, Sussex, Essex, Kent, Derbyshire, Norfolk, Yorkshire and Wales.   But act fast! Applications close today  https://www.fishingforschools.co.uk/

 

 

Apply today!

 

 

Quiz The normal random collection of questions inspired by the date, events or topics in the Newsletter.   It is just for fun with answers at the bottom of the page.   1)     40 years ago this week Brideshead Revisited came to our TV screens. Who wrote the novel published in 1945?   2)     In what country is today Wombat Day?   3) Whose army destroyed Corfe Castle in 1646?     Have a good weekend.   Best wishes,

 

 

Simon Cooper simon@fishingbreaks.co.uk Founder & Managing Directorwww.fishingbreaks.co.uk

 

 

 

Quiz answers:   1)     Evelyn Waugh 2)     Australia 3)     Oliver Cromwell’s

Is Boris bonkers about beavers?

 

Greeting   When I opened up my Twitter feed one day last month, I had something of a shock. The announcement by Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) that it was launching a consultation into the wider release of beavers into enclosures and the wild seemed to have been hacked by one of the pro-beaver groups for it included a one minute promo video for beavers.   Beautifully filmed. Lovingly edited. Cuddly shots. Endless captions extolling the ecological benefits of beavers. Fair enough. If you believe in beavers you are going to believe all that stuff. But it soon became apparent that Twitter had not been hacked. This was the official DEFRA video (watch it here) to launch the consultation that closes 17 November.   I tell you this by way of context. Not only have DEFRA drunk the beaver Kool Aid but so has our Prime Minster. I was delighted when he mentioned otters in his speech to the Conservative Party Conference on Wednesday; it is one of the few British nature success stories of the past 60 years.

 

 

Here is the extract from his speech,   “Otters are returning to rivers from which they have been absent for decades. Beavers that have not been seen on some rivers since Tudor times, massacred for their pelts, are now back – and if that isn’t Conservatism, my friends, I don’t know what is. Build back beaver!”   But to conflate beavers with otters is well, in a favourite Johnson word, bonkers. The otter revival happened because a dedicated few campaigned for 30 years from the 1950's for the abolition of organophosphates that were slowly driving otters to extinction. It has then taken a further 30 years for the pesticide, widely used in agriculture, to leave the food chain. But beavers? These haven’t revived from a very low base. Do not believe all that guff (another BJ favourite word) about Tudor times. Bar a few that hung on in Wales no beaver had walked the Southern Downs since Boadicea until the illegal releases that begun some 20 years ago which have accelerated exponentially in the past five. A recent study by the Southwest River Association of their 17 rivers found beavers present in 10 of which only 3 were licenced for releases.   Even before the speech it was clear Boris was a signed up member of the Beaver Tendency; the family had bought a beaver for his father Stanley for release at his Devon home. I’m told the arrival of the Johnson beaver is currently delayed due to licencing issues but I’m guessing it is only a matter of time.   I’m afraid I don’t hold out much hope for the consultation changing the direction of travel; in a decade beavers will be in pretty well every river catchment, And in a further decade we’ll probably embark on an expensive culling programme. But, for now, the beaver is the new ecological Messiah who will have the full protection of the law. If a beaver invades your river it will become a criminal offence to interfere with it or the dams it builds. Of course, you will be able to apply to Natural England for a management licence but we know how that goes. It took two decades to convince Natural England that cormorants were a menace. Goodness knows how long they will hold out for the beaver.   Please do consider filling in the consultation form. DEFRA haven’t made it easy and it is one of those ‘consultations' that is trying to guide the outcome to a predetermined point. Unbelievably, the final question asks: “Would you (or an organisation you are involved with) consider preparing an application for wild release, if the approach proposed in this consultation became national policy? If yes, please provide the general location where you might consider applying for such a release.”   You can answer No if you wish but there is no space provided to explain your reasons for such an answer. That said I’m simply going to write my reasons for No in the Yes box.   Here is the DEFRA consultation link. Make a strong cup of tea (or something more potent) before opening.

 

 

A cruel, cruel cut   When I bought you news a few weeks ago that the Australian company Macquarie had ‘rescued’ Southern Water I feared the worst for the desalination plant on Southampton Water that had been given the go ahead by the previous management earlier in the year.   Desalination plants are not perfect. It is an industrial process that uses energy but the 75 million litres of drinking water it would have produced daily would have supplied 215,000 homes in Hampshire. In of itself that might not mean much but when you consider that is enough water for over a quarter of the homes in the county, a county almost completely dependent on the aquifers that feed the chalkstreams, the beneficial scale of the Fawley Desalination Plant is apparent.

 

 

The local victors

 

But, true to form, Macquarie announced last week that the desalination pant was not going ahead, a saving, apparently, of some £600m which comes as something of a surprise to many as the original announcement put the cost of the plant at £120m.   The local campaigners against the plant, such as they were and supported to my mind erroneously by the New Forest MP, claimed this as a victory for local activism. I hate to burst their bubble, but this is all about the bottom line and nothing to do with the environment. In fact, the statement from Macquarie is ominous. It reads: "We have written to our regulators [OFWAT] informing them that we’re continuing to explore our proposals for water recycling and water transfer solutions and do not intend to further develop plans for desalination."   Well, I guess we know which dusty OFWAT in-tray that particular letter will be consigned to. But really the meat of the paragraph are the phrases ‘water recycling’ and ‘water transfer’. Firstly, water recycling: if Macquarie have ditched desalination on the grounds of cost then recycling stands no chance of being a significant water provider the processes being many times more expensive. Secondly, if you are wondering what water transfer means in the context of Hampshire this is sucking the water out of one river catchment and piping it to another catchment. It is cheap and easy but does nothing to address the essential problem of water companies depleting a diminishing resource regardless of the impact on something as precious and scarce as the chalkstreams.   As I say desalination is far from perfect but it really did represent a lifeline for the rivers of west Hampshire and the New Forest. For most of the year Southern Water can pump away at the aquifers for as much as they need; from October to June, we have more than enough water to go around. But in those critical months of July-September, abstraction will kill stone dead those headwaters and aquifers which would have been kept flowing had the Fawley Plant survived this cruel, cruel cut.   What odds do you think that other major Southern Water project, the Havant Thicket Reservoir, surviving the red pen of the Macquarie accountants?

 

 

When brown trout go bad   We hear a great deal about the endangerment of brown trout. In fact, though you might not know this, the brown trout is the most widely dispersed of all British fish across the British Isles. You will find it happily living in more places than any other of our native fish and that includes what we might sometimes regard as the more common coarse species.   Salmo trutta is incredibly robust. It is a survivor in some truly terrible conditions. And it has that safety valve; sea trout evolved so females, and a few males, might survive when natural catastrophes forced them to flee the rivers. In fact, when you consider that the ancestors of the humble British brown trout now populate rivers on every continent, it gives you some indication as to how robust and adaptable they are. But this is not always a good thing as evidenced by news that our brown trout, an 19th century import to Indian rivers, is driving out the native snow trout.

 

 

Himalayan brown trout

 

A recent study by the Wildlife Institute for India, that labels the brown trout as ‘exotic’ and ‘invasive’, has found that the snow trout is being increasingly displaced from its natural habitat to the higher reaches of the Himalayan rivers where it is less able to survive and, more importantly, complete its life cycle.   There doesn’t currently appear to be any plan to resolve the situation though the Institute points out that dams and similar upstream projects might well cut off the only remaining route the snow trout currently has for survival.

 

 

Himalayan snow trout

 

 

Quiz The normal random collection of questions inspired by the date, events or topics in the Newsletter.   It is just for fun with answers at the bottom of the page.   1)     Which British musical opened on Broadway on this day in 1982 and ran for a further 18 years?   2)     How many countries does the Himalayas abut or cross?   3) Who is generally regarded as the founder of the Conservative Party?     Have a good weekend.   Best wishes,

 

 

Simon Cooper simon@fishingbreaks.co.uk Founder & Managing Directorwww.fishingbreaks.co.uk

 

 

 

Quiz answers:   1)     Cats 2)     Five countries: Bhutan, India, Nepal (photo), China, and Pakistan. 3)     Robert Peel in 1834