Life of a Chalkstream: The wasted hundreds of millions spent on fish protection

Friday 5th December 2025

Greetings!

We have been getting a little bit excited about £1.2m coming our way via Southern Water for Operation White Hart, a three year programme to investigate the reasons for the precipitous decline in the chalkstream salmon population and, hopefully, implement some measures to reverse the decline on the rivers Itchen and Test. The who, what, how and where the money will be spent is still unclear as it is early days so watch this space. However, these are simply crumbs from the table compared to the hundreds of millions being spent on fish ‘protection’ measures at Hinkley Point C, the nuclear plant being constructed on the shore of the Bristol Channel in Somerset.

Hinkley has long had a perceived fish problem. As you will well know, nuclear generation requires huge amounts on water for cooling, which arrives by way of giant intake pipes from the sea. The Hinkley intakes estimated to shred 46 tonnes of fish a year once in operation. Now, as I wrote about back in April 2024, 46 tonnes might seem like a lot of fish, but it really is not. The Margiris, a super trawler that operates in the English Channel, is capable of catching 250 tonnes of fish a DAY.

Hinkley Point C intake pipe

However, despite this blindingly obvious fact, as the Daily Telegraph reported in the week, the total spent on fish protection measures at Hinkley C now tops £750 million including special intake mouths (£500m), fish recovery and return system (£150m), saltmarsh offset (£50m) and an acoustic fish deterrent system (£50m). In terms of protecting the lives of endangered fish, that spend represents 0.028 sea trout saved each year, and 0.083 salmon and six lampreys. Or in the case of the shad, £280,000 per fish life saved.

How have we come to this financial and ecological madness? Well, The Telegraph article comes in the wake of a government report into the regulatory costs of such projects as Hinkley that have become a happy hunting ground for over zealous bodies such as the Environment Agency and Natural England who throw their weight around, aided and abetted by pressure groups such as the RSPB, Rivers Trusts and Friends of the Earth who weigh in with their own agendas. The result, as I will attest in my dealings with some of the above, is an emphasis on process rather than outcome. The cost in time and money of the former is disregarded whilst outcomes become nebulous predictions, the fallout dealt with by others long after the regulatory decision makers have moved onto their next rodeo.

How much better off would we be if those hundreds of millions were being spent on solving our current problems; compared to Hinkley, the Operation White Hart spend is no more than an accounting error. Instead of making house builders and homeowners spend billions on bureaucratic bat, newt and tree surveys how about a levy that actually diverts the money away from the pockets of consultants into real world solutions? I know these so called ‘nature funds’ are far from perfect, but it is hard to see how they could be worse than what we have now.

Anglers: watch your backs

News has come that the Testwood salmon fishery is no more, as least for the foreseeable future, as the owners have taken the lease back in hand, ending centuries of recreational salmon fishing on this famous River Test pool close to Southampton Water.

The move has been reported as a conservation measure in the light of the falling numbers of chalkstream salmon which for me is an interesting take on the decline in the migratory fish population not just here in Hampshire, but across the UK in general. Of all the problems that assail our anadromous fish who is it that thinks that rod and line catches have been responsible for the parlous state we find ourselves in? After all, chalkstream salmon are not without their protections: the close season is effectively policed and catch-and-release has been a legal obligation for some years.

The River Test becomes Southampton Water

Herein lies a danger for all of us who love fishing. News alert: not everyone who supports river conversation have the best interests of angling at heart. In fact, some see conservation as the Trojan Horse to end recreational fishing. Despite the fact that anglers were banging on about river pollution and the associated woes decades ago, long before the ‘conservationists’ took ownership of the issue, we are now often the villains of the piece. We leave litter. We discard fish lines. We disturb nesting birds. We catch fish. We manage rivers for fishing not fish. And so on. And so on.

Believe me, we need to sup with the longest of spoons. Already conservation funding is coming with strings attached such as the end of stocking. Soon wild trout zones, where fishing is banned or restricted to the point of extinction, will become normalised. But this is bunkum. Anglers are being shot because we were once the messengers. Fishing is not the problem; pollution is the problem. If you want your children to still fish, we will need to fight our corner and sometimes turn our back on the siren calls of those who really do not like us very much. And believe you me there are plenty of those people who work in River Trusts, Wildlife Trusts, Natural England and the Environment Agency.

River Frome salmon news

Not sure why this is becoming a salmon week in this Newsletter, but I guess it is all due to a confluence of news, sadly mostly bad this time from the River Frome in Dorset.

You might not be aware of it, but the Frome is one of the most monitored salmon rivers in Europe, the research run by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) dating back over 40 years to 1973. This impressive body of data charts the decline of what was once a prolific Atlantic salmon river, with catches running into the thousands each year but now mostly the matter of a few hundred. Part of the programme is annual PIT tagging, first introduced in 2002, that catches, weighs, measures and microchips 10,000 juvenile salmon that have hatched during winter and spring. The PIT tags then generate movement data so that the team know when the salmon leave the river for the ocean and, hopefully, return some years later. However, this year there were so few juvenile salmon in the river that the research team where only able to tag 3,226 fish, even worse than the previous record low of 4,593 recorded last year.

A fine River Frome salmon from Ilsington

As I have written before, there is a great deal we do not know about the decline in the Atlantic salmon population, much of which happens way out in the ocean, in international waters beyond the scope of any national body. So, as Donald Rumsfeld once intimated, it is all about the known unknowns and to my mind Dylan Roberts, Head of Fisheries at GWCT, offers the blueprint in this respect:

“The issues for salmon are many and complex. They are facing much tougher conditions in the marine environment, where global warming and concerns over bycatch are posing serious threats. But if we are able to improve conditions in our rivers, and make sure they can grow fitter, larger and stronger and reproduce in greater numbers, they will stand a better chance, once they migrate to sea, of returning in larger numbers.

My team has seen first-hand the changes to the physical nature of the river Frome. In recent years, we have seen a huge increase in the growth of algae between spring and autumn which smothers the riverbed, shades and then reduces the growth of plants like water crowfoot, which are crucial habitats for juvenile salmon and the insects upon which they feed. We’ve also seen increases in the quantity of sediment, which is mud running from the riverbanks and ploughed fields into the river where it smothers and suffocates salmon eggs.

Excessive algae also reduces the amount of oxygen available to fish in rivers at night and especially during the warmer months, this can stress, reduce the growth of and even kill fish. The algae grows excessively due to high levels of nutrients - nitrate and phosphate which are released into rivers from sewage, septic tank discharges and running off agricultural land.

To create a better future for salmon, we need to tackle these issues together and at scale. To date, projects have been too small and patchy - mainly due to a lack of funding and bureaucratic challenges around farming and conservation - to make the changes needed.”

Now here is a thought: if we took just one third of the money being spent on ‘fish protection’ at Hinkley that £250m would be almost enough to buy all the land* along the length of the River Frome from source to estuary to create a one mile river protection corridor. Of course, that is never going to happen because, we will be told, there is no money. But as Hinkley proves, there is the money, but it is being spent by idiots.

*22,800 acres at £12,000/acre= £268,800,000

Fly Fishing Film Tour is back!

In more cheerful news I am pleased to hear that the Fly Fishing Film Tour is returning to the UK next year, marking its 20th anniversary.

Many of you may recall that it was first bought to our shores as part of the River Test One Fly Festival and now it is hosted in 14 countries in 300 venues featuring some amazing, adrenaline packed short films covering saltwater and freshwater fly fishing for species around the globe.

If you have not been I promise you will leave the cinema buzzing with just one thought in the front of your brain – I MUST GO FISHING! There are five UK showing including London (7 March) and Stockbridge (18 March). Tickets are on sale now.