Why beavers would vote for Truss

 

Greetings!   I was completely baffled when, in the midst of that internecine war we call the Conservative Party leadership contest, Defra popped its head above the parapet last week to announce that beavers would be given the full protection of the law they currently do not have.   Why? It seemed an odd moment for George Eustice the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to move the legislation allowing for the change to come into force October 1. Later in the day, apparently completely unconnected, I happened to be listening to an interview on talk radio with Thérèse Coffey, a Minister over at Work and Pensions, who was being quizzed, very hard I must say, as to why she was supporting Liz Truss.

 

 

'Where did I put my Tory leadership ballot paper?'

 

Now Coffey always seems to me reasonable, sane and lucid but when it came to Truss she truly seemed lost for words babbling a few platitudes until she said, and this is in response to the question as to why Truss should be our next Prime Minster,   ‘Liz was the first person to reintroduce beavers.’   If you think that is the oddest reason to support anyone for high office you are certainly not alone – the interviewer for one was incredulous and it caused much hilarity amongst later callers to the show. I must admit I had forgotten that Truss was a signed up beaverite and much of the mess we currently find ourselves in respect of these rodents dates back to her time at Defra 2014-16 when the department took a ‘light-touch’ approach to illegal releases.   As it turns out there has been a bit of grinding of reverse gears at Defra, with a counter announcement that the proposed legislation is now on hold because of other pressing parliamentary business ahead of the recess. However, a spokesman for Defra did say it is their intention to introduce the protection for beavers as required by our compliance to the Bern convention. Well, I’ve looked this up. It says,   ‘The convention, adopted at Bern on 19 September 1979, aims to promote cooperation between the signatory countries in order to conserve wild flora and fauna and their natural habitats and to protect endangered migratory species.’   Beavers are not endangered, and they are only migratory in the sense that 15 years ago someone captured a breeding pair in eastern Europe, drove them 1500 miles, smuggled them across the Channel and then released them in Scotland, later doing the same favour for the West Country.   As to the Defra false start my guess is that someone (whoever might that be?!) thought that currying favour with Truss might be a good way of ensuring preferment should she become the next PM.

 

 

Should we trust the Wildlife Trusts?   There has a fair bit of chatter about a recent decision by Northampton Wildlife Trust to ‘ban’ fishing from all of its waters.    Now the simple fact is that the Trust owns the fishing waters at the Attenborough Nature Reserve, so they have a perfect right to grant a lease on whatever terms it wishes or not grant it at all. The Nottingham Angling Association, who rented the Attenborough waters, says the lease terms have become increasingly onerous in recent years, so they declined to renew. The Trust have now ended fishing for the next 12 months pending a review. However, since in a statement the Trust said “our long-standing policy, agreed by members, is against permitting angling on sites where we hold the rights” I think we can readily guess where that particular ‘review’ is heading.   As you might imagine I have had many dealings with wildlife trusts, the National Trust, government agencies and similar bodies over the years in respect of fishing rights both as a tenant and an agent. I’ll be honest, it is rarely a straightforward commercial transaction with all sorts of agendas, conflict of aims, bureaucracy and opaque decision making. I did raise a wry smile when someone interviewed by the Angling Times about the Attenborough Reserve furore said of a similar outcome for a pike fishing club,  “The wildlife trust says it has an angling policy, but it’s more like an anti-angling policy.” Copy that.

 

 

However, I think the central tenet still remains that the owner, be it a Trust or a private individual, has the perfect right to lease land, fishing or property to whoever they wish. As anglers we don’t have any God-given right to rent.    But and it has to be a big but, a great many wildlife trusts and similar bodies only exist thanks to public funding, only able to purchase what they own by way of lottery grants and government (aka taxpayer) money that comes from many different sources. They would not, for a single moment, consider it legitimate to shut out bird watchers, ramblers, cyclists and those many other groups who choose to enjoy the great outdoors. Why should anglers be treated any differently?    Why indeed. Is there a hotbed of anti-angling sentiment within the wildlife trusts and similar bodies? I sort of suspect not with them or the public at large, as otherwise we would have seen the BBC series Mortimer & Whitehouse banned from our screens long ago. So, what is going on?   Well, to start with I am sure there are a small number of anti-angling activists who have undue influence on policy making, amping up the cruelty notions of fishing without ever mentioning that the fishing community have long been the unpaid and unsung custodians of our rivers. And then into the mix they add a bit of class warfare looking down on ‘white van’ coarse anglers and sneering at ‘posh’ fly fishers.   To me the answer is pretty clear. All grants and funding always come with a raft of conditions; the right to fish, whenever fair and reasonable, should be added to that list of conditions.

 

 

Feeling the heat? Not us!   As you all well know I have particular opinions reserved for both the Environment Agency (EA) and Natural England (NE) who purport to be the guardians of our countryside.    As you also know I do sometimes cut them some slack. They do, in the end, have masters in high places and those masters (and mistresses), the people we call government, have failed miserably to provide leadership going back countless decades.    But the EA and NE do themselves no favours even at the most basic level of carrying out simple duties. You’ll recall how during lockdown EA officers stayed at home rather than visit the sites of fish kills and would not fulfil their legal obligations to erect weed booms when the Covid risk of having two people in a rowboat was deemed too high.   Fast forward to the recent heatwave when we had scheduled, on the River Frome in Dorset, a weeklong habitat survey by a team of ecologists from Natural England. You can guess where this going - it was postponed on the Friday prior due to the ‘prospect of excessive temperature’.   I don’t know about you but of all the places I’d have liked to have been on those two or three days was beside a river. Plenty did. Our river keepers kept working. Our kids fish camp ran as planned. I know they weren’t technically on the river, but the builders next door kept jackhammering. The world did not have to stop.   Except, of course, if you were employed by Natural England. It was apparently beyond their wit to find some way of safeguarding a small team of men and women tasked with surveying 500m stretches of riverbank.    And do any of us for one moment imagine the NE ecologists were redeployed productively or that the contractors will not have to be paid twice? And that is before all of us river owners were messed about without a by-your-leave, consultation or apology. It really does make you despair.

 

 

Dressed for work as seen in the Natural England careers guide.

 

 

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) What flew for the first time on this day in 1907?   2) In what year was the first UEFA Women's Championship staged?   3) Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak both held, at different times, the same ministerial position. What was it?

 

 

 

Have a good weekend.    Best wishes,

 

 

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

 

 

 

Quiz answers:   1) A helicopter 2) 1982 3) Chief secretary to the Treasury. Sunak 2019-20. Truss 2017-19.

How water companies game the system

 

Greetings!   Here is the insanity we find ourselves in this week as water companies use the force of the law and the complicity of the regulators to suck our rivers dry at the times when they are at their most vulnerable.   Southern Water along will all similar companies, have abstraction rights enshrined in law. Essentially, they can take water from our rivers for free which, in turn, they process and sell. For most of the time, roughly eight months of the year, there is plenty of water. What they take, barring some of the most fragile headwaters, makes little or no difference to the overall ecology of the chalkstreams. I see nothing wrong with that; man cannot exist without exploiting natural resources.

 

 

However, the water companies do not have unlimited abstraction rights, their right to abstract being suspended once the daily river flow falls below a certain threshold. It seems a sensible and rational precaution in times of a drought. Why would a water company want to over exploit a natural resource? I’ll tell you why, because they have a get-out-of-jail free card which, with a mighty bound, they are able to free themselves of such pesky regulation.   They are playing that card right now, as you read this piece. The flow on the River Test has fallen below the threshold of 355 million litres per day. At this moment Southern Water should stop the pumping to rely on alternate sources, desalination plants, reservoirs and their like to maintain supplies to homes and businesses.   Oh, just a minute. There is no desalination plant – Southern Water owners Macquarie have cancelled it. Reservoirs? Heaven forbid that anyone should build a new one. It hasn’t happened in the 33 years since privatisation and the only one sure to happen for now is Havant Thicket opening (we hope) in 2029. However, it is not owned by Southern Water who will have to buy this water if they want it. Or they probably won’t.   Because what do water companies care? When the going gets tough they turn to those guardians of the chalkstreams the Environment Agency and Natural England for a waiver to the regulations. Please sir, may we carry on pumping? Of course you can boys, don’t worry about it.    You can see where the water companies are coming from in all this. If there is no incentive, no hard stop to the amount of water they can freely pillage, so why bother with expensive infrastructure? They simply lodge a Drought Permit application which allows for a seven-day formal consultation period (you can imagine how that ‘consultation’ goes ….) before the waiver is granted.   It is easy to blame the water companies, but they will only operate within the rules of the game, so what is the solution? Clearly the EA and Natural England are no use; there is zero chance that the applications coming down the line for the Test, Itchen and many other parched chalkstreams this summer will be denied despite the ecological consequences.   The fault really lies with government. They fixed the rules of this particular game, so they need to fix them back. It should not be difficult to use the power of the market to alter the behaviour of the water companies.   Simply charge them a usurious amount for these waivers. A charge levied in such a way that it can’t be passed on to the customers and a charge that makes building new infrastructure look cheap. At that point I’d happily wager we’ll rapidly see a rash of reservoir building, desalination plant construction and a host of other imaginative solutions.

 

 

A good weed story   We seem to be in perpetual weed cutting mode around this time of the summer. The worst of the cuts of June are behind us, but most weeks of July and August we are on one or other of the river catchments, be it the Avon, Itchen or Test trimming and tweaking to ensure the best natural habitat for fish and insect life whilst balancing the needs of fly fishers.   It is not always easy and often the outcome not as pretty as we’d like with rafts of surface weed left in place to preserve water levels and flows. But as one river keeper once said to me, ‘A river without weed is as worthless as a lawn without grass.’   However, we have no such difficulties on the River Wylye in Wiltshire where our Head Keeper Si Fields and his assistant Charley Portsmouth did a cracking job. 

 

 

 

A reversal of fortune   It is probably a fair assumption to make that when the Financial Times starts running articles on sewage pollution the argument has moved beyond the emotional. And in a bland line in a piece 30/June they expose what we have all suspected for years,    ‘The frequency of illegal spills might suggest water companies view penalties as simply the cost of doing business.’   The article was prompted by the announcement that Thames Water, the largest of the UK water and sewerage companies, was tapping current investors for an additional £1.5 billion of capital. This follows on the emergency injection of £1 billion for Southern Water last year. This is a considerable reversal of fortune for the water utility owners who have sucked out, rather than pumped in, cash since privatisation in 1989.

 

 

For those of us who love our rivers and coastline this is certainly some indication of a new direction of travel created by public pressure which in turn has prompted some changes in environmental oversight from government. However, that £2.5 billion is woefully short of the sort of capital investment required to solve the problems.   A report estimates that between £23 billion and £80 billion is required to clean up our water act. Passed on to customers in its entirety that is an increase in bills of between 16 and 33 per cent. The FT seems to assume this would be unacceptable to customers but that view is based on what I am not sure. As I have written before, in the totem of household bills for combined water and sewerage the annual cost is somewhere near the bottom. But let us assume it’s as bad as 33% without the water companies chipping in. That’s on average only an extra £150 per household/year.    I believe, deep down in my heart, that a brave government could make a compelling, and ultimately popular, case for such an increase especially if the utility owners are forced to share the pain.   Maybe something for the Inbox of our new Prime Minister?   You may be able to read the original FT article here though it sometimes disappears behind a firewall.

 

 

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)    Who surrendered to who on this day in 1815?   2)    The London Financial Guide founded in 1888 became which newspaper the following year?   3)    Is the Open golf trophy, the Claret Jug, that will be presented on Sunday, real or fake?

 

 

 

Have a good weekend.    Best wishes,

 

 

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

 

 

 

Quiz answers:   1)    Napoleon to Captain Frederick Maitland after defeat at the Battle of Waterloo 2)    Financial Times 3)    It is fake. The original trophy permanently resides on display in the R&A's Clubhouse at St Andrews, the presentation one being a replica which the winner takes home for a year.