Where have all the anglers gone?

 

Greetings!   My first instinct on reading this was to shrug and think it nothing more than might be reasonably expected and I think that is a fair reaction, though it is disappointing that we have not held onto the surge of interest for longer. However, a look at the graph from the EA taking us back to the start of the millennium reveals a worrying longer term trend.   It is the blue line of the graph that really matters; that is the number of actual licences sold as opposed to the income shown by the red columns. As you will see the Covid spike was a real aberration with licence sales swiftly returning to what is, sadly, an ever declining number from a peak of just over 1.4m in 2010/11 to 934,000 in 2021/22, a decline of 34.4%.

 

 

I must admit I find the whole graph baffling. Why, for instance, did licence sales grow steadily in the first decade of the century from a shade over 1 million to that peak of 1.4 million? Why, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash and the age of austerity did numbers hold steady for 3-4 years before starting the gradual decline to where we are now? Where did all those anglers come from and, subsequently, where have they all gone?   Is it something to do with the demographic of anglers? Participation tends to be highest in the older section of the population so you would think that with our aging population numbers would at the very worst be static, or even climbing. Likewise, the ‘grey pound’ has fared pretty well during the period of the decline.   Could it be the delivery of the licence, the way in which it is bought and sold? In days of old most licences were bought in person at Post Offices or from fisheries and tackle shops who acted as agents for the EA, receiving a small commission for providing the service. Today the only way to buy the licence is online. In itself I don’t see that as a problem; it is more user friendly for younger anglers and the rising graph 2000-10 when online was becoming normalised suggests it was an increasingly popular way of purchase. However, the only drawback I can see is that awareness of the licence is declining; a poster at tackle shop or fishery with the owner pointing out it was an obligation to have a licence before commencing fishing must have been a potent sales weapon.   How about cost? To their credit the EA have kept increases to a minimum or not at all; in real terms the licence gets cheaper with each passing year not like say, rail fares. However, £33 for an annual trout and coarse fish licence is still £33. I know for most people reading this column that represents a drop in the bucket but if you have a minimum wage job you will have to work half a day to pay for the licence or a day and a bit for the salmon licence which is a swingeing £86.10 for the year.    How about enforcement? You will know I am not keen on the paramilitary-style wing of the Angling Trust to whom the EA have outsourced the policing of the licence who last year checked 41,446 licences that resulted in 726 successful prosecutions. I think that tells you two things. Firstly, your chances of being checked are slim. It has been estimated that 19 million days a year are spent fishing so you will probably have your licence checked about once every 23 years. Secondly, extrapolating on that number of prosecutions and the slim chance of getting caught, it suggests there are a lot of people not buying a licence.   None of the above seems to me to provide an angling specific silver bullet as to why fewer people are participating in angling, but since our pastime does not exist in a vacuum, I think we need to look to society as a whole and how habits are changing.  A survey to mark the 10th anniversary of the London Olympics, which was hoped to boost participation in all sports and pastimes, has proved quite the reverse. We are, ironically, watching more sport than ever but doing less of it ourselves. Subsequent analysis of data analytics on consumer trends for the five years 2017-22, concluded:   “Historically, sport participation has always been higher among employed people than the unemployed and higher for those with more disposable income. High unemployment and squeezed incomes at the start of the period constrained sports participation. There has also been a distinct shift in type of participation as skiing and golf fell out of favour and cheaper activities, such as road running. For much of the period, economic uncertainty squeezed household income which deflated sports participation rates.”   Adding it altogether it seems to me that changing lifestyles, an upcoming generation that have never fished and the cost of angling, both in time and money, are gradually eroding the size of the angling community. But does that, in itself, matter? Will what we enjoy be any different if there are five million of us instead of one million?   Ultimately, the number makes no difference to the passion you and I feel for fishing, but it remains a sadness to me that by the time I eventually hang up my rod for the last time the number of anglers will have more than halved in my lifetime with every prospect of that number falling further.

 

 

No rain February   Just when we were jogging along nicely on the back of a wet winter February proved to be one of the driest second months of the year in many decades, ranging from a not-very-good 46% of the average rainfall for the month in the north-east to a decidedly dry 14% in the south-east. Nationally, it was roughly a quarter of the amount of rain we usually expect for February.   But with all weather data, as proponents both sides of the climate debate know but rarely admit, whipping up a storm on the basis of a single data point is all too easy – weather, like history, is older than mankind so deserves perspective. Now going back a year is hardly reaching back into the mists of time, but for the chalkstreams and the hidden reservoir effect of the chalk downs means what we see in the rivers today is largely determined by the rains of the past to 1-2 years. On that basis we are bang on average for the past 12 months at 102% as you will see from the figures in the far righthand column of the table, the only regional outlier being the east of England at 86%.

 

 

However, the more direct impact of the dry February is to river flows and the English map show how it has hit the spate river regions with too many blinking orange (notably low) or red (exceptionally low). The chalkstreams, thanks to the reservoir effect of a wet November-January are less affected with Berkshire, Hampshire and Wiltshire green (normal) but though Dorset is suffering with some river in yellow (below normal) territory. All that said it should only take an averagely wet March, which has been forecast, to bring all rivers everywhere back into green territory or better.

 

 

 

Photo of the Week I am a great proponent of the Stonehenge tunnel. Wiping away a century and a quarter of the motor car to return the Wiltshire downs to the way it has been for the previous seven millennia seems to me the right thing to do even if I will miss seeing it on my regular drive bys.

 

 

Stonehenge under the recent southern aurora borealis

 

 

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)     When did the national fishing licence come into being? A) 1873 B) 1923 C) 1973   2)     Who was captured by Irish pirates on this day in 432 AD from his home in Great Britain and taken as a slave to Ireland?   3)   Who is the first city to host the Summer Olympics on three different occasions?

 

 

 

Have good weekend.    Best wishes,

 

 

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

 

 

 

Quiz answers:   1)     B. It was created by the 1923 Salmon & Freshwater Fisheries Act though it was up to local regions to enforce it with the Thames region not requiring a rod licence until 1976. 2)     St Patrick 3)     London. 1908, 1948 and 2012.