Life of a Chalkstream: April 2023

Greetings!

I found myself very conflicted when I read about Herefordshire farmer John Price who was jailed last week for 12 months for illegal dredging of the River Lugg after prosecution on behalf of the Environment Agency.

On the one hand he did a damn stupid thing, ignoring numerous interventions from the Environment Agency and Natural England to stop whilst he seemed to be misguidedly well-intentioned in his efforts which had the support of some in the local community who feared flooding. On the other hand, we have that regulatory behemoth the Environment Agency having a man sent to jail for a transgression which is as nothing compared to the cart and horses that the water companies drive through Environment Agency regulations on a daily basis.

Now, I am not a keen supporter of the belief that the directors of water companies should be sent to jail – ultimately all it will do is send badly needed talent and investors away from the sector – but it strikes me as a total iniquity that Environment Agency can find the gumption to wave the jail stick to go after the small fry but cannot go after the big fry. Let me ask you this. This time next year will the River Lugg be a more degraded river because of a) John Prices’ dredging or b) the polluting activities of Welsh Water and Severn Trent Water?

The River Lugg stretch before the dredging .....

We have to be clear the Environment Agency is a very strange beast. It is always claiming to be skint with inadequate ‘resources’ to police our rivers to a standard any decent country has the right to expect. But you have to ask what scale of resources do they require to do their job? There are close to 11,000 employees with an annual expenditure of £1.9 billion pounds, most of which comes from you and I the taxpayer. This is no toothless tiger as the rap sheet for John Price shows, with five charges including “causing the discharge of silt into the River Lugg, which can smother and suffocate aquatic life.” with a possible sentence of six months custody or unlimited fines. Would you have not thought silt was a component of just about every sewage spill?

As you all know I have little love for the Environment Agency; it seems obsessed with process – let me give you a small example. A few weeks ago, I had to change the administration address for a stocking permit. You would have thought this a simple task as nothing was changing in regard to where, when and how many fish were being stocked.

It did not get off to a great start. The first automated reply to my email explained to me that the Environment Agency were very busy and that I may have to wait 20 (yes, twenty!) working days for a response. To be fair the super-efficient administrator in the Huntingdon office (official title: Technical Officer, Fish Movements Team, National Monitoring: Fish and Ecology) came back to me much quicker but explained, whilst admitting all the details remained the same, that I would have to reapply for the same permit for approval by the local team in Hampshire. I have no idea exactly how much work this required but I suspect that collectively this involved dozens of emails and a good few hours by us all, me included. And for what? The permit was reissued so we could all return to exactly the same place from which we started.

.... John Price immediately after the dredging ......

The saddest thing about this, and the dredging farmer, is that despite the Environment Agency being supremely capable of building a pointless bureaucracy and having John Price languishing in a cell our rivers will not be getting any cleaner any time soon. Nor does there seem any appetite to fundamentally change the regulatory oversight for our rivers and coastline.

I really don’t know how many more years of failure it will take before government wakes up to the fact that the Environment Agency is plainly not up to the task. Of course, there are bits of it, and people in it, who should be admired and supported but overall, it plainly fails. It is time, perhaps championed by the new chairman Alan Lovell, to have an honest conversation with government to separate out water from the general remit of the Agency (fly tipping, atomic waste, coastal defence, flooding etc) to create a new body, free from past failings and inadequacies, which will have a laser focus on pure rivers and coastal waters.

Maybe that thought might find its way into a party manifesto come the next general election?

PS Sorry I did not to bring you my How we can win the pollution war; next time I promise.

...... and how it is today.

Bobbies on the bank

Wiltshire Police certainly like to march to the beat of their own drum; some years ago, they turned off all the speed cameras much to the delight of most Moonrakers. That was easily understood, less so the latest declaration from the County Constabulary:

“The new framework [for the rural crime team] will provide more scrutiny around the suitability of our officers, staff and volunteers to work within the unit. It sets out key principles to ensure staff do not have personal links to hunts past or present, do not have links to any anti-hunt groups past or present and requires staff to disclose links to any rural based hobby or initiative that could potentially call into question their policing impartiality.”

Rural based hobby? Are we talking about full disclosure for anglers, bird watchers and ramblers in the force? It puts me in mind of that skit from Not The Nine O’Clock News where the senior policeman Rowan Atkinson questions police constable Griff Rhys-Jones about a dubious arrest record of one particular person 117 times, a Mr Vincent Kdogo, for such misdemeanours as ‘ looking at me in a funny way.” or “having an offensive wife.” I can see it now as hordes of tweed capped, corduroy wearers are bought up in front of Salisbury Magistrates on 'walking in the manner of someone intending to blend in to the landscape." charges.

Of course, there is a small irony to all this taking place in Wiltshire, where the locals take a dim view of the intelligence of the authorities who reciprocate in kind, at least according to the moonraker legend.

So goes the tale that originates from the 1700s, when smuggling was widespread in the county. A group of smugglers had hidden some illegal barrels of brandy in a pond. A couple of tax men got wind of this so waited around one moonlit night to catch them. As the smugglers were attempting to retrieve their brandy with rakes the officers approached. But they succeeded in convincing the excisemen that they were drunk, confused or both - or merely simple 'yokels' - by claiming to be scraping the surface of the water in the hope of retrieving cheese from the moon. The tax men, taking them to be all three, left them to it.

Cartoon of the Week

You know an issue is taking hold when the Sunday Times feature a cartoon of this nature in their comment section opposite the leader page. Fantastic work from Peter Brookes.

These May flies could be yours

It is the last few days of April so I’m going to be doing an extra, but mercifully brief, Newsletter to you all next week to announce the Feedback Draw winner because I have an exciting prize for this and every month of the coming season.

We have teamed up with Kent fly tyer Nigel Nunn to produce a special monthly selection. But this is no ordinary pack of flies: Nigel has tied his choice of flies which are presented on a hand drawn and signed card. And that is not all, as they say in the best of infomercials. The selection is specifically tied to use in May, hence my eagerness to get them in the post at the earliest opportunity to the lucky winner. I’ll be repeating this through the season with the May winner getting June flies and so on.

Don’t forget to fill in your feedback form here and you can see more of Nigel’s flies at www.nigelnunnflies.com