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EA Duties

Must admit I am neither a fan of The EA or Martin Salter and his band of Villains!

As a committee member of quite a large Angling Club I get to go to a number of meetings with EA personnel, I make it clear on every occasion that I believe that we as anglers are VERY poorly served by their organisation, they dropped the ball on Cormorants and Crayfish and they are fumbling on Otters!!

I would not trust the EA to blow up my Lilo!!

As an organisation I don’t think they give a “rats” about the environment, of all the nations in Europe we are the least well served and have to suffer with more in the way of government sanctioned pollution than any other nation in The EU!
For instance a year or so ago there was a pollution on The Tidal Thames when 12.7 million cubic meters of un-treated waste was released by the sewage works at Mogden.
The EA were interviewed for a TV slot, almost the entire interview was taken up with the same old “Did you know that there are Salmon in The Thames now??”

Mogden releases the same quantity 3 times a year but the EA cannot take them to task as this occurs on riverbank that is common land.

Which just goes to show what an Ineffectual and Pointless organisation the EA is!!




The last time I had my Licence checked the idiot from The EA was banging on about how wonderful it is that we now have Otters in The Great Ouse!

What planet are they from???

Sometimes I think they are rubbing our noses in it deliberately!!
 
So............

We shoot the EA and put fisheries into the hands of the owners and those who fish them...

Fine, if the river has good owners and good clubs (or these new, suddenly sexy, Trusts) looking after it, but as for the rest (the rest including all the unfished / unfishable, less desirable stuff that lies within the same watershed and feeds water into the desirable bits)...

Who looks after the unwanted rest? Who tries to prevent pollution incidents, then comes in and clears them up if they have happened...?

A "No EA" situation is just fine and dandy if a river is a well-owned, well-managed, much-fished and much-valued one, but someone please tell me who will in such a situation be around to do what they can with the unwanted but still very important rest...

I have had heard a lot of "Bloody EA" stuff over the years from owners and fishers of trout and salmon rivers, but not one of them has been able to address my question: "Okay, so you can fence off your own little piece of paradise and go it alone, but what will you do when the local sewage works eats it, or a bad farmer refuses to rebuild his leaking slurry pit, or the industrial estate ten miles away begins polluting a storm drain that eventually feeds your river?" Not only unable to answer this question but also suddenly becoming pretty shirty with me.
 
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Good point Paul and I won’t get shirty!!

Easy to have a go but what would we have in its place, well I would like to see a properly independent organisation which has as its core value, a duty of care towards the environment, and it would need to be so independent that it could take on government organisations with a chance of winning.

I know!! There would be all sorts of problems, not least being funding!

But just because it would be difficult, does not mean we should not at least try and get something better than the mess we already have!
 
Its easy to knock the EA but they do have some people who care. Unfortunately however they do not always have the resources to carry out their statutory duties effectively..... I know I have been there!

Its also easy to forget about the thousands of planning applications they object to every year to protect water quality etc.

One things for sure, we would be a lot worse off without them and I cant see any replacement body doing the job any better. The problems lay at Westminster not at the EA but its to be expected in these times and I know they are facing even further cut backs next year.
 
I asked earlier but might have been missed....classification of the river quality, seen ity mentioned before particularly about the drop of classification of the Ouse.

Is there some sort of league table of rivers, can it be found and what's the criteria for it

Cheers
Jason
 
ANGLING TRUST – Press Release

Wednesday 16th March 2010

Government in the Dock over 'Illegal' River Basin Plans

The Angling Trust and WWF have today launched a legal challenge over inadequate plans to safeguard the health of rivers and lakes in England. Lodging the documents at the High Court is the first step in the process of applying for a judicial review of the government’s River Basin Management Plans which were submitted to the EU in December to comply with the Water Framework Directive.

Our rivers and lakes are extremely valuable as they not only supply our drinking water but also support a thriving biodiversity of plants and wildlife. But many are suffering the impacts of pollution from agricultural chemicals and run-off, over-abstraction and physical modifications such as concrete banks and barriers to fish migration.

The two organisations are challenging the legality of the plans because they do not set specific targets or a coherent timeframe to address the poor ecological status of many rivers and lakes in England. The plans also rely heavily on a wide range of reasons for inaction which the Directive only allows to be used in exceptional circumstances.

If the challenge is successful, and the plans are found to contravene the law, the government could have to produce supplementary plans correcting these illegalities and commit to giving full details of how our rivers can be improved by 2015 and beyond.

Mark Lloyd, chief executive of the Angling Trust, said: “The Angling Trust has been working for nearly a decade to remind government and the Environment Agency of their responsibilities to implement this Directive which would restore the vast majority of our rivers and fisheries to good health by 2015.

“The plans that have been put forward fall way short of what we and our partner organisations expected and most importantly short of what the law requires. Instead of a clear and comprehensive plan of action, we have been presented with an impenetrable tangled web of excuses for failing to achieve the objectives of the Directive in all but a small percentage of water bodies.

“Anglers invest millions in caring for the waterside environment each year for the benefit of fisheries and the water environment as a whole. We hope that this legal action will lead to a rethink of the approach the EA has adopted so that we can work closely together to help deliver a really meaningful programme of action for the benefit of our rivers, lakes and wetlands."



David Nussbaum, chief executive of WWF-UK, said: “The Water Framework Directive is the most important piece of environmental legislation ever passed for our rivers and should be the cornerstone of sustainable freshwater management for decades to come.

“We have worked with senior decision makers in Defra and the Environment Agency to achieve the high quality water in our rivers and lakes we all aspire to have. Sadly, we have concluded that their plans do not yet match the ambitious set of actions required to protect these vital natural resources. We have reluctantly decided that taking legal action is the best route to the outcome we all desire for our rivers and lakes.”

- ends -



Editor's notes

The Water Framework Directive, adopted in 2000, requires the achievement of “good ecological status” in Europe’s freshwater and estuarine environments by 2015, with extensions to 2021 and 2027 permitted under tightly defined circumstances.

WWF and the Angling Trust have been working with various partners and the government for a number of years with a view to helping implement the Water Framework Directive (WFD) to achieve Good Ecological Status in water bodies in England and Wales by 2015.

On 22nd December 2009 the plans were published by Defra and submitted to the European Commission. These continued to demonstrate extraordinarily low levels of ambition: a national average improvement in water bodies at ‘good status’ of only 5%, against a current base of 27% at good status. This compares to the ostensible objective of the WFD to achieve good status in all water bodies by 2015, subject to a number of tightly defined derogations.

The way we live is leading to environmental threats such as climate change, species extinction, deforestation, water shortages and the collapse of fisheries. WWF’s One Planet Future Campaign is working to help people live a good quality of life within the earth’s capacity. For more information visit www.wwf.org.uk/oneplanet

The Angling Trust is the representative body for all game, coarse and sea anglers in England. It campaigns for anglers’ rights, the protection of the freshwater and marine environment and the promotion of angling. For more information visit www.anglingtrust.net

For further information, please contact:

Robin Clegg, WWF-UK, tel: 07771 818 707, email: rclegg@wwf.org.uk

Mark Lloyd, Angling Trust, tel: 07973 468198, email: mark.lloyd@anglingtrust.net
 
The Chairman on Friday


With that sort of timing, so close to an Election...?

Hmm.

Peg on Nose.jpg



As ever etc,

B.B.
 
Very true point there Paul. Sorry to mention this again, but working the EA for 8 years, it always was a raw point that MPs & local councillors always became more interested in local issues in the run up to local/general elections. I wish I had the choice to only undertake the duties of my job every two years

Cheers, Jon
 
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