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EA Duties

J

Jason Bean

Senior Member
The duty to manage, maintain and improve a fishery.

Is it a true statement by the the EA?

Often banded around by us anglers...but what does it actually mean? is there any legal status been set by not doing it?

Cheers
Jason
 
Jason , I take it this is a firm policy of the agency, if so, where did you get it from.

I recently asked a forum question about the EA recreation policy as the EA are exploring the prospect of Canoeing on the Dearne.

Just wondered how these two policies would work together.?

andy
 
This is it Andy I don't really know, it's a word banded around by anglers and I'm sure at sometime i've read it on the EA website at.

What it is I 'm trying to put a definitive letter together on behalf of my local club just for the record. This including the quality of angling from where it used to be where it is now and what measures the fisheries officers will do to improve/safeguard it. This will cover all aspects of where we are at from water quality,abstraction to predation and like your area canoes as we have recently had a hire centre placed next to the river and they currently use the canal.

Just trying to get ahead of the game now and not just react to problems that will and may arise in the future. Our club gets alond well with the local officer but he's obviously not in control of everything the EA do

Cheers
Jason
 
The EA presently have a wide remit covering a lot of different areas. Fisheries being a small part of this. They operate under various statues. There charter can be found herehttp://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/aboutus/customercharter/default.aspx
The fisheries department is funded partly by the license fee and partly by government grant (tax). The main parts of the EA are funded by tax and levies on the Water Companies.
I don't think that managing fisheries is part of their remit, but maintenance and improvement of rivers is. However this is a wider remit than managing for the benefit of anglers. That part of the job is what the license fee and ring fenced government funding is for. The main part is monitoring and maintaining rivers for water quality, abstraction and flood prevention. Obviously the two functions often clash. Hence the political moves afoot to break up the EA, which may have serious implications for the future.
The water companies and many political lobbyists are of the view that too much attention of the EA is focused on fisheries, hence the moves in the EA to encourage wider use recreationally of the water ways, which is presently part of their remit.
Alternatives such as having a single agency with a focus on environmental protection, with the recreational use, flood prevention etc. going elsewhere have been suggested. How this would be funded is of course the issue.
Whist anglers are always quick to concerned everything the EA does, for the small license we pay at the moment a large amount of money is actually spent of both direct and indirect benefit to anglers. I very much doubt if this will continue after the next election, with water charges continuing to increase at an alarming rate, saving cash will be at the forefront of any future changes. Having our water industry run by the private sector in its entirity was a decision taken many years ago, the cost implications of this decsion are no being felt by the consumer. Shareholder value must be maintained and that can only be done if the money for investment in the industry comes from somewhere. Either the consumer or the tax payer. Support for fisheries is a relatively easy thing to cut out of this and make anglers pay the full costs for.
 
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If you can find in our target driven age any figures that push forward elements of the EAs duty to maintain and improve water environments, that would be quite useful for you Jason. There are likely to be strings attached to the grant in the form of targets.

But I think as words alone, the idea of "maintaining and improving" habitat is nebulous enough for any agency to point to pockets of good work, do a bit of a comms job on it, and dodge the issue of whether overall, and in a systematic way, things can be said to be improving because of their intervention.

I also had a look on their website but could not find anything that really leapt out that clearly stated aims and objectives etc, but I didn't look v hard. The charter Pete points you to is useful.

These days the best way to take agencies to account is find the conditions attached to their grant, follow the money, see what it is spent on, and then see what evidence the agency can provide that their spend leads to interventions that meets their targets. The problem will be if their targets bear little or no relation to the issues you face on your waters - well then, you're stuffed really...

Best of luck. Contact and communication with agencies is a good thing to do anyway.
 
You may also find DEFRA's web site a useful resource as this detail the various legislative responsibility of all the agencies that implement policy in the UK. The EA has responsibility in England and Wales for implemented a chunk of this. Most environmental legislation these days originates in the EU (usually watered down, sorry for the pun, by the UK government) and the EA implement's some of the, the key one being the Water directive which was widely consulted on last year and where the water companies in the Uk made very clear that they would require extra funding to even meet present standards.
try here
http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/about/partners/delivery/index.htm
for an overall view and a list of those represented on the various legistive bodies
Here
http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/quality/water/waterquality/fwfish/index.htm
is the key EU directive on freshwater fish.
Which will eventually be subsumed in the EU water directive. The EU water directive contains specific targets for each river in terms of reaching water quality levels that have been agreed in each designated area. In England and Wales each area matches the EA local areas. All this documentation is available for download from the EA website. I attended my local consultative meetings on the EU WAter Directive and I can tell you that there is an awful lot of material that you need to plough through!!! You also need somebody to translate some of it unless you are yourself an environmental scientist. So best to get somebody on board who actually understand what the targets mean in the real world...often sympathetic people from the EA itself, but as you may have seen from recent press releases from the Angling Trust some EA employees may be under pressure to toe the line these days.
The one thing that the Water Directive does do is show you each river, its present state as measured by the present environmental measure, the target state, the time table for achieving this and who, at least in theory, is responsible for doing this. The Water directive will have the force of law, but as I have already said, most environmental legislation from the EU is watered down in the UK and we also have a private industry running our water industry which is different from most other Western European countries.
For any other things that you may need in a campaign the the OPI site is a great source of information on legislation
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/
 
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'Maintain, Improve and Develope' was the original NRA/EA protocol.
How they/we interperate that can be totally different. EA Goalposts, have and will always be moved to suit themselves.
 
The EA is an easy, obvious, convenient, easily hateable for being box-ticking bureaucratic, unwieldy whipping-boy. And yet, until people - you, me, our families, the people we know, work with and meet - change their own lives - moderate their own, me-me-me, never-enough expectations - then no body, organization or environmental charity will be able to rein in those who lust for quick, "cheap", easy profits and growth and who use subtle "social Dolby Systems" - chucking enough instant "goodies" at people to keep them quiet - as a means of getting them. Children start out so promising, seeing from the age of 2 or 3 or so until leaving for secondary school the complete madness in killing stuff and generally despoiling the planet for a short-term tuppenceha'penny (invariably in somebody else's pocket), then, when coolness, consumerism and the impending world of work inevitably gets to them, are gone - no longer the hope for the future and the potential solution, but the consumer and the problem just like the rest of us.....

We can kick at the likes of the EA as much as we like, but it is still we - all of us, or at least a significant, can't-ignore majority of us - who have to change; it's only then that the promise much - deliver little, vote-seeking power-players and destructive, here today - gone tomorrow, profit-taking minority will have to change their destructive ways. Till then, however, I fear, environmentalism will continue to be just a radical minority and a concerned-middle-class wishlist fad.
 
The Chairman reflects...


But then as I was only saying yesterday evening at a Committee Meeting in Much Binding:

"The problem is that chaps and Ladies today expect an aeroplane to be waiting at their beck and call, ready to whisk them off at the drop of a spot of horse tranquilizer merely because they're feeling 'stressed out' or 'because I'm worth it', and similarly also expect a 24th Century road network that will get them to their desired destination without so much a jam or glitch and fully expect said destination to be looking and fishing like the rural England of 1860 when they get there. We can achieve this in The Hamsters, of course, Ladies and Gentlemen, with a lot of gratuitous violence and sudden, unaccountable disappearance courtesy of Head Keeper Kevin, but in the Wild Wide World beyond the Wild Wood..."

At this, I retired to the Snug with my P.A., Olga, and a bottle of Beauchamps Originals Absinthe (well, three, actually).


As ever,

B.B.
 
Raymond....please remind me where I have said that I agree with the EA's task to generate energy from our rivers??
Better watch what you are accusing people of...get my meaning?:(

Paul...excellent post...just wish google had a translator for it....:D
 
Whilst being completely opposed to the use of many of our rivers for new micro generation and having been involved in campaigns in the past against these projects in the Scottish Highlands when they have been inappropriate (whilst supporting those that are appropriate, such as the Isle of Eigg scheme) I think we should be careful about equating those proposals with restoration projects of existing water mills such as the Ludlow one. The EA seem to be doing their job here by ensuring that safeguards are put into the existing mill (and the key here is existing) in order to ensure free access for fish through the mill once it is working again. This is in no way the same as the proposals being supported by the EA elsewhere to develop micro generation sites requiring new building and not generating electricity for the grid, but for potential new builds on the river.
When the fisheries staff of the EA take action to defend a river it may be a good idea to give them support rather than just generally attack them.
One of the problems with campaigners on both sides of this important issue is those that automatically support anything that claims to generate so called "green" energy and those that automatically oppose any such proposal rather than attempting to see that a change to how we live our lives and how we generate the energy we need to live our lives has to happen. This may even be related to what Paul, in his usual way, is getting at (it may equally not of course, because working out what Paul means is one of the challenges of this site...perhaps a prize should be awarded by Paul for the most imaginative interpretations of his posts:cool:
 
Translation tip: People want something for nothing nowadays ("MY life must be happy ... everything must be perfect...."), and are prepared to do absolutely nothing to get it (or to improve the inescapable, far-from-perfect state of things), but, Boy, do they know how to shoulder their way to the front and moan, bleat and whine...
 
Paul, you can't win the prize by doing your own interpretation....it's not fair as we are taught to say these days.
And I'm not too sure that the situation you describe hasn't been the case for a large part of the western world for quite a long time.
However Spes oritur aeternum as we used to say (I think), there are always and will always be people willing to take responsibility for their own lives, they are and always will be a minority; but then if you can think of a single occasion in the whole of human history when the majority of opinion was right about anything...............
 
"E-e-w-w!" as someone dear to me, to Bertram and, it appears, to the writers of Milton Jones' latest on the 'Home Service' might say.

For further clarification (of particular interest and meaning to those to whom an mp4 torrent download watchable on a lozenge-sized phone-screen equates to real life), I can only recommend episode 4 ["Free For All"] of the "classic" The Prisoner series, a still-relevant 1967 / 68 take on Politics, Elections and their impact on the independently minded, highly intelligent, but not easily swayed individual. Check it out; might blow your tiny mind.
 
You lot have lost me, I'm sober this morning..........:)

So i take it the EA dont really have a mission statement as such that you could pin them down to nowadays, as you read through all the bunf it all sounds good but there doesnt seem to be alot of meaning to it that relates to angling.

The sort of letter the club want to write is one where we break it down into categries that will relate to the EA's reposibilities such as abstraction, invasive species and so on, then we want to find the facts from them about discharges from water companies. Relating all the info we can get from them to give a knowing of where we are at so we can identify the areas that need the attention most. The list for it can go on and any ideas to add to it would be welcome.

Also river categorization such as A,B and C i've heard it mentioned but where is the list and info on all this?

Cheers
Jason
 
You, Julian, have clearly shifted your derriere and done something; it's those who have not and never will who have no right to whine and moan, and who, if talking total Castor and Pollux, should be duly shot down in flames.
 
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There are many ways to skin a cat, Julian - one being is to put the very fear of God into those who make it their business to attend meetings...
 
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