mark lloyd at
Member
- Joined
- Jul 19, 2012
- Messages
- 6
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- 0
I am back from leave and have caught up with this one in my brimming inbox. I have provided (I hope) a comprehensive reply below, but I cannot commit to doing this on a regular basis or getting involved in this thread on an ongoing basis due to my many other commitments.
What have we done about canoes?
We have campaigned tirelessly on this issue since our formation in 2009 when Griff Rhys Jones was promoting his TV programme about canoeing down rivers and encouraging people to go out and disturb as many anglers as possible. We got on national media to make the case for maintaining the policy of voluntary access agreements, which the governments in Westminster and Cardiff have continued to do, in spite of right to paddle legislation being introduced in Scotland. We published Conflict on the Riverbank, a document setting out the various problems around the country, available here: http://www.anglingtrust.net/core/core_picker/download.asp?id=4828 . We were founding members of the Sustainable Access Campaign Cymru to see off proposed legislation for open access to Welsh rivers, which we did successfully. We published fact sheets for our members about the law.
We have issued numerous press releases (e.g. Canoe Trespass Must be Tackled Say Angling and Countryside Groups - The Angling Trust, Angling Trust calls on British Canoe Union to Condemn Mass Trespass Protest - The Angling Trust,
Defra publishes legal opinion on Canoeists’ “unconvincing” claims of universal access - The Angling Trust), met with several government ministers, raised the issue with Sport England and the Sport and Recreation Alliance and held talks with British Canoeing. Fish Legal launched a legal case to try and stop British Canoeing publishing misleading information. We have since invested several thousand pounds on legal Advice from an eminent QC, a summary of which we published to our membership earlier this year, confirming that there is no Public Right of Navigation (Angling Trust) to try and challenge the nonsense coming out of the militant end of the canoeing fraternity, none of which is supported by legal professionals.
We are currently in further, delicate talks with British Canoeing that have taken longer than I hoped to reach a conclusion. We have agreed with them not to speak publicly about the detail of those talks while they continue. We will however be making a further announcement by the end of September at the latest.
Binka’s complaint about the Trust failing to respond to a request for information.
I have investigated this issue this week, and have found that an e-mail was sent to our membership team about using voluntary bailiffs to prosecute canoeists. We did put together the information for a reply, explaining the role of voluntary bailiffs and the fact that unlawful canoeing is a civil, rather than a criminal issue, but I'm afraid that it was not sent. It is very rare that we do not reply to correspondence and I'm sorry that we failed on this occasion.
Lack of engagement in forum debates
There are many, many angling forums online, each of which has numerous threads running to many pages. We do try and keep an eye out for hot issues where the Angling Trust is being discussed, but it would need at least one person working full time to read and respond to all the text online, so please don’t put something in a post on a forum thread and expect someone from the Trust to respond because we really can’t spend all day reading forums. Just responding to the 4 pages of posts from about 6 people on this thread has taken me several hours. Please contact us direct at admin@anglingtrust.net We do prioritise responses to members, because they fund us to serve them with a subscription, but we try to respond to everyone who writes to us.
This is something we have always struggled with. Communicating with a constituency of 3 million anglers, only 100,000 of whom buy an angling magazine or newspaper, is very difficult indeed. We introduced a new free subscription service for non-members to find out what we do so they can make their minds up: Join our Mailing List - The Angling Trust We have also published a campaigns grid to try and capture everything that we are doing on a myriad of issues: http://www.anglingtrust.net/core/core_picker/download.asp?id=6980&filetitle=Angling+Trust++Fish+Legal+Campaigns+Grid+%2D+2016 However, we clearly haven’t cracked it yet. Please let me know if you have any ideas for doing this better, but cost-effectively.
EA funding for the Angling Trust
The Crow says that we received £4 million from the EA last year. It was in fact £1 million of rod licence funds each year (it was £4 million over 4 years), which is specifically earmarked to deliver a contract to promote angling participation, run the voluntary bailiff service, advise fisheries about controlling predation and to distribute funds to clubs and fisheries to help them develop their facilities for juniors and fence out predators. This is 4% of rod licence income.
It is completely wrong to suggest that we won’t do anything to upset the EA as a result of getting this money – only last year we challenged them in court with a judicial review for failing to tackle agricultural pollution and got this into the national press: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/aug/27/government-accused-of-failing-to-protect-waterways-from-farm-pollution. We are very clear that our job is to represent anglers and that we will if necessary criticise the EA. We have done so repeatedly since our formation and will continue to do so as robustly as ever. That said, we have built increasingly strong relationships with senior staff at the EA which enable us to protect fish and fishing very effectively behind the scenes. We recently took the new Chief Executive out on the bank and he caught his first fish (a perch) and referred to us as very effective advocates for fishing. This level of support is completely new for angling and a direct result of years of work by our organisation.
Water company sponsorship of competitions.
We do get some sponsorship of Riverfest, the new national competition we set up which has been incredibly successful, and of Tidefest in London, from water companies like Thames Water and Severn Trent. To be honest, we couldn’t find anyone else who would provide the financial support needed to get these competitions off the ground. However, this small amount of sponsorship has absolutely no bearing on the way in which we operate as representative organisations. We are not exactly shy of challenging companies to improve their environmental performance; indeed I struggle to think of any other organisation that has taken on the water companies so comprehensively in recent years.
Over the past 7 years Fish Legal has fought a landmark legal case all the way to the European and eventually to the High Court to force companies to be subject to the Environmental Information Regulations so that they have to tell anglers (and the general public) what they put into our waters (and how much water they suck out). This cost us tens of thousands of pounds to fight and involved some very significant risks from losing a major legal case against several water companies and the Secretary of State for the Environment at once, but we won an historic decision which will benefit angling for years: Fish Legal v IC & Ors (Information rights : Information rights: practice and procedure) [2015] UKUT 52 (AAC) (19 February 2015).
We have also challenged them on other issues, for example on deemed consents: FoI request shows water companies are failing to co-operate over 1,968 sewage outfalls - The Angling Trust and have sued numerous companies successfully for polluting our members’ waters. I cannot see how this record of activity can possibly be squared with a conspiracy theory that we are in the pockets of the water companies; if we are, we are a very spiky thing that causes them a lot of discomfort! I think the problem is that our critics on here are not aware of the good work that we are doing.
“The secret membership deals done with lapsed members paying less to rejoin than new members joining”
We tried, for an experimental period of a couple of months, giving lapsed members the opportunity to rejoin at a lower rate. It didn’t work and some members reacted negatively so we dropped the idea. We have had to experiment with a number of ideas to try and get more people to join the Angling Trust and Fish Legal. There was nothing secretive about it.
Being involved in "the next big thing" as they see it and publicising whatever it is only to allow it to fall by the wayside when it suits them.
There are a huge number of issues we have to deal with in the Angling Trust with very limited staff numbers. If we do nothing on an issue (or are mistakenly perceived to have done nothing, as was the case with canoeing on this thread), then we are accused of being complacent. If we try to address an issue but fail to win that particular battle, we are accused of being cynically opportunistic. If we take on too many issues we are accused of spreading ourselves too thinly. Our many successes seem to go unnoticed. Everyone who works for, and volunteers for, the Angling Trust and Fish Legal works incredibly hard and tries to do everything we can to protect and improve fish and fishing. We don’t always get it right, but it is very frustrating to get to the end of yet another 50 - 60 hour week for the good of the sport and then to open a page on an angling forum to read comments suggesting that we are involved in some dark conspiracy to destroy angling.
And finally
As the campaigns grid shows (http://www.anglingtrust.net/core/core_picker/download.asp?id=6980&filetitle=Angling+Trust++Fish+Legal+Campaigns+Grid+%2D+2016) , many of these issues are ongoing, long-running sagas that cannot be resolved quickly but in each case we set out what we have done and what we are planning to do. The way our society works means that it is very rare that a group pressing for a particular thing gets exactly what they want; what happens in most cases is that we press as hard as we can to get the best result possible and we tend to make small incremental improvements. Over time, these add up to an overall picture that is getting better, rather than the one that we have suffered for decades where small deteriorations add up to a decline in the angling experience. We have however had numerous major successes, some of which are far greater than anything that was achieved by the organisations which went before the Angling Trust.
It’s clear from this thread and many others like it that there is a lot of misinformation and mistrust among some members the angling community about the Angling Trust and Fish Legal. We have spent hours and hours trying to find new ways of getting the message out about what we are doing. We have set up blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, free e-mails to subscribers, regular e-mails to members encouraging them to forward them to others, regular columns in angling publications, magazines to members, stands at angling shows and organising 36 angling forums throughout the country in the evenings (for members and non-members; find out where we will be in your region here: Angling Trust Regions: Get Involved! - The Angling Trust). I think it’s fair to say that we haven’t communicated as well as we should have done in the past, but this was due to a lack of resources rather than any attempt to hide anything. We now have a few more people to help us do it better and we’ll keep trying to reach the millions of anglers out there better (many of whom are hiding behind a bush, waist deep in water and never read any specialist media at all!)
All we can do in my view is to keep doing what we do, take on board and respond to legitimate criticism, keep spreading the word about our successes and hope that we build trust in the angling community that we are the good guys and worthy of everyone’s support. I urge you to get on board and join us. If you don’t feel comfortable paying us money to campaign and take legal action to protect fish and fishing, then please take out a free subscription so that you can at least find out what we are doing for you funded by the 12,000 individual anglers and 1,600 clubs who do pay a subscription each year.
As I said at the beginning, I can’t commit to getting involved in a thread on here, it simply takes too much of my time to communicate with 4 or 5 people via a forum, but do let me know if you think I have missed any of the points you made. I’m really keen to try and address your criticisms personally to give you and browsers of this thread the comfort that the Angling Trust and Fish Legal are in fact an immense force for good and deserve far more support than we receive.
All best wishes
Mark
Mark Lloyd
Chief Executive
What have we done about canoes?
We have campaigned tirelessly on this issue since our formation in 2009 when Griff Rhys Jones was promoting his TV programme about canoeing down rivers and encouraging people to go out and disturb as many anglers as possible. We got on national media to make the case for maintaining the policy of voluntary access agreements, which the governments in Westminster and Cardiff have continued to do, in spite of right to paddle legislation being introduced in Scotland. We published Conflict on the Riverbank, a document setting out the various problems around the country, available here: http://www.anglingtrust.net/core/core_picker/download.asp?id=4828 . We were founding members of the Sustainable Access Campaign Cymru to see off proposed legislation for open access to Welsh rivers, which we did successfully. We published fact sheets for our members about the law.
We have issued numerous press releases (e.g. Canoe Trespass Must be Tackled Say Angling and Countryside Groups - The Angling Trust, Angling Trust calls on British Canoe Union to Condemn Mass Trespass Protest - The Angling Trust,
Defra publishes legal opinion on Canoeists’ “unconvincing” claims of universal access - The Angling Trust), met with several government ministers, raised the issue with Sport England and the Sport and Recreation Alliance and held talks with British Canoeing. Fish Legal launched a legal case to try and stop British Canoeing publishing misleading information. We have since invested several thousand pounds on legal Advice from an eminent QC, a summary of which we published to our membership earlier this year, confirming that there is no Public Right of Navigation (Angling Trust) to try and challenge the nonsense coming out of the militant end of the canoeing fraternity, none of which is supported by legal professionals.
We are currently in further, delicate talks with British Canoeing that have taken longer than I hoped to reach a conclusion. We have agreed with them not to speak publicly about the detail of those talks while they continue. We will however be making a further announcement by the end of September at the latest.
Binka’s complaint about the Trust failing to respond to a request for information.
I have investigated this issue this week, and have found that an e-mail was sent to our membership team about using voluntary bailiffs to prosecute canoeists. We did put together the information for a reply, explaining the role of voluntary bailiffs and the fact that unlawful canoeing is a civil, rather than a criminal issue, but I'm afraid that it was not sent. It is very rare that we do not reply to correspondence and I'm sorry that we failed on this occasion.
Lack of engagement in forum debates
There are many, many angling forums online, each of which has numerous threads running to many pages. We do try and keep an eye out for hot issues where the Angling Trust is being discussed, but it would need at least one person working full time to read and respond to all the text online, so please don’t put something in a post on a forum thread and expect someone from the Trust to respond because we really can’t spend all day reading forums. Just responding to the 4 pages of posts from about 6 people on this thread has taken me several hours. Please contact us direct at admin@anglingtrust.net We do prioritise responses to members, because they fund us to serve them with a subscription, but we try to respond to everyone who writes to us.
This is something we have always struggled with. Communicating with a constituency of 3 million anglers, only 100,000 of whom buy an angling magazine or newspaper, is very difficult indeed. We introduced a new free subscription service for non-members to find out what we do so they can make their minds up: Join our Mailing List - The Angling Trust We have also published a campaigns grid to try and capture everything that we are doing on a myriad of issues: http://www.anglingtrust.net/core/core_picker/download.asp?id=6980&filetitle=Angling+Trust++Fish+Legal+Campaigns+Grid+%2D+2016 However, we clearly haven’t cracked it yet. Please let me know if you have any ideas for doing this better, but cost-effectively.
EA funding for the Angling Trust
The Crow says that we received £4 million from the EA last year. It was in fact £1 million of rod licence funds each year (it was £4 million over 4 years), which is specifically earmarked to deliver a contract to promote angling participation, run the voluntary bailiff service, advise fisheries about controlling predation and to distribute funds to clubs and fisheries to help them develop their facilities for juniors and fence out predators. This is 4% of rod licence income.
It is completely wrong to suggest that we won’t do anything to upset the EA as a result of getting this money – only last year we challenged them in court with a judicial review for failing to tackle agricultural pollution and got this into the national press: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/aug/27/government-accused-of-failing-to-protect-waterways-from-farm-pollution. We are very clear that our job is to represent anglers and that we will if necessary criticise the EA. We have done so repeatedly since our formation and will continue to do so as robustly as ever. That said, we have built increasingly strong relationships with senior staff at the EA which enable us to protect fish and fishing very effectively behind the scenes. We recently took the new Chief Executive out on the bank and he caught his first fish (a perch) and referred to us as very effective advocates for fishing. This level of support is completely new for angling and a direct result of years of work by our organisation.
Water company sponsorship of competitions.
We do get some sponsorship of Riverfest, the new national competition we set up which has been incredibly successful, and of Tidefest in London, from water companies like Thames Water and Severn Trent. To be honest, we couldn’t find anyone else who would provide the financial support needed to get these competitions off the ground. However, this small amount of sponsorship has absolutely no bearing on the way in which we operate as representative organisations. We are not exactly shy of challenging companies to improve their environmental performance; indeed I struggle to think of any other organisation that has taken on the water companies so comprehensively in recent years.
Over the past 7 years Fish Legal has fought a landmark legal case all the way to the European and eventually to the High Court to force companies to be subject to the Environmental Information Regulations so that they have to tell anglers (and the general public) what they put into our waters (and how much water they suck out). This cost us tens of thousands of pounds to fight and involved some very significant risks from losing a major legal case against several water companies and the Secretary of State for the Environment at once, but we won an historic decision which will benefit angling for years: Fish Legal v IC & Ors (Information rights : Information rights: practice and procedure) [2015] UKUT 52 (AAC) (19 February 2015).
We have also challenged them on other issues, for example on deemed consents: FoI request shows water companies are failing to co-operate over 1,968 sewage outfalls - The Angling Trust and have sued numerous companies successfully for polluting our members’ waters. I cannot see how this record of activity can possibly be squared with a conspiracy theory that we are in the pockets of the water companies; if we are, we are a very spiky thing that causes them a lot of discomfort! I think the problem is that our critics on here are not aware of the good work that we are doing.
“The secret membership deals done with lapsed members paying less to rejoin than new members joining”
We tried, for an experimental period of a couple of months, giving lapsed members the opportunity to rejoin at a lower rate. It didn’t work and some members reacted negatively so we dropped the idea. We have had to experiment with a number of ideas to try and get more people to join the Angling Trust and Fish Legal. There was nothing secretive about it.
Being involved in "the next big thing" as they see it and publicising whatever it is only to allow it to fall by the wayside when it suits them.
There are a huge number of issues we have to deal with in the Angling Trust with very limited staff numbers. If we do nothing on an issue (or are mistakenly perceived to have done nothing, as was the case with canoeing on this thread), then we are accused of being complacent. If we try to address an issue but fail to win that particular battle, we are accused of being cynically opportunistic. If we take on too many issues we are accused of spreading ourselves too thinly. Our many successes seem to go unnoticed. Everyone who works for, and volunteers for, the Angling Trust and Fish Legal works incredibly hard and tries to do everything we can to protect and improve fish and fishing. We don’t always get it right, but it is very frustrating to get to the end of yet another 50 - 60 hour week for the good of the sport and then to open a page on an angling forum to read comments suggesting that we are involved in some dark conspiracy to destroy angling.
And finally
As the campaigns grid shows (http://www.anglingtrust.net/core/core_picker/download.asp?id=6980&filetitle=Angling+Trust++Fish+Legal+Campaigns+Grid+%2D+2016) , many of these issues are ongoing, long-running sagas that cannot be resolved quickly but in each case we set out what we have done and what we are planning to do. The way our society works means that it is very rare that a group pressing for a particular thing gets exactly what they want; what happens in most cases is that we press as hard as we can to get the best result possible and we tend to make small incremental improvements. Over time, these add up to an overall picture that is getting better, rather than the one that we have suffered for decades where small deteriorations add up to a decline in the angling experience. We have however had numerous major successes, some of which are far greater than anything that was achieved by the organisations which went before the Angling Trust.
It’s clear from this thread and many others like it that there is a lot of misinformation and mistrust among some members the angling community about the Angling Trust and Fish Legal. We have spent hours and hours trying to find new ways of getting the message out about what we are doing. We have set up blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, free e-mails to subscribers, regular e-mails to members encouraging them to forward them to others, regular columns in angling publications, magazines to members, stands at angling shows and organising 36 angling forums throughout the country in the evenings (for members and non-members; find out where we will be in your region here: Angling Trust Regions: Get Involved! - The Angling Trust). I think it’s fair to say that we haven’t communicated as well as we should have done in the past, but this was due to a lack of resources rather than any attempt to hide anything. We now have a few more people to help us do it better and we’ll keep trying to reach the millions of anglers out there better (many of whom are hiding behind a bush, waist deep in water and never read any specialist media at all!)
All we can do in my view is to keep doing what we do, take on board and respond to legitimate criticism, keep spreading the word about our successes and hope that we build trust in the angling community that we are the good guys and worthy of everyone’s support. I urge you to get on board and join us. If you don’t feel comfortable paying us money to campaign and take legal action to protect fish and fishing, then please take out a free subscription so that you can at least find out what we are doing for you funded by the 12,000 individual anglers and 1,600 clubs who do pay a subscription each year.
As I said at the beginning, I can’t commit to getting involved in a thread on here, it simply takes too much of my time to communicate with 4 or 5 people via a forum, but do let me know if you think I have missed any of the points you made. I’m really keen to try and address your criticisms personally to give you and browsers of this thread the comfort that the Angling Trust and Fish Legal are in fact an immense force for good and deserve far more support than we receive.
All best wishes
Mark
Mark Lloyd
Chief Executive
