The 2,318,140 That Got Away

That’s strange because according to the Environment Agency, who sell the NRA fishing license at £ 26.00 each per year, there are 2.6 million of us over twelve year old anglers out there somewhere. What’s more, they say that 8.3 million of us went fishing at some time in the last ten years…That’s 20% of the population.

So why do Sport England disagree?

The Active People Survey, carried out by MORI in 2006 was “to measure levels of participation in sport and active recreation and its contribution to improving the health of the nation” and the results have just been published.

Top of the list is walking 8.1 million, followed by swimming 5.6 million, gym 4.7 million and so on through squash and yoga all the way down to fishing which, according to the survey, has only 281,083 participants in the whole UK.

Now I know anglers have a reputation for exaggerating but there has to be something quite seriously wrong somewhere.

And it gets even more surreal when you know that official government figures show 20,000 people are employed in the angling industry. That’s 1 for every 14 fisherman? Not only that, between us we spent 2.75 billion pounds on our sport. According to Sport England that’s an average of nearly £ 10,000. each per year.

If it wasn’t so serious, it would be laughable and Sport England should have thrown this one in the bin rather than announcing it to the world. The problem is, it’s figures like these that will be used by the Government and governing bodies in policy decisions or funding allocations.

“Sport England is in the process of evaluating how it will channel future investment.” they say.

However, a report for The Home Office by Dr Adam Brown of Substance says,

“Sport England, although it encourages people to fish, does not recognise fishing as core sport and as such this limits funding opportunities, despite the activity and health opportunities it may offer.”Worse still these statistics may be taken by extremist groups and use to campaign against what is undeniably a hugely popular participation sport.

Through its demand for availability of resources like lakes and rivers and for clean water, has preserved, and even in some places extended, recreational facilities and natural wildlife habitat that would otherwise have probably become building plots by now.

The Environment Agency’s report – Our Nations Fisheries concluded:

“We see angling as good for people and for the environment and that is why we take our role in developing and promoting the sport very seriously.”

So how could MORI, an organisation that practically invented the survey, get it so horribly wrong? When there’s so much at stake, how could they have come up with these figures?

“The questionnaire was designed with an expert Advisory Group of leading academics. It was fully piloted and tested for reliability.” say Sport England.

OK, that’s fair enough, so what was the question?

“In the last four weeks, did you do any sporting or recreational physical activity?”

I’ve been an angler for over 45 years and never regarded it a “physical activity”, and since I do it for pleasure, the question of “sport” is only appropriate to match anglers.

The widely accepted definition of “sport” by Professor Jay Coakley, author of Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies, says,

“Sports are institutionalised competitive activities that involve rigorous physical exertion or the use of relatively complex physical skills by participants motivated by internal and external rewards”

So if you had asked me that question it’s hardly surprising that I would have answered NO. So does that mean I’m not an angler in the eyes of Sport England?

“We have complete confidence in its (the survey) robustness and in the findings.” they assert.

I realise that angling can be a contentious issue for some people but for an organisation like MORI to draw definitive conclusions from such a poorly worded question surprises me. They, of all people, must understand that in order to get true answers, the question has to be right. If, like me, the respondents didn’t regard their fishing as either “sport” or “physical activity” the conclusion that there are so few anglers must be completely false.

It gets worse. The survey was conducted from October 2005 until October 2006.

Fishing, unlike say Squash, or Yoga is an outdoor sport and highly seasonal. From October till April, only a fraction of fishermen would be able to answer the question in the affirmative. Ask them in July or August and the result would be completely different.

I suppose to be fair to MORI their mistake is not to have defined what activities they would include in the sample as delivering the objective of better health as defined in the Active People survey. But having undertaken the survey and seen the results someone must have realised the massive contradiction that their results indicated against the EA sales of over one million fishing licences. After all, it’s not rocket science. One million people did not spend £ 26.00 each on a licence to fish and just to sit at home, did they?

Benjamin Disraeli once said “There are three kinds of lies; lies, damned lies and statistics”.

These statistics, however sincerely intended and honestly gained will become lies in the hands of those with their own agenda.

My only hope is that as a result of these very poor statistics, this wonderful sport of angling is not the loser, and that, in five or ten years time, we don’t find the innumerable benefits to society and the environment that spin off from my participation, are really the “ones that got away”.