Fishing: Fighter punching its weight again

TWO years ago this month, the Anglers? Conservation Association (ACA), the small but potent body that pursues polluters of rivers and lakes through the courts and had long been one of the sport?s most respected bodies, was plunged into crisis.
For nearly 60 years, the ACA had been fighting the good fight in England and Wales ? and had acquired a formidable reputation. It had taken on more than 2,000 cases, fighting some of them as far as the High Court, and had lost only three.



It had defeated multinational corporations and one-man bands, Government ministries and local authorities, water companies and even water regulators. By deft use of common law rather than criminal law, it had won millions in damages for the angling clubs and riparian owners who fund it.

Then, turmoil. Its director and its press officer, a husband-and-wife team, left abruptly. Although the pair denied wrongdoing, rumours of all kinds were rife. It later became clear that the organisation was in financial crisis, that membership was down, that key people had quit and that morale had reached rock bottom.

Well, that was then and this is now. Under a vigorous chairman and an energetic new director, the ACA is reporting finances under control, membership stabilised, the legal team strengthened and direction and focus sharpened.

The case book ? damages won in 11 disputes out of 11 in the past 12 months alone, more than in the previous three years combined ? tells part of the story. An aggressive new posture, combined with a wider interpretation of its brief, reveals another.

In February, a crucial victory on the sale of some sheep dips was won over the Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD), the body that licenses the sometimes toxic chemicals used on farm animals and that often end up in rivers and lakes. The salmon-farming industry has been threatened with action if imported diseases and parasites affect wild salmon and damages from farms supplying coarse fish and trout have been won.

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For the first time in its history, the ACA has offered a reward for information about a polluter who ruined a member club?s fishing.

?We are going to become a lot more proactive,? Mark Lloyd, the director recruited after the 2004 crisis, said. ?Too many things have been on the ?too difficult? pile for too long. Anglers have private property rights and if they are damaged in any way we are going to sue for whatever that damage is. It doesn?t just have to be pollution coming out of big pipes. It can be anything.?

The offer of rewards seems likely to stay as a tool. ?Only 40 per cent of offenders involved in environmental pollution cases are found,? Lloyd said. ?That is shockingly low. We have to find ways of getting evidence and making people realise that if they come forward with it, something will be done.?

While the ACA?s traditional pursuit of polluters will continue ? Lloyd instances a claim for ?650,000 damages for five clubs after a strawberry farm polluted 22 miles of the Sussex Ouse ? other cases point to the wider way ahead and give notice that, as in the past, no one will be immune.

This year, damages of ?50,000 were won from the Environment Agency, the Government?s water watchdog, after a weir it built on the Eden, in Cumbria, ruined fishing upstream. Damages were won from the Royal Mint after it caused a fish kill on the River Ely in South Wales. In Lancashire, the escape of thousands of farmed rainbow trout into a wild brown trout fishery on the River Wenning was viewed as a form of pollution and damages against the fish farm resulted.

The ACA created a precedent with damages against a second farm after fish stocked into a Towcester club?s water were found to carry disease, thus putting wild fish at risk. Damages were won from several developers whose building works obstructed anglers? access to their waters. A claim for the impact of over-abstraction on the River Dove in Derbyshire ? a river made famous by Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton ? is being pursued against a water company.

Every case is music to anglers? ears, but the decision wrested from the VMD on insecticides, dwarfs them all.

Working with the Salmon and Trout Association ? angling?s political lobby group ? and others, the ACA caused the VMD to suspend the marketing of Cypermethrin sheep dip. Cypermethrin is one of a deadly group of pesticides long implicated in a collapse of aquatic fly life nationally and the battle to have it banned had been going on for years. The Freedom of Information Act, the threat of judicial review and the threat of direct legal action from the

ACA all had to be used to overcome the VMD?s resistance to a sales curb, Lloyd said.

Although the longer-term future of Cypermethrin is under discussion, manufacturers have been told that if the ban is lifted, they may be sued for damage caused to waterways not only in the future, but in the past.

Another wide front has been opened with threats of legal action against the salmon farming industry if imports of live eggs and fish from Norway lead to the introduction of disease in threatened British wild-salmon stocks. Particular concern is focused on Gyrodactylus salaris, a parasite found in Norwegian fish farms that has devastated wild salmon.

And so, it seems, the ACA is back ? and with a bigger bang. Rivers and lakes stricken by abstraction, diffuse pollution, carelessness and bloody-mindedness are being promised wider protection. Polluters and those who supply them will rest less easily. Anglers will note all of it and be heartened.