Taken from a recent press release by the Angling Trust
Mike. I assume you are refering to the appointment of Ben Thompson to cover angling development in the NE. I dont know what his past angling practice has been but the job entails promoting angling as a whole and not just specifically sea angling.
With regard to the NE RSA's we are probably in a better position in terms of representation at the moment than we have been for many years.
The angling trust has two sides, the region match side and the conservation side. The NE is chaired by Sam Harris and an active committee whilst there is also a Yorkshire division.
In addition there is a national conservation committee and then finally the Marine committee which is chaired by Stuart McPherson who himself is a NE angler.
Discussions on matters affecting anglers such as Art 47, Bait Digging and MCZ's are held by the conservation committee who then put this forward to the marine committe and then on to the AT board for ratification.
I am a member of the conservation committee which along with Stuart gives us two regional representatives on the ground level and Stuart then can take things right to the AT board.
The last meeting of the conservation Group was last saturday at Warwick and NE topics were firmly on the agenda. The main ones been Bait Digging and the Northumberland EMS which is destined to automatically become a MCZ. This is something we need to be aware of as this covers 115km of the coastline from Berwick southwards and so any legislation covering this area will have consequences on shore (and to a lesser degree boat) anglers.
Another topic of conversation was anglers who sit on the Sea Fisheries Committee's and it was agreed that better sharing of information and more help should be given to these people to ensure they can represent anglers better. In the NE we have two representatives on the Northumberland SFC who are Les Weller (Loopyles5 on here) and myself. There are also 4 reprentatives on the NE SFC.
In addition to this we have Alan who is also doing his bit to help NE sea anglers and seems to be getting good results from what I read.
One thing that was made clearer was the way in which MCZ's will be chosen based on the work already done in the SW region which is 2 years ahead of us in terms of creating MCZ's.
It starts with scientists Identifying how much (but not where ) needs MCZ status and for what reasons. This is then passed to a group drawn from all coastal users at the grass roots level. This group will include Commercials, Divers, dreders, bird watchers etc etc. In the SW it initially included 1 angler and a second has been included in recent months. There is hope to get a third angler on this committee as the area involved increases.
This group then discuss each area and decide where should be made into a MCZ and the reasons for its creation. This then goes back up the line to public consultation and finally designation as a MCZ. This is a total reversal of the normal practice where scientist deside where and then it moves straight to consultation and introduction.
The time scale for this to be in place is 2012, which considering the SW project has been running for 2 years already and they are only just collecting the data is in my view a very optomistic target.
It's very early days for the Angling Trust with a lot of new projects just beginning and the change from NFSA to AT has not been as easy as expected by all accounts.
One interesting fact is that on one of the earlier public consultations with Defra the only NE stakeholder was listed as NESA, and things have come a long way since then.
Cheers
Dave
