news/editorial

15 February 2015 News/Editorial

A Scottish Government consultation has begun on licences (effectively quotas) to kill salmon for rod fishermen, just one product of the Wild Fisheries Review carried out by Andrew Thin and published last October.

Quite why there is a need for this when all rivers already forbid killing any spring fish, and the overall kill rate of rod caught fish is around 25-30%, is not clear. I have never heard anybody (except some nets, but they would, wouldn’t they?) say that rods killing fish is a cause of decline.

A cynic might say it is all political, a trade off with the nets, and the Government could not bring itself to quota/licence the numbers the nets kill, without doing the same to the rods.

So, here on Tweed, where, because the rod proprietors have paid out over £2 million to get rid of their nets, and at last in 2015 we have none, this £2 million being paid without any assistance from the Scottish Government...that self same Government is now proposing to tell us how many salmon we rods can kill, and charge us for the privilege of being given a licence to do so.

There are also proposals to regulate fishing equipment (mandatory barbless hooks?).

I hope I am not alone in finding all this faintly offensive when the RTC, the Tweed Foundation and proprietors have done as much as anybody possibly could to preserve and protect its salmon stocks, especially over the last 30 years.

For instance, we have paid over £2 million of our own money to stop too many fish being killed by the nets, and the Government proposes to thank us for that by telling us how many we can, or most probably cannot, kill (even more ironic when we kill so few anyway).

So how will they decide how many we can kill? What does Government know that the RTC, the Tweed Foundation scientists and the proprietors do not know?

For instance, does the Government know in advance, because such licences and quotas will have to be decided and issued in advance, how big a run of fish there will be in the coming year?

Is Government so clever that it knows in advance that 2010 was to be a bonanza and 2014 the opposite, when assessing licence applications?

And how will the river quota be split up between individual beats... and then how will the beats split up their beat quota between the numerous different fisherman they have fishing over the many weeks of the 10 months of the Tweed rod fishing season?

And is killing one salmon the same as killing another? Most of us think that killing a 3lb grilse is a very different thing from killing a 15lb autumn hen fish full of eggs, and boatmen, gillies and anglers are very sensitive to that…..but the licence will just deal with killing “salmon”?

Forgive me if I see this as all wholly unnecessary, of no practical value whatever, the only motive I can conceive being “control”..... the Government seems to want to control us and tell us what we can and cannot do, not because they know better (because they demonstrably do not), nor because they have a long history of salmon conservation (quite the reverse, they have helped to ruin west coast salmon rivers by not controlling the salmon farming industry).

Let me quote from Andrew Thin’s report;

“Owners of salmon fishing rights who wish to kill salmon should be required to apply for a licence to do so (specifying the number of fish sought) by the end of December in the year preceding the year in which the licence is to be exercised. Applications should be considered and, if thought sustainable on scientific grounds, approved by a suitable public authority, with the applicant having the right of appeal if the licence is refused or a reduced number of fish consented…..Licences approved should be issued only on payment of an appropriate fee designed to ensure full cost recovery, and managed through the issuing of numbered, year and location specific tags that must be attached immediately to any fish killed. This would mean that possession of a fish without such a tag would become an offence, and any fish killed could not be kept unless a tag is attached”.

So where is the evidence of abuse by rod fishing owners that requires such a draconian change?

Even the report admits there is little or none, and I quote “The review team found little evidence that unsustainable exercise of fishing rights is anything but rare in Scotland, but anecdotal evidence was submitted to the effect that in some isolated instances owners of fishing rights may have deliberately culled certain species of coarse fish in an unsustainable manner as part of wider salmon specific fisheries management evidence”.

Good grief, surely one of the weakest statements ever made….”anecdotal…..in some isolated instances…….owners may have….. coarse fish(!)”

It is all based on such flimsy evidence, some would say no evidence at all, and because “there will be circumstances where particular fish populations come under pressure from sources outside the owner’s control…...disease, pollution, illegal fishing, threats to habitat…..all have the potential to reduce population levels to a level where it will be justified in the public interest for Government to prohibit further harvesting…”

Aha, at last, if in doubt, and you can find no other reason, invoke “the public interest” as a justification for Government taking control.

We have had “disease, pollution, illegal fishing and threats to habitat” before and all have been dealt with in exemplary fashion by the RTC over its 200 years; there is nothing new here.

So I repeat, what is it that the rod fisheries have done which is “broke”, and which requires to be fixed by centralised salmon kill licencing for the rods?

If there is no evidence of rod fisheries doing anything wrong, why is it happening?

The answer….CONTROL…. and pressure from the netting lobby for equivalence (if you are going to quota and licence us, you must do the same to the rods).

The day when I apply to a “suitable public authority” (SNH? ) for a licence and believe that it is even remotely more informed and capable of deciding how many salmon should be killed on scientific grounds, in advance, than Tweed’s own scientists and managers, the people who live on, love, and manage this wonderful river…..will be the blackest of days.

God help us…..but if I were a betting man, it will happen.

And if further irony were needed in all this, how does this proposed centralisation away from the RTC, a local elected body with an impeccable track record in good fisheries management, to the central Government, sit with the SNP Government, whose whole DNA is devolution of powers?

Not all devolution is good, it would seem.

Recommendation 1. of Andrew Thin’s self-same Wild Fisheries Review states, as a core principle (and a very good one), “The new wild fisheries management system should be firmly based on a decentralised and locally empowered model”.

Really?!

The consultation on this matter ends on 30th April, measures will be laid before the Scottish Parliament in June 2015, with the intention of implementation for 2016.