Yorkshire's fight against illegal fishing - Crackdown that is reeling in the poachers

The next time you walk by your local fishing lake, you might be surprised by what is lurking down there. Not by any strange creatures swimming in the depths, but more by the price tags that are attached to them. To the non-angler, the price of fish may come as a bit of a shock.

“A 20lb carp from a quick growing strain can be as much as £1,500 - £2,000.” says Chas White, a member of the Angling Trust’s new Voluntary Bailiff Service.

But now you are aware, it will probably come as no surprise that an illegal trade has developed around them. “It can be a big crime,” White tells me. “I know waters that have been emptied by illegal netsmen and those fish have obviously been sold on, and they could have made £15 - £20,000 for one night’s work.”

With this kind of money at stake, people will go to extraordinary lengths to carry out their illicit activities. ‘Carp rustling’ the Environment Agency calls it. According to them, poachers will use nets, traps, and have even been known to deploy explosives to steal fish.

In 2015 the Angling Trust, a charitable organisation which campaigns for anglers’ rights, won a £4m contract to supply angling services to the EA, which includes tackling illegal fishing.

It can all get very complicated, not to mention time-consuming. The Angling Trust has set up a Voluntary Bailiff Service, where anglers such as Chas White are recruited to act as the ‘eyes and ears’ for the police and Environment Agency, and report anything fishy - so to speak.

The Angling Trust piloted the scheme in the South East then began to roll it out to the rest of the country last year, with the appointment of six Regional Enforcement Managers.

To add weight - and expertise - to their role, all are ex-police, as well as being keen anglers themselves. Giles Evans, Regional Enforcement Manager for the North East and Yorkshire, spent 30 years in the police service, serving as a Detective in Northumberland before taking on this Angling Trust role.

The police arriving ‘mob-handed’ on the nation’s riverbanks to nab a few poachers might at first glance seem overkill, but part of Evans’ work is to communicate the wider implications of poaching and how it relates to rural crime more generally. Experience has shown that there are some surprising overlaps within the criminal fraternity.

“People who are fishing illegally are involved in fish theft, and there are five clear, linked crimes.” Evans says. “Those are: rural and wildlife crime - the same people who are out in the countryside doing this type of thing are possibly the same people involved in those two types of crime.

“We’ve also got business and organised crime, and the last one is hate crime, which takes in the perception that East Europeans are to blame for declining fish stocks. Those are the five linked crimes that we take to the police, where we can assist them and they can assist us.”

There are no distinct dividing lines between these crimes. Evans mentions the case last year where there was a successful prosecution on the River Esk at Whitby. The river was being netted and in one night there were 23 sea trout and two salmon in the net. This is in a fragile environment with knock-on effects for the ecology of the river.

The Angling Trust’s Voluntary Bailiff Service has so far attracted 474 volunteers nationally, of which 79 are on Evan’s patch. He is “over the moon” with the response so far. “In terms of the volunteers themselves, they are all anglers,” says Evans.

“All we ask them to do is to basically go fishing, or patrol the waters they have, and just record things on a secure website so that we can get the intelligence for the Environment Agency and Police.”

Poaching overall accounts for 33 per cent of all cases reported to the National Wildlife Crime Unit. A further 31 per cent involves hare coursing, and the level of criminal involvement becomes clearer when you learn that prize money of £30,000 and more can be at stake. Threats of intimidation and violence by the criminals involved lead to a suspected under reporting of these types of crimes.

Inspector Jonathan Grainge leads the Rural Task Force within North Yorkshire Police. Its job is to tackle rural acquisitive crime and wildlife crime within rural communities.

“The days of poaching being one man and his dog, one for the pot, those days pretty much don’t exist any more.” says Grainge.

“What we are talking about is travelling criminality, people coming from well beyond the borders of North Yorkshire specifically to poach, whether it be for hare, deer, or fish. And there are serious links to organised crime, and serious links to gambling, with significant amounts of money involved. And the knock on effects to our rural communities are both economic and ecological.”

Volunteers have always played a key role in the fight against rural crime. Bringing successful prosecutions is all about intelligence, and technology is playing an important role in people being able to get that information to the police, whether that be via secure websites, messaging services, or even a dedicated app designed to report incidents of poaching - ‘Project Poacher’.

Peter Mischenko is a Fisheries Technical Officer for the Environment Agency in Yorkshire. “Any report of potential illegal fishing activity we investigate as best we can.” says Mischenko. “But because of resources we are increasingly relying on the Angling Trust and the Voluntary Bailiff Service and police to help us out, especially with the intelligence received, which we use to target our resources.”

This is the value of joint operations such as the one at Grassington, Mischenko believes. Although nobody was caught fishing illegally that day, the logos of the Police, Environment Agency, and Angling Trust’s Voluntary Bailiff Service were seen together.

“The word will get round that the eyes and ears are out there,” says Mischenko, “And if we catch anybody we will do our best to get them to court.”

The Angling Trust is further planning to develop the service with volunteers being trained in using powers to ask to see fishing licenses. This will put them under the direct control of the Environment Agency, analogous to the Special Constabulary in the police force.

But these additional powers are not for everybody. I am personally not willing to get involved challenging people there and then,” says Chas White. “It is no joke. Some of these guys are not afraid of using violence.”

White just wants to do his bit and report anything suspicious he sees while out fishing. “The biggest problem in angling is apathy,” says White.

“What we are doing is try to say to these clubs: ‘look, it is your water, your fish. Do something yourselves’.”

Rules that muddy the waters

The question of just who is responsible for ‘policing’ our riverbanks and fishing lakes is something of a grey area.

To fish anywhere in England and Wales you need a rod licence purchased from the Environment Agency (fine for fishing without - up to £2,500) and it is the agency’s job to enforce that.

But taking fish from an enclosed area such as a lake is legally theft, and so should be a matter for the police.

To confuse things still further, you cannot legally ‘steal’ a fish from an open river (they are considered wild) but if you have not purchased a permit, you have stolen the rights to fish from the rights holder.

So again this is theft and should be dealt with by the police.