About a year ago I wrote a couple of blogs, one about the changes to the rod licence and one about how the Environment Agency (EA) spend the rod licence money. Well the EA have just published their annual Fisheries Reports for 2016/17.  Which is basically a document which tells you what they have been spending rod licence money on during those 12 months. You can view both the National Report and also your local regions report HERE.

So what is the Environment Agency trying to achieve when it is spending Rod Licence money ?

Well it’s the Government, in the form of Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) who tell the EA what their aims are, and they state three key objectives:

1. To ensure the conservation and maintain the diversity of freshwater fish, salmon, sea trout and
   eels and to conserve their aquatic environment
2. To enhance the contribution salmon and freshwater fisheries make to the economy, particularly
   in remote rural areas and in areas with low levels of income
3. To enhance the social value of fishing as a widely available and healthy form of recreation.

The Environment Agency doesn’t try to achieve these aims all by itself, it partners with a number of other organisations to deliver habitat improvement projects, to encourage more people to go fishing and to distribute grants to fishing related projects right round the country.

One of the highest profile ways that the EA spends rod licence money is through the Angling Improvement Fund which is administered by The Angling Trust. 

In the 2016 to 2017 financial year the EA reinvested £670,000 of fishing licence money in 153 angling
improvement projects.. The vast majority of these projects were provided with grants of between £3000 – £5000 and went to local clubs and organisations to improve local fishing infrastructure, to train fishing coaches, to improve access to fishing for people with disabilities and to help combat predation by cormorants and otters. What’s more, the organisations involved provided matched funding of another £870,000. So in total it the fund generated over £1.5million worth of projects.

To find out more about how your club or organisation could apply for a grant from the Angling Improvement Fund, just click the link above.

So why not take half an hour and actually have a read of the report. After all if you are an angler, then you have contributed some of your own hard earned cash by buying a rod licence, so don’t you think you should know where it all goes ?

Next time we’ll take a closer look at how rod licence money is used to try to improve and restore the fishing on rivers throughout the country.