Saving Our Streams: The Role of the Anglers' Conservation Association in Protecting English & Welsh Rivers (Research Monograph, 53)

128 Pages·2001·0.34 MB·English

by  Roger Bate

Saving Our Streams

Saving Our Streams
The Role of the Anglers’ Conservation
Association in Protecting
English and Welsh Rivers
ROGER BATE
The Institute of Economic Affairs
First published in Great Britain in 2001 by
The Institute of Economic Affairs
2 Lord North Street
Westminster
London sw1p3lb
in association with Profile Books Ltd
Copyright © The Institute of Economic Affairs 2001
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written
permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
isbn 0 255 36494 6
Many IEApublications are translated into languages other than English or are
reprinted. Permission to translate or to reprint should be sought from the
General Director at the address above.
Typeset in Stone by MacGuru
[email protected]
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Hobbs the Printers
CONTENTS
List of tables and figures 7
The author 9
Acknowledgements 11
Foreword by Keith Hartley 13
Preface by Hugo Eastwood 17
Summary 19
1 Introduction 21
2 The Anglers’ Conservation Association
and the common law 24
The early days of the ACA 26
The founder 29
Legislation to 1948 – the law and the remedy 30
The crusading angler 36
3 The ACA in action 40
Some early ACA cases 40
Monitoring pollution 48
ACA Trustees Co. Ltd and the Guarantee Fund 51
Criminal or civil? 54
4 Landmark cases 57
Pride of Derby 57
Estuaries 63
Unlawful maintenance? 68
Defences 73
5 How the ACA affected government policy
and legislation 78
River boards 78
Rivers (Prevention of Pollution) Act, 1961 82
The Water Resources Act, 1963 84
The Water Act, 1973 87
Control of Pollution Act (COPA), 1974 89
Privatisation 96
The ACA and the NRA 98
Minewater test case 101
Recent and proposed legislation 103
6 Conclusion 107
What should the ACA do in the future? 112
Appendix: ACA membership and value of fees 115
References 117
Cases cited 123
About the IEA 124
TABLES AND FIGURES
Table 1 Examples of typical Biochemical Oxygen
Demand levels 33
Figure 1 ACA members 109
Figure 2 Reported injunctions in first 25 years 110
Figure 3a Comparison of ACA fee and fishery values 116
Figure 3b Inflation-adjusted ACA fee and fishery values 116
7

THE AUTHOR
Roger Bate founded the Environment Unit at the Institute of
Economic Affairs in 1993 and co-founded the European Science
and Environment Forum in 1994. He undertook a research project
on water allocation in South Africa for the South African Water
Research Commission. This research formed part of his PhD at
Cambridge University.
Dr Bate is the editor of What Risk? (Butterworth Heinemann,
1997), a collection of papers that critically assess the way risk is
regulated in society. He has also written several scholarly papers
and numerous shorter scientific articles for newspapers and
magazines, including the Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times,
Accountancy and LM. His most recent book is Life’s Adventure:
Virtual Risk in a Real World(Butterworth Heinemann, 2000).
The author can be contacted on [email protected]
9