I know I have written about the Environment Agency (EA) before, but there is an issue here, highlighted brilliantly this week by Simon Cooper of Fishing Breaks.

I’m a great fan of Simon’s. Perhaps because he is ex-UEA, he speaks endless sense, never more than now. From the outset, once again let me make it clear that many of those who work in the Fisheries sections of the EA are good people, well intentioned and I like to count Nick, Graham, Helen and many others as friends. It is the organisation that fails us, as Simon makes clear.

If you are, like me, a traditionalist, it’s likely you’ll be renewing your fishing licence in a couple of months. Last year, our licence fees added up to £21m; not bad, but a drop in the bucket of the EA’s total budget of £1.6bn. And of course, probably £8m of our money goes into the administration of the licence, into collecting, policing and prosecutions. That leaves little to be spent nationwide on improving our fishing, the whole point of the licence, we are told. This is especially irksome as last year all this money and effort resulted in 350 prosecutions, one a day, compared with 50,000 TV licence dodgers who were collared. Indeed, have you EVER been approached by a paramilitary style, stab-vested bailiff and asked for your licence? There are one or two hotspots but in general, the answer, I guess, is no.

So, let us say that £12m does go to fishery improvement, much of that is wasted. Wasted on consultants, ridiculously OTT health and safety requirements and schemes that come in at hugely-inflated costs. Projects that are carried out, eventually, are then forgotten about and abandoned, left to rot in many cases.

We know that in Scotland no licence is necessary, nor is one required for fishing off Cromer pier. You can cycle free, swim in rivers free and canoe free. You can do almost anything outdoors free, apart from fish. I’m at age when concessions make my own licence ludicrously cheap, but the normal fee hits the poorest hard and possibly deters many from entering our wonderful sport. Personally, I’d pay 10 times what I do if I could see positive benefits… remember ex-EA officer Steve Lane’s plan to lease waters and run them as free, safe, attractive fisheries? Now that I’d pay for and see some proper sense in.

I find it hard to believe many would disagree with what Simon wrote and I have endorsed. As matters stand, the EA licence fee really is a useless irritant. In Slovenia, to quote one of many examples, fees are high, your licence is checked daily, fines for misdemeanours are hard hitting, fisheries are supremely protected and improved and the system makes sense both financially and piscatorially. Here, the situation is a nonsense and a shambles.

The question is, what do we do about it? We all know in the UK anything and everything is achieved with glacial slowness. Think back to the summer when we came close to drought and the media wanted the blood of the water companies? Now it has rained for three months, we’ve all forgotten hose pipe bans and the water companies are off the hook for another year. On and on this endless cycle of inefficiency rumbles.

Back in the 1980s, my fishing partner, Roger Miller, and I refused to buy the licence for all the points above - see how quickly things do not change!

We were warned that, as he was a policeman and I taught at the Norwich School, this was a risky thing to do, but we were on a crusade. In the event, because I wrote about our stance in the press, I was caught and prosecuted. I sat waiting for my case to be heard, practising my Churchillian speech on the iniquities of Anglian Water. The door opened and my solicitor came out, not to call me in for a court room drama, but to tell me the affair had been rushed through in less than a minute and I was fined a few quid. My moment of heroism had been sunk without trace.

My guess is that we’ll all buy our stupid licence yet again this year and spend our time grumbling about the catastrophe in salmon and sea trout stocks, the sewage in our rivers, the collapse of roach and brown trout numbers, unchecked poaching, cormorant predation that Natural England pretends not to see and a hundred other abuses that will be with us interminably. How tragically, unforgivably sad is that?