The law on when it is legal to keep a fish you have caught is to be clarified because the coarse fishing industry estimates it is losing millions of pounds a year to poachers who either eat the fish or steal them to order for other fisheries.

Fishery owners now rate Polish, Bulgarian and Romanian poachers as the biggest threat facing their business. Of 60 fisheries across England and Wales questioned, 34 said they were regular victims of thefts and the problem had worsened in the past two years. Some 25 of them thought those responsible were immigrants removing the fish for the table.

Many fisheries fear that they are being targeted by gangs of professional thieves. Fisheries pay up to £400 for a 10kg (22lb) carp, and the heaviest varieties cost thousands of pounds.

Ian Welch, chairman of the Professional Coarse Fisheries Association, said: “Eastern Europeans just don’t understand the mindset where you check fish and put them back. Where we fish for sport, they tend to fish for food.”

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is drafting new regulations. It is theft to take fish from an enclosed body of water, but the law is unclear where lakes or ponds connect to the river network and stocks are protected by the convention that anglers fish solely for sport.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Tree stump 'shows image of Virgin Mary'
• BBC drops Strictly judge for younger model
• Trafalgar Square 'reduced to a spectacle'