THE centenary year of the National Federation of Sea Anglers (NFSA) has produced bigger waves than the organisation itself might have foreseen. Two government reports and the reaction to them look set to shape recreational sea fishing for decades to come.

One, an independent study for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), assessed the popularity of sea angling specifically, in England and Wales. The other, a report by the Downing Street Strategy Unit (DSSU) looked at declining fish stocks — fish such as cod are at one third of the level that scientists say is necessary to sustain the species — and considered the impact on the commercial fishing sector. Each study showed that more than a million people in the United Kingdom go sea fishing every year.

The Defra report said that while in England and Wales 24 per cent of those made just one outing, the average number of outings was 11. All told, sea anglers in England and Wales spent close on £550 million a year on their sport. The DSSU report calculated that if Northern Ireland and Scotland were taken into account, the annual spend was around £1 billion.

The sudden realisation that sport fishing is in the same economic league as Britain’s entire commercial food-fish industry — also worth around £1 billion all told — has caused ministers to sit up and take notice. Indeed, it has prompted Ben Bradshaw, the Fisheries Minister at Defra, to say: “Sea anglers are, of course, recognised as stakeholders in the management of fish stocks . . . . and will be fully involved in considering the recommendations on fisheries management made in response to the Prime Minister’s strategy unit.”

In a different context — welcome though his words were — Bradshaw might have been accused of sexing things up. By just how much is shown by the membership of the Stakeholders’ Advisory Group, the committee assembled by officials to develop the very response to Downing Street that Bradshaw mentions.

This key group has more than 50 members, around half of them civil servants. Of the rest, most are either commercial fishermen or representatives of the food-fish industry. Anglers have been allocated a single chair.

“That’s not what I’d call fully involved,” Richard Ferré, who represents the NFSA at the meetings, says. “While it’s true we’ve got a representative on a couple of other Defra groups as well, decision-making at all levels is completely dominated by the commercial sector. That needs to change. If it doesn’t, and if things go on as they are, there’s going to be nothing left for anyone to fish for.”

Ferré, one of the vigorous new brooms at the NFSA, is the retired chief executive of a publicly quoted IT company, understands politics and issues and knows how to get things done. He is also a lifelong angler and has seen his own catches, like those of other anglers, go through the seabed in the past 20 years. Ferré and his team have a clear view of what they need to extract from the present round of contacts. Pretty well everything on their list, including the need for a bigger say in policy decisions, is aimed at raising fish stocks and sizes.

“It’s simple,” Ferré says. “No one comes here for our sea angling but plenty of British anglers take their money abroad. They go to places like the US where many of the species anglers want to catch are managed primarily for angling benefit. As a result the fishing’s great and the US reaps the economic benefit. If sea anglers in Britain can generate anything approaching £1 billion on a declining resource, how much more could we contribute if fish were there to catch?"

Two thirds of the sea fish anglers are interested in never go beyond the 12-mile limit and most of those are accessible within a mile of the shore. It is these species that the NFSA wants to protect above all.

Measures Ferré and his team are pressing for include higher takeable size limits for some species: at present, even valuable fish such as cod and bass can be killed before they have had a chance to reproduce “and if that’s not self-defeating, I don’t know what is”.

Another measure being targeted is a limit on the extent to which any boat can use gill nets — light, invisible, nylon shrouds up to 30 kilometres long that will trap and throttle anything that swims into them. A ban on the use of any gill nets at all and on all trawling within one mile of land is likewise on Ferré’s list, as is recognition that local planning decisions need to provide for better access to shorelines.

It is on the winning of some of these points, Ferré says, that the future of one of the most contentious of all issues depends. In its search for cash to fund the control measures likely to be needed, the DSSU indicated that it would like to see a £22-a-year rod licence imposed on sea anglers, just as it is on those who fish in freshwater. The difference as sea anglers see it is that freshwater anglers get a service from the Environment Agency for their cash, whereas they get nothing.

“However,” Ferré says, “we’ve told officials that we’ll back a licence if we get enough of what we want. The future’s in the Government’s own hands. And that’s not just the future for anglers — it’s the future for the fish and for the commercial boys, as well.”

• Brian Clarke's angling column appears on the first Monday of each month.