Muddled thinking

The council has not offered any clear reason why this ban is being considered but points out it is only proposing to apply it to a section of the sea front in front of the De La Warr Pavilion. Perhaps it believes using the beach for leisure activities is a bit too untidy.

Many people in Bexhill (and I have personally spoken to hundreds) believe that this typifies the kind of muddled thinking the council too often indulges in.

To be fair it has put this out for consultation but even then it didn’t make much effort to publicise it, probably hoping that we’d all be too busy indulging in our unsightly hobbies to notice.

A petition has been raised by the Sussex Sea Angling Network, being presented on May 27 at 4.30pm.

When the SSAN initially asked for a meeting with David Edwards, solicitor for the council, as part of the consultation he dismissed the concerns of the group thus “a petition objecting to a ban on fishing from the Rother shoreline... would not be relevant to the current consultation exercise”.

He states the council “has a legitimate concern about safety and the quality of the experience for beach-users like swimmers, sunbathers, boat users etc..” I’d like to know if anyone has complained, maybe someone has been injured by an aircraft landing.

Speaking as an angler I would avoid the beach when it was crowded anyway, and most other anglers would do the same. A ban is a completely pointless exercise in petty rule-making which will achieve nothing apart from annoying a large proportion of the good people of Rother.

But the thing is, once this byelaw is in place it could decide to apply it to every part of the shoreline – a precedent would have been set.

TIM MCPHERSON

Bexhill sea angler