“No-one is currently available to be interviewed” from Cornwall IFCA, please no fake comments, and a rather interesting source has contacted me

You do not need to live in Cornwall to be outraged and angry about what I posted up here on Friday, and I was pleased to see some interesting comments coming through, with my thanks as always for engaging. I have set it up so that I need to okay comments for them to appear down below, and it’s very rare for me to get either an offensive or painfully stupid one that is obviously not going to be okayed - there wasn’t a single comment to do with Friday’s post that I deemed to be remotely wrong as such. But on Monday morning I received this email from Simon Cadman who is the Principal Enforcement Officer for Cornwall IFCA:

“Dear Mr Gilbey. I am the Principal Enforcement Officer for Cornwall IFCA and I write to inform you that neither I or the solicitor agent for Cornwall IFCA, Fred Howell, have posted any comments on your blog. I am therefore requesting that you remove them. When you do so, please would you explain that the reason for their removal is because they were not genuine posts and also discourage others from doing similarly.” So I went looking through the comments and sure enough there were two comments left by a Simon Cadman and a Fred Howell. I replied along the lines of what if there are two other people commenting on my blog with the same names - somewhat unlikely of course, but benefit of the doubt and all that - and that I didn’t want to go deleting comments when they could be by genuine anglers with genuine concerns about Cornwall IFCA’s obvious failings.

Now to be fair to Simon Cadman the Principal Enforcement Officer for Cornwall IFCA, he got back to me and was able to show me that these two comments were indeed fake - and I removed them which then meant that my website software went and removed the replies to one of these comments that had been sent through (apologies, but I couldn’t do anything to stop it when I deleted the original fake comment). Simon Cadman said to me on email that: “Cornwall IFCA would not ordinarily post comments on third party blogs, so if in future you saw a comment that was seemingly attributable to a Cornwall IFCA officer, I would encourage you to contact the Cornwall IFCA office and ensure that it is not a fake comment.” I don’t know enough about the personnel at Cornwall IFCA to be checking names attached to comments on here, and from personal experience and from what a lot of you are saying on here, it’s not as if our contacting Cornwall IFCA to report something important such as suspicious looking commercial activity has exactly got anywhere at all - which leaves me distinctly not inclined to be contacting them to check the validity of suspicious comments when they surely have far more important things to be doing like not enabling a 43% increase in bass netting landings since 2013. All I can do is ask you kind people not to leave any comments under a false name.

But I did use this contact from Cornwall IFCA’s Principal Enforcement Officer to request an interview or at least a Q&A from you blog readers. I emailed this in a reply to Simon Cadman: “How about you do a blog based interview for me instead, or perhaps I can ask my blog readers for questions they would like to ask IFCA.” He might well have missed this request on my first reply back to him about the fake comments, so I asked again: “I note though that you have not answered my request for an interview and/or a Q&A. Might I ask why?” I did then get a reply from Simon Cadman and it went: “Whilst I understand yours and others needs for answers to questions that you/they may have, for various reasons, no-one is currently available to be interviewed or engage in Q&A.” Surprise, surprise one might think, but perhaps everybody at Cornwall IFCA is entirely too busy to engage with a recreational angler like me because they are working so diligently and transparently to reduce such obvious issues as I highlighted on Friday……………

And then I got a very interesting email from who I shall refer to as a “source”, and from a few emails back and forth I got this quote which has been okayed to use on here: “When CIFCA took over responsibility for enforcing the coastal netting legislation from the EA, myself and other EA Fisheries Officers were tasked with showing them various areas around the coast where we had encountered problems with illegal surface netting targeting Bass and Salmonids. With this in mind we took Simon Cadman and other CIFCA officers on several boat patrols, showing them where these nets were set and giving them details of known offenders and giving them other very specific information that was relevant to the legislation that they would be enforcing. The CIFCA officers were also required to undertake SAFFA training in order to Obtain SAFFA warrants to enable them to enforce the legislation and bring them up to the same level of expertise as the EA fisheries Officers. So they were given all the tools necessary to deal with coastal nets, it was then up to them whether they chose to enforce this legislation, they were not starting from scratch which is what we had to do. In my opinion, and it is only that, CIFCA seemed reluctant to undertake these duties. It is therefore very frustrating to see that the work undertaken by myself and other EA Fisheries Officers in stopping the coastal netting (with great success) has not been followed up by CIFCA." Bloody hell to put it mildly.

The cynical amongst you might think that all I am doing is having a pop at Cornwall IFCA here, but I would like to think that this is not the case. I applaud Simon Cadman the Principal Enforcement Officer for Cornwall IFCA for contacting me and highlighting what turned out to be fake comments on Friday’s blog post, because surely a couple of fake comments need to dealt with far more than perhaps addressing some of the issues that Friday’s blog post raised, and perhaps doing an interview where we could perhaps ask how IFCA’s role in developing a “a leading and effective national role in fisheries and conservation management in line with the IFCA vision” has resulted in this 43% increase in bass netting landings since 2013 here in Cornwall. Cynical, me?