I have floated a few general questions out lately, so please forgive me if I do yet another!

I was wondering whether people think that the number of UK anglers is going up or down or is remaining steady.

I suspect that there might be some distinctions to be drawn here, in particular between "life anglers" and those which perhaps only end up dipping their toe in - the sort that immediately buy a shedload of equipment, hit the overstocked stewponds, "bag-up" every time they go, lose interest and either archive the lot in the loft or flog it on eBay. A fair few tackle dealers have told me that (thankfully for them!) there are quite a few of these "flash-in-the-pan" types.

A fair few tackle dealers have also told me that they think fly fishing in particular seems to have been in decline over the past few years in terms of numbers buying in their shops at least. Some have even suggested that it is because of the relatively low sales volumes of fly gear that it is more expensive than say carp-related gear.

I suppose that my query is a tricky one for most of us to answer as we do not have a wide enough view of the necessary facts - just because a particular fishery or tackle shop has started to struggle in recent years does not necessarily indicate a nationwide reduction in the numbers of anglers.

Does anyone know what the annual rod licence numbers are? Is anyone aware of any relevant marketing studies, trade figures or tackle manufacturers, production figures which might provide some decent indicators of any overall national trends? What are your tackle dealers saying to you? Have those who fish the huge venues like Grafham and Rutland noticed any changes / trends?

I often see statements in the press and elsewhere of "x million anglers in the UK" and angling being the UK's most popular participation sport, but to date I have never seen any hard facts or stats to back these claims up. Such statements are of course reassuring to read in the light of the antis' nonsense, but I wonder just how big a body of opinion we actually are, and whether we are in fact growing or declining in numbers.

I would be grateful for your thoughts.

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strikealight


Dynamite fishing is always effective.

Full England & Wales rod licences have been running at about 1 million per year for some time. Short term licence sales tend to fluctuate quite a bit. For example, I would expect there to be a fall in sales in the early part of this summer due to the Olympics, but they should pick up again later on when people start going fishing rather than leering at beach volleyball on the TV.

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Save the softmouth trout

If you look at the stats for licence sales for the past ten years the sales have gone up and up, up to 2010/2011 when there was a slight reduction but not enough to be worried about.

Very true the canals round here are full of fish


Cheers
spencer

You could do a poll of the 30,000 members of this forum. Seems a reasonable sample base! Or even set up a survey monkey to get the answers with well-designed multiple choice questions. There's been some poor ones lately but i'm sure it can be done.

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you could but how many have a licence and then there's only a few hundred regularly posting ?????

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WHEN YOU LEAVE THE RIVER, TAKE NOTHING, AND LEAVE ONLY FOOTPRINT'S!!!

THA CAN TELL A YORKSHIREMAN ,BUT THA CAN'T TELL HIM MUCH !!

The problem is some people, more so carp anglers, buy 2 licenses so they can fish 4 rods etc. The E.A should be the best people to ask. There is now no difference between fly and coarse licenses unless for salmon.