Clogged fuel pickup?

Right, so I've been having running issues for a little while - under high revs the engine sometimes stutters (especially when going uphill and with less than half a tank of fuel) and a couple of weeks ago it began to cut out in traffic when I was just driving around normally. I've restricted the return line from the vapour separator which made it a little better, but not much. Since I knew the previous owner had replaced the filler neck due to rust, I took off the inspection panel under the rear seats earlier to have a look for debris in the tank. It was pretty clean, but with a few gritty bits here and there in the bottom - swinging a magnet around on a bit of string didn't pick any of them up so I don't think it's rust, but I might try again when the tank's not full as it was pretty hard to see what I was doing! The level sensor looked like this one:



The brown plastic piece on the end of the pickup pipe (not sure if it really deserves to be called a filter?) had a few specks of metal jammed into the holes, so maybe that explains why it was getting starved. Is there supposed to be something else on the end, like a filter sock or something? Seems to be a bit of a carp design if not! Not really sure how I can clean the crud out of the bottom of the tank very easily since it doesn't seem to be magnetic: could I maybe remove the brown plastic piece for a few weeks to let it all build up in the filter in the engine bay? Or just drop a magnet into the bottom of the tank and leave it there like they do on sumps? Would ideally like to replace the vapour separator on the off chance, but VW Heritage are out of stock. Could replace it with a T-piece for a while to see if that helps? Any ideas appreciated!

Stone

loads of people have binned off the separator with no side effects, so may as well give it a go. pretty sure there is no filter on the pickup? if you fit one it may make it a bit harder for the fuel pump to pull the fuel up, i take it you have checked main filter in bay is clean inside and given the lines a good blow thru in case bits of crud stuck up them?