Examination of Witnesses
(Questions 328 - 350)
WEDNESDAY 21 OCTOBER 1998
DR MARK
AVERY, MR
JIM DIXON
AND MS
VICKI SWALES
Chairman
328. Dr Avery, I do apologise for keeping you
waiting but we have had two interesting sessions which we have
enjoyed and I am sure this will be a third which will be interesting
and we shall enjoy as well. Thank you for written memorandum;
it is greatly appreciated by the Committee. Can I begin by asking
you to introduce yourself and your colleagues.
(Dr Avery) Thank you, Chairman. Good
afternoon. I am Mark Avery, Director of Conservation for the RSPB.
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to give evidence on this
important and technical subject. I have only been in post for
a few weeks but because it is important I am particularly pleased
to have with me my colleagues Jim Dixon, who is our Senior Policy
Officer, and Vicki Swales, who is our Agricultural Policy Officer,
and you will see that I will be relying heavily on them during
our evidence.
Chairman: Thank you for that frank answer. We
will go straight to Mr Marsden.
Mr Marsden
329. You suggest in your memorandum that the
main funding priorities under the proposed regulation should be
to increase spending on agri-environmental programmes as well
as: "Developing broadly based rural development schemes for
the uplands to support hill farming and rural communities."
Bearing in mind the restricted economic opportunities what broadly-based
rural development schemes do you actually have in mind?
(Mr Avery) We believe that rural development regulation
offers a wide range of potential measures which could support
hill farming and rural communities. I do say "could"
because I think that depends on the level of funding and how the
regulation is actually implemented. What does seem to be clear
is that we cannot say where we are at the moment because the CAP
is not working either for farmers, for rural communities and certainly
from our point of view for the environment so we have to move
to a different position. We believe in the fact that it is not
just farmers who need support and you have already heard evidence
today that suggests that. We think that is true. It is the framework
in which farmers are working which is important and I think from
our perspective—I am married to a farmer's daughter and
farmers are in my family—in a place like Northamptonshire
small farmers are very much dependent on the framework around
them. The boot and shoe industry is probably just as important
in maintaining small farmers in farming in an environmentally
friendly way as anything else. I will ask Jim to give you some
more concrete examples.
(Mr Dixon) I think the rural development regulation
if applied with gusto, enthusiasm and clarity of purpose—I
will come back to that perhaps—offers an opportunity to
answer some of the difficult problems farming faces at the moment.
It probably cannot answer all of them but it seems clear to us
that the prevailing economic situation of farming is a trend toward
greater scale, greater volatility in markets, greater complexity
in the demands on producers from the retailers and so on, and
this is an economic fact of life and therefore fewer farmers will
be able to just stand still and say, "I'm a farmer and I'm
going to grow what my father grew and that is its future."
So opportunities such as specialist marketing, organic marketing
are important. Organic farming seems to us to be one particular
area in which the regulation could provide support. We currently
import about 70 per cent of our organic products into the United
Kingdom. We like that because we are interested in protecting
the environment abroad as well as in the United Kingdom, but it
does seem for the want of a relatively small amount of support
we are not supporting an industry which generates food, economic
activity and environmental benefits. So organic farming is one.
If you peel away what it is that organic farming offers it offers
environmental management, it offers a particular defined product.
Often organic products are very local and indeed these messages,
these opportunities may well have much wider application in agricultural
processing and development. Indeed, there is nothing in the regulation
as it stands at the moment to prevent regional, local, other specialist
marketing opportunities.
330. Let me chase that up. You talk about organic
farming. Could you quantify how much extra agri-environment spending
you would like to see and also areas other than organic farming
that you would like to see it directed at?
(Mr Dixon) Yes, I think we would. With all agri-environment
schemes we start from the basis of setting environmental objectives.
We think that things like the Biodiversity Action Plan and the
Sustainable Development Plan that the Government is working on
set actual technical environmental objectives. We then need to
cast around and look for ways of delivering those objectives.
In practical terms, agriculture is very important to delivering
a lot of environmental objectives, so that you can import into
agri-environment policy objectives from environmental legislation
and environmental priorities. It seems to us that that is the
only long-term valid way of defining the objectives of agri-environment
policy to avoid allegations that we are just subsidising farmers
by a back-door way. So if you take the Biodiversity Action Plan
and you take the conservation objectives, we see a range of agri-environment
schemes. Ms Swales might be in a better position to run through
precisely some of those.
(Ms Swales) Yes. We have a good programme of agri-environment
schemes, certainly in the United Kingdom, but an incredible potential
for growth, both in the coverage and in the number of new schemes,
particularly trialling new ways, pilot schemes, and there are
certain initiatives taking place at the moment, one in particular
in the uplands at Bodmin and Bowland, which is looking at a more
integrated approach, trying to integrate Countryside Stewardship,
for instance, with Objective 5B funds, which very much could be
seen as a model for this rural development regulation, or at least
give us some pointers as to the direction things should take.
We have a programme of Environmentally Sensitive Area schemes
throughout the United Kingdom, 44 in total, but in terms of the
actual number of farmers we are able to bring into those schemes,
I think there is great potential for growth, given that farmers
are entering at what is called the basic Tier 1 level but very
few farmers, or relatively few, are interested in going up into
the conservation tiers, but we need additional funding in order
to be able to bring farmers into those tiers. Countryside Stewardship
is a scheme which is massively oversubscribed. There are roughly
twice as many applicants as there is funding available. The demand
is clearly there for farmers to enter these sorts of programmes
but the money is not there to bring them in. Equally, in Wales
the proposal to have a new scheme called Tir Gofal, an all-Wales
agri-environment scheme, in itself needs funding. So there is
a tremendous range of potential, I think, within the United Kingdom
to produce and increase agri-environment programmes.
Chairman
331. Is this document which accompanied your
evidence from Bird Life International, of which RSPB is a leading
member, a document which all the members of Bird Life International
subscribe to, which I see includes a bird organisation in every
country except Italy, for some reason?
(Dr Avery) We do have an Italian partner, so I am
sure they would sign up to that.
332. I will not make any observations about
the policy of Italians towards birds from that omission, but what
interested me is that in the document it does say what you are
saying in your own evidence to us and what we have just heard
from our other witnesses this morning, that the new Rural Development
programme must offer support to a wide range of rural beneficiaries,
and that is something with which this Committee will have a lot
of sympathy, but of course we do know that other Member States
are much less happy about that prospect. We have heard about the
famous village hairdresser which exercises the Germans so much.
Are all your members of Bird Life International signed up to that
policy objective for a wide range of beneficiaries?
(Dr Avery) Absolutely.
(Mr Dixon) Yes. If you take any of the countries around
the Mediterranean—Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy, Italy
in particular—they do not see the status quo, which is very
high amounts of rural poverty in many areas, a form of agricultural
intensification on the horizon which is bringing in large-scale
Northern European techniques of irrigation and development, as
a future for their environment and for their wildlife. So they
are looking at mechanisms to link people and environmental management
and they see agri-environment schemes as the solution. Their governments
and their farming industries do not necessarily see that. If you
take, for example, Spain, we know that the formal Spanish position
is that they do not wish to have some of the resources currently
going into commodities support redirected into rural development,
but behind the scenes informally they know that there is no future
for the common agricultural policy if it only subsidises production.
Therefore, the environmental organisations are talking to the
farming organisations and to the government about what is the
alternative view, and at some stage that view must break forward
in the Agriculture Council, but we all know that the Agriculture
Council is about brinkmanship, it is about negotiating positions,
and at the moment the professed view of the southern countries
is rather different from the view of our environmental colleagues.
333. So there is surprisingly strong unanimity
within Bird Life International sister organisations in the European
Union?
(Mr Dixon) I think there is, certainly on the question
of rural development. Obviously countries like Germany and Belgium
would see rural development as, to an extent, a threat to the
countryside and to the environment, to an extent an alternative
to the agricultural systems that we see today.
Mr George
334. As has been repeated a couple of times
already today, the European Commission's proposals have really
only one mandatory component for implementation, namely, the agri-environment
measures, but I wanted to explore a little bit further what impact
that itself would have on the economies of rural areas, if any
beneficial impact at all. Do you believe that maintaining traditionally
farmed landscapes and encouraging less intensive forms of agricultural
production are at the heart of the sustainable rural development
effort in the United Kingdom, and does this ignore the fact that
agriculture's importance as a source of employment in the countryside
is continually on the decline?
(Dr Avery) I think when we are talking about sustainable
rural development, we (not surprisingly, I think) would say that
the maintenance of biodiversity is one of the key tests of that
sustainability. So there are two crises in the countryside. One
is in the farming and the other is in biodiversity in the farmed
landscape. So we are obviously very pleased that the agri-environment
measures are the compulsory part of this for Member States to
implement. We would say that in the United Kingdom proper implementation
is going to be critical to the Government achieving its objectives
under the Biodiversity Action Plan. I suppose what we do think
is that agri-environment measures are not well enough funded at
the moment to have as big an impact as they could, either in environmental
terms or in terms of sustaining and generating employment.
335. Could I interrupt you before you pass over
and ask you the question: as MPs we need to go back to our constituencies
and persuade farmers and the unemployed in our rural communities
that biodiversity and agri-environment schemes are going to give
them something other than a more interesting wildlife environment.
How many jobs is this going to create? What benefit will it be
to the economy? Can you give me any useful ammunition that I can
take back, and my colleagues?
(Dr Avery) I think I will hand over to Ms Swales in
a moment to do that but the other thing that the agri-environment
schemes can do is to win public support for farming, that this
is a way of public money being spent to generate general environmental
goods, and I think with the situation in United Kingdom farming
at the moment, the farming industry needs public support, and
when one can say that money is going into the system to protect
the countryside, protect biodiversity but also to generate jobs,
that is a "win-win" situation. We do believe that agri-environment
schemes can support jobs.
(Ms Swales) Yes. there have been various studies done
looking at the employment and income effects of putting money
into the rural economy through agri-environment schemes. For example,
studies show that in 1995 Countryside Stewardship alone created
300 new jobs and it maintained the incomes of nine out of ten
participating farmers. Tir Cymen, which was a pilot scheme in
Wales, created a total of 200 new jobs in the three pilot areas
in which it ran. Similarly, Environmentally Sensitive Areas are
shown to be able to create employment and often contract work—dry-stone
wallers, hedge-layers, for example—to small businesses in
the rural economy. Organic farming, which Mr Dixon mentioned,
is a farming method which is generally more labour intensive than
some conventional systems and again has offered scope directly
for farm employment but also job creation in local processing
and marketing. So we think it actually creates an awful lot of
opportunities, both for farmers, for other people in the local
economy and for some of those downstream industries particularly
related to the processing and marketing of foods. So farmers can
use agri-environment schemes to say, "I am producing premium
food, good-quality food, in an environmentally sustainable way,"
then clearly the supermarkets seem to feel there is a marketing
niche there and the consumer wants that kind of produce, and I
think when you put all those together you actually have in a sense
a package along with other rural development measures which actually
do help to create employment and to maintain incomes.
Chairman
336. Your sense would be, broadly speaking,
that British agriculture is inherently susceptible to this line
of argument, that it is not hostile to it? Your feeling is that,
on the whole, British farmers want to go down these kinds of routes,
they want to farm their environment sensitively?
(Ms Swales) Yes. I think there is an awful lot of
evidence that farmers are interested in taking this route. They
are having some very clear signals that the current way in which
they are supported through production, through commodity payments,
is going to run into trouble in the future with the WTO and I
think they are looking for alternative sources of income. But
much more than that, there is a genuine interest and a growing
interest in doing their bit to help protect and maintain the environment.
A small example of that is a new pilot scheme, Arable Stewardship,
which the RSPB worked with English Nature and The Game Conservancy
Trust to develop. That has had an extremely good uptake, with
many more farmers applying to enter that than there is money available,
again another indication that if these schemes are there and they
are funded, farmers will go into them.
Mr Hayes
337. You talk in your memorandum about drawing
up regional development plans with a variety of agencies' involvement.
When you draw up rural development plans, as you know, the timescale
necessitates a high level of efficiency. You talk about non-governmental
organisations, national level, county level, local level, involving
the community. In practice, how feasible would that be, given
the timescale involved?
(Dr Avery) We do believe that it would be important.
It would help the efficiency of the scheme and the effectiveness
of the scheme in the long term if there is that type of involvement.
I have to say that we would not claim to be experts on the implementation
of complex regulations like this, but we do have some experience
from our involvement in agri-environment schemes in the past.
I think we would be looking to the United Kingdom Government for
an imaginative approach to this, which has been shown in the past
with the introduction of ESAs and Countryside Stewardship, where
the United Kingdom was very good, possibly leading Europe, in
working out how to implement those regulations. We need to do
something rather similar in working through this one. The experiment
in Bodmin and the Forest of Bowland is one example of a step forward
in that direction. We will have to look and see how that works
out. From our perspective, one of the things that would be needed
at all levels in these plans would be very clear objectives and
targets, and if those are put in place right at the beginning
then it will be easier to measure the success of them and to see
how to implement them. It is if there is too much uncertainty
about what these plans are meant to be achieving that there would
be difficulty.
338. You have actually anticipated the second
part of my question, which was about implementation of the regulation,
but in terms of the actual rural development plans, I take your
point that it is laudable to obtain a degree of involvement and,
therefore, to guarantee a sense of ownership of a plan, but in
practice, will not one agency have to take responsibility for
this, and if one agency takes responsibility, will not the rest
of the consultation simply be paying lip service? So you have
effectively crossed over both the implementation and the composition
of the plans in your answer, I think not unreasonably, but I am
interested in both the business of getting people to buy into
them, to feel that they have a sense of involvement in the setting
of the targets which you mentioned, but also about the effective
implementation of the plans. How would you see the actual mechanisms
for that working, not the laudable objectives but the practical
mechanisms?
(Dr Avery) I think it is quite difficult. Clearly
the Government has to make decisions at the end of the day, but
if you take the Arable Stewardship scheme, which we have already
mentioned, that is an example of where a range of government departments,
NGOs, statutory agencies, were involved and that happened quite
quickly and that appears to be a good, workable scheme at the
moment.
(Mr Dixon) Maybe if you were talking to the people
who work in government they might say, "They are just a nuisance,
the RSPB," but our experience is that we are often called
in to help to develop ideas, and I think in a sense there is a
hierarchy of decision-making to be made in this regulation. There
is clearly at a European level a need to redefine much more clearly
some of the basic parameters about the regulation. There is a
need to define very clearly at a national level what the target
objectives are, what is expected, and then there is also a regional
and country dimension and, indeed, there might even be a local
dimension. John Bryden referred to the fact that we were moving
away from a system of market price support. If you are managing
a market, it is a centralised process, and the principal public
benefit is that you are going to guarantee their food supply.
That was the old CAP. The new CAP is about social, environmental
and other objectives, which necessarily have to operate and be
defined at a local level as much as at other levels. I think local
participation is very important, local participative groups. We
have had very positive experience at a national level with the
National Agri-Environment Forum, which was an opportunity for
different sectors of government, the environment sectors, the
rural development sectors, the agriculture sectors, the people
who run the schemes, the people who monitor them, the people who
set the programmes. That operates relatively efficiently to bring
a joined-up approach to scheme design and management. I think
that is a much more efficient way than one government department
trying to run a scheme to its objectives only with insufficient
consultation and then finding that there is a lack of support
and ownership as the programme develops.
339. It is interesting you say that. I am encouraged
by what you say. Earlier witnesses talked about the importance
of defining a structure which was distinctively United Kingdom
or Britain rather than adopting a structure. It may be that that
structure is not a regional one. It may be that the distinctiveness
about the Britishness is not regional; it is actually more important
to embrace county structures, for example, and I do not make any
judgment about that. Given what you have just said, getting the
existing structure, the existing local authorities, for example,
involved would be critical, would it not? How would you see that
working?
(Mr Dixon) I think the local experience of Environmentally
Sensitive Area management groups, the target setting process for
the Countryside Stewardship scheme, which involves farmers, land
owners, environmental groups and local authorities, are quite
useful models for that process, and I think there are some structural
changes that might happen. Philip Lowe alluded to these in terms
of the role of MAFF in relation to regional government but there
is also a cultural and a communication exercise which needs to
take place, which is involving some of these other players in
MAFF decisions essentially.
Chairman
340. May I take you on a little bit from that
because what we are seeing in this new regional development regulation
is the pooling of agri-environment and rural development measures
into one new regulation, one new policy area, the second pillar
of CAP, we hope. Do you have a view at all about how the United
Kingdom institutions should respond to that organisationally?
Should we be looking for increased integration of United Kingdom
institutions to cope with this?
(Mr Dixon) Yes. I think the first thing we would say
is really restating what several other people have said. There
is a pressing need in the United Kingdom for a more integrated
approach to rural policy. I think Dr Avery referred to the decline
of biodiversity. In order to prevent the decline of biodiversity,
we see very targeted biodiversity programmes but also integration
with other economic sectors, particularly the primary land users,
and those are two indivisible approaches to biodiversity conservation,
and the loss of biodiversity is a symptom, we believe, of a poor
rural policy structure in the United Kingdom and at an England
level. Tony Blair and others have talked about "joined-up
government" and I think the comprehensive spending review
is a very good example of completely disjointed government. It
has been a great disappointment to us to see the boundaries between
the Whitehall fiefdoms very unchanged through the comprehensive
spending review. We see relatively little clarity of the basic
function of government. As we move from government intervening
in markets towards government setting other objectives for the
countryside, the role of government will change towards one of
setting the social and environmental parameters in which markets
operate. At a practical level we think that it is quite important
that there is a centre of rural expertise, the development of
rural expertise, and to be in lieu of major structural changes
in government, that needs to be a number of sectors of government
working together, the new Countryside Agency, but it is also vital
that the new Countryside Agency works very closely with English
Nature because at the moment the plans are for a separate agency
from English Nature, but, of course, if we are going to achieve
biodiversity conservation in the countryside, those two agencies
must work very closely together. MAFF itself has a fundamental
role in the delivery of a lot of our rural policy objectives and,
therefore, there needs to be much greater political and practical
integration of programmes, staffing, interchange of staffing and
other methods, to bring the cultural change in the way that we
develop rural policy.
341. It just so happens that I have a question
on the Order Paper this afternoon to Jack Cunningham and I am
asking what plans he has to improve the co-ordination of the Government's
rural policies, so what do you hope his answer will be? Just what
you said really; just repeat your last answer?
(Mr Dixon) Yes.
342. If you had one wish, one "fairy godmother"
wish?
(Mr Dixon) I think in his time as Agriculture Minister
Jack Cunningham began to move the Whitehall machinery to think
in broader terms. I would not want to cast aspersions on the Whitehall
machinery.
343. Please feel free. You are protected by
privilege. Say what you like.
(Mr Dixon) Many of the senior people in MAFF are the
people I would want on my side if I were negotiating difficult
CAP issues, but there needs to be a much wider range of consumer,
third world development, environment, integrated into agricultural
policy, and if Jack Cunningham can do anything for us, it is taking
his expertise and his understanding of the very important and
at times narrow function of MAFF and looking at rural policy and
putting a rural spin on what the Departments of Health, Education,
Transport and others do, and also to define very clearly in a
clear banner way what the job of government is in rural areas,
and we believe that one of the crucial roles of government in
rural areas is protecting the environmental assets of those rural
areas.
Mr Marsden
344. Just following on from that, I am very
encouraged by what you say and I wholeheartedly support it, but
do you envisage more working committees, groups, representatives
from different governmental departments and agencies, sitting
down and working through policies, or do you envisage a new Ministry
for Rural Affairs, which would be a new Whitehall department which
may take elements of DETR or maybe even Health as well, all-embracing,
to recognise the unique problems that rural areas face?
(Mr Dixon) I think there may be a case for a Ministry
of Rural Affairs. There is certainly not in the short term the
prospect of one, I think. The advantage of having a Ministry of
Rural Affairs, of course, is that you would have some rural preference.
There would be a voice for rural areas in the Cabinet and that
would be important in deciding spending priorities. But it would
be very important that it was a Ministry of Rural Affairs for
what we want in the future, not a Ministry of Rural Affairs based
on the structures and objectives of the past. If it were a Ministry
of Rural Affairs that was MAFF with extra squiggles and extra
functions, that would probably not be the right model, but even
if we were able to design a Ministry of Rural Affairs that reflected
our objectives for the countryside in the future, there would
still be the difficulty that environment is not something restricted
to rural areas; it is something about the marine environment,
it is about towns and cities, the relationship between towns,
cities and countryside areas. The social issues in rural areas
are often the same social issues affecting people in urban areas
and many of the difficulties that the countryside faces—take,
for example, at the moment the increasing demands on farmers to
produce certain quality products, quality in food standards terms,
quality in terms of delivery to markets—those are urban-driven
changes and demands and I think the division of town and country
has not been a very helpful political approach to resolving a
lot of the problems of the country. There are some distinctive
issues in rural areas but partitioning those into a countryside
problem probably is not the right approach.
345. Am I right in saying that you concede that
there may be a need and we may be able to evolve towards a Ministry
of Rural Affairs but in the short term we just need greater understanding
and awareness within each independent department and agency?
(Mr Dixon) I think in the short term we need very
clear political will and that is not just the environment and
agriculture departments. It is the central function of government
too and its manifesto commitments, the whole political direction.
Our countryside, our environment in our countryside, food, the
people who live in the countryside, should be as high on the political
agenda as health and education are today. They are not, and one
of the reasons for that is that, for example, in the comprehensive
spending review there was a bit of an assumption, I think, in
Whitehall village that MAFF was not going to get any more money
because MAFF was trouble, MAFF was BSE, MAFF was for farmers.
Actually, what MAFF potentially can do and what the countryside
departments of government can do are so important to our whole
national being, and certainly to our environment, that it needs
to be a much higher, central theme of government, and I think
at a practical level that could mean, in the short term, much
greater interdepartmental working amongst civil servants, but
it must come from a politically-driven inspiration.
346. Do you then, have a blueprint, a vision,
at a micro level and at a macro level of agri-environmental measures
which will mean literally a checklist that farmers could use?
You talk about different tiers, but do we already have that in
the submission? If not, could we get that and is there anything
you would like to add to your oral evidence on this?
(Ms Swales) I think it is possible to say both at
farm level, so both at a micro level and going up to a macro level,
the sorts of agri-environment measures we want and to put those
into, in a sense, a kind of tiered package, and there are some
very basic elements to that. Some people call it a pyramid of
measures, whatever you want to call it, but at the very bottom
we need some kind of basic legislation, regulation or whatever,
to ensure that, at the very least, we protect what we currently
have in terms of our environmental resources and that land uses
such as agriculture do not dilute, further degrade or lead to
the deterioration of those. Above that, you can go up to what
might be seen as a basic agri-environment-type payment which all
farmers are in receipt of, and in order to get that, they have
to adhere to a certain set of prescriptions or conditions, a certain
set of environmental measures. Above that, you then start to get
into some more detailed, specific measures which relate perhaps
to particular habitats or species, heather moorland, for example,
or heathland or lowland wet grasslands, where you are saying to
the farmer, "We want quite a significant change in your farming
practices"—it might be raising water levels or increasing
stocking densities, a very wide range of measures—"but
that has some implications for your business and your costs, and,
therefore, in order to get you to do that, we are going to have
to compensate you for those costs and offer you some incentive
to do it." Then at the very top of the pyramid in a sense
you have what I will call very special sites, sites of special
scientific interest, designated areas, the very cream, if you
will, of our environmental resources, our species and habitats
in the United Kingdom, and clearly we need to be able to protect
those, not just protect them but manage them in the right way
to ensure that they are there for future generations. So in a
sense there you have a pyramid of measures and you could apply
that at a farm level or you could take that as a more generic
model. Clearly when you are getting down to farm level it is important
to look at what is there on the farm and to relate that to the
farm business. So there needs to be some kind of process whereby
perhaps the farmer with an adviser or whatever may hinge around
farm plans, may hinge around looking at the environmental resources
there and saying, "Here is the best thing you can do on your
farm." But I think it is feasible and there are a wide range
of measures. We should not just see those as the sole remit that
we would call agri-environment measures at the moment. There are
LFA (less favoured area) payments, for example. Maybe they provide
some of the bottom tiers I was talking about, a base for agri-environment
payments, and we use what is traditionally funded through our
agri-environment regulation to deliver some of those higher tiers
in the pyramid. So in a sense we are quite a long way off that
stage at the moment with what we have but there is a model and
something we can move towards. What we need to look at now are
the opportunities we have to change LFA policy, to develop or
expand our agri-environment programmes, to use of the measures
within the rural development regulation to produce this pyramid
and this support system, not just for farmers but for rural areas
and land managers generally.
Mr Hurst: I must say I am very attracted by
what Ms Swales has just said as to the approach to dealing with
the environment and farming, but moving on from there—and,
indeed, you folk may not be the people I should actually put the
question to—to the humbler person it does seem to me that
there are an awful lot of people and organisations advising and
handing out grants and making decisions concerning the environment
and countryside or rurality, that I wonder if the time is almost
coming when there are more people employed in advising about these
things than are actually now employed in agriculture itself. Do
you happen to know how many organisations there are, how much
from the public purse—I appreciate yours is in a different
position—is now spent on advising and administering the
grants and assistance and research, indeed, which goes into these
matters?
Chairman: You can probably take that as a rhetorical
question, if you like!
Mr Hurst
347. I was a seeker after truth there, Chairman.
(Mr Dixon) I think it is a very important question
and we have to recognise two things. The first is that we are
asking farmers to do more and more things for us. We are asking
farmers to understand about health and safety, computers, new
technology, food safety demands and environmental management,
and the marketplace, Mr Tesco, Mr Sainsbury, will reward the farmers
if they deliver on quality, delivery of services and so on. What
the marketplace will not help farmers do is understand about protecting
a hay meadow or a lapwing or a skylark, and there is a public
good interest there. Therefore, I think it fundamentally is right
that the taxpayer should pay for that. There is a fairly high
administrative cost associated with many of the agri-environment
schemes in comparison with several other areas of agriculture
policy, and the two extremes perhaps are the arable area payments
scheme, which is over £1.25 billion of public money. The
administrative costs of giving farmers those subsidies are very
small; as a percentage of the total amount it is less than 1 per
cent., but anyone can burn money, anyone can throw away £5
notes. The requirement on farmers for that is that they submit
a farm map that shows how many hectares they have and they have
to grow a crop. So the public benefit from that is very small
indeed but there is a very high cost and a very low administrative
cost. The agri-environment schemes, Countryside Stewardship, the
Environmentally Sensitive Areas, can have administrative costs
maybe 10, 15, 20 per cent. of the total budget, but that is because
there is much more of a guarantee that there is a public benefit
form the money being spent. So we do not think it is a bad thing
that there are a lot of people employed in helping farmers. Indeed,
we could find lots of cases where we think there should be more
people on the ground doing more environmental monitoring, more
checking, more working with farmers, because that will guarantee
some value for money, money which I understand has to be very
carefully spent.
348. Going back to Ms Swales' proposition, I
understood it to be almost in effect some sort of new Domesday
Book scheme of land sites in this country which would, therefore,
attract payments in accordance with, in effect, the benefit to
the community which follows from conservation environmental measures.
If that is so, should we not start moving on that on a comprehensive
basis?
(Ms Swales) I think we should start moving on that.
I am not sure in terms of a Domesday Book, in terms of being written
down. I do not think you can define what we want to see on individual
farms in a way which is fixed. Clearly there has to be a flexible
process. Farmers' land is going to change hands, it is going to
change management, but the basic environmental resources will
be there. That is certainly true. We can categorise those. We
have things like the Biodiversity Action Plan, which does categorise
those, which does say how many hectares of lowland wet grassland,
for example, we have left and identify some of the threats facing
that. Then you can begin to work that down to local plans and
to individual farmers who have that resource on their farm and
are able to do something about it.
349. I am only concerned that when I go around
they are all terribly keen to show Members of Parliament all the
wonders of the environmental schemes because they are the farms
you go to, but you see strips of grass which are left along the
side which they take great pride in but aesthetically they are
very unpleasing and I sometimes wonder what environmental effects
flow from them, but I may be misunderstanding the purpose of them.
(Dr Avery) I think on field margins there is quite
good evidence that they would be of value to a wide range of biodiversity,
a lot of farmland birds, many of them in the Biodiversity Action
Plan, species that are crashing in numbers. So I think when you
say they are not that attractive, you ought to look hard at the
number of birds on them.
Chairman
350. I will take Mr Hurst for a walk in my constituency
and we can look at the field margins together. May I ask one last
question on a specific issue before I release you for lunch, that
is, less favoured areas. I am not at all surprised to see that
you support the move from a headage to an area basis for these
payments. Clearly in environmental terms I can see why you should
advocate that, but you also talk in your written evidence to us
about the need to sustain a viable agriculture. What is the RSPB's
view of the implications of this change for the viability of farming
in the less favoured areas?
(Ms Swales) I think absolutely we do very much wholeheartedly
support the switch. We think it will have environmental benefits
and it will help to combat some of the problems we have seen in
some upland areas relating to localised over-grazing. They are
certainly much more decoupled payments than headage payments are,
and so for that reason they may be more acceptable in the long
term in terms of Europe's trading partners. But there are some
inherent problems. Part of the problem is that, of course, the
vast majority of livestock subsidies are going to continue to
be paid on a headage basis, so that the sheep annual premium,
beef suckler cow premium, for example, will continue to be paid
on a production basis, so the effect that can have on the environment
is going to be quite limited. We are also very concerned that
we do recognise that in making a switch there could potentially
be some quite significant impacts on farm incomes and, as you
suggest, the future viability of farming in some of these areas.
We have always said this from the earliest time that we started
to think and talk about area payments. There have been some studies
looking at how technically you might switch to an area-based payment.
Wye College has recently done some work on this. But it does recognise
that there potentially could be some significant winners and losers,
both at farm level and at country level. One of our concerns is
our own Agriculture Department. We are certainly not aware that
they have done or undertaken any work to begin to look at some
of these effects of moving to these sorts of payments, nor, indeed,
has the farming industry. I think it is such an important issue
it is about time somebody somewhere took a good hard look and
said, "Okay, there may be some environmental benefits from
doing this but, of course, we do need to look at the farm income
effects and see if there is a way in which we can make that switch
and that change from a headage to an area based payment in a way
that ensures that farmers are able to stay farming in the hills
and uplands." The Upland Working Group, which reports to
the National Agri-Environment Forum, might be a suitable forum
to stimulate some discussion, but I think the Agriculture Departments
do need to do some work on this.
Chairman: I think that is a helpful answer.
I would like to go on but we have run past one o'clock and as
we kept you waiting at the beginning I think it is only fair that
we should release you now. We are genuinely grateful once again
to the RSPB for the quality of the evidence you have given us.
Thank you very much indeed.
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