Examination of witnesses (Questions 80
- 99)
WEDNESDAY 24 NOVEMBER 1999
MR TONY
BURTON and MR
ALASTAIR RUTHERFORD
80. Just a few.
(Mr Burton) We would like to see a new approach to
the value of the countryside. The countryside is fundamentally
an under-valued resource. It is a resource which can bring not
just environmental benefits but also economic benefits.
Chairman
81. How do you value it? How do you put a price
on it?
(Mr Burton) You do not put a price on it. You value
it in the way in which we make planning decisions.
82. Surely valuing in planning is balancing
something against something else?
(Mr Burton) No, it is not. It is about integrating
the beauty of the landscape into other objectives. It is about
ensuring that we deliver economic prosperity in this country and,
at the same time, deliver a better quality of the rural environment.
It is not about saying that there are simply trade-offs between
them. I suppose that this is most obvious in the agricultural
sector, where we see a very clear link, in our view, between the
future development strategies for agriculture and farming in rewarding
farmers economically and socially for the beautiful countryside
that they are also producing as land managers.
Mrs Ellman
83. What are the mechanisms that are going to
ensure there is delivery of new policies and that it will make
a real difference in rural areas on the ground?
(Mr Burton) The most important thing in terms of what
the Rural White Paper itself can achieve is a new commitment to
rural policy within the rural proofing machinery of Government,
which can be delivered both through the very creation of the Rural
White Paper, around which Government is united and which sets
clear objectives and targets. These can also be set through other
mechanisms as well. We would like to see a screening mechanism
so that as all policy is drawn up across Government there is a
rural interest looking at it and assessing whether it has immediate
and important rural implications. We would like to see the countryside
addressed in the headline indicators which the Government has
produced on sustainable development or quality of life. There
is a fundamental gap in the headline indicators which has not
yet been addressed and the quality of the countryside is not part
of the headline indicators of sustainable development. We would
like to see new forms of accounting for rural expenditure. The
new public service agreement model, we believe, could through
a rural public service agreement, provide a mechanism for integrating
the expenditure of a range of Government departments around a
shared set of rural objectives and thereby help integrate the
countryside across the machinery of Government itself.
84. How important are European structural funds
in this, particularly the newly acquired funds for areas like
Cornwall?
(Mr Rutherford) I think those funds are extremely
important but of course they are within designated areas and we
would be losing a lot of European structural funds across England
as a whole as a result of the Agenda 2000 process. What it is
important to be doing is thinking about some of the other European
funding mechanisms that are also coming along and perhaps the
one with the most potential is the Rural Development Regulation
which is available across the whole of the country. We have been
very encouraged at the way the Ministry of Agriculture has taken
forward the implementation of the Rural Development Regulation
in providing a national, strategic framework and then, within
that, regional plans for rural development. These plans should
also be integrated with the objectives of the other structural
funds, where they happen to overlap with them. The big problem
of course with the Rural Development Regulation is it does not
have money attached to it. I think it is desperately important
that we do start shifting some of the resources that are still
going into the commodity side into some of the measures under
the new Rural Development Regulation.
85. Does improving the standard of rural life
mean encouraging more people to live in the countryside?
(Mr Rutherford) I do not think there is a cause and
effect argument in that relationship. The use of rural services
is partly dependent on the lifestyles of the people who are in
a particular area of a village. If you import people who are used
to a very urban lifestyle into a rural context, those people will
still want to use those services that are provided in that urban
context. They will not necessarily support the provision of those
local services in a rural context.
(Mr Burton) Some research that we undertook on the
reasons why people are moving from urban to rural areas showed
that a more significant driver was the quality of life within
the urban environment. The lure of the countryside was attractive.
The rural idyll was an aspiration, although it was not necessarily
realised when people arrived, but the key driver within the range
that was being analysed was the quality of urban life. That is
obviously a wider debate as to where the linkages to the Urban
White Paper need to come in and it is where the urban renaissance
agenda needs to bite.
Mr Brake
86. Could I just bring you back to the buzz
phrase "rural proofing". It sounds very nice but no
doubt the Government is also looking at the environmental implications
of things, perhaps the so-called social exclusion implication
of things, equal opportunities. Does it amount to anything more
than a buzz phrase?
(Mr Burton) I hope so. I recognise that one of the
symptoms of integration in Government is that there are more people
demanding that they are part of the cross-cutting agenda. There
is much more that can be done on that. Just because more people
are asking for it does not mean to say that it is not important.
It actually requires a different culture within Whitehall to deliver
it. At the moment we have to get from A to B and we have to do
that rather crudely perhaps at the moment but hopefully by the
time we get to B it will be second nature and people will think
about these issues just as all Government departments naturally
think of questions about GDP or inflation or some of the other
things because it is part of the bloodstream. We want to make
sure that rural issues are effectively addressed when major Government
decisions are being drawn up. We suggested some mechanisms for
achieving that. A very immediate one, of course, is with the new
Comprehensive Spending Review and the role that can play in ensuring
that spending patterns across Government reflect rural issues.
Just because other people on other issues are asking for it too
does not diminish the importance of the countryside in our view.
(Mr Rutherford) I think another important element
that might make rural proofing more effective is the role of the
Countryside Agency as somebody who has got an overall view of
the rural process and who can help, through its expertise in rural
areas and rural issues, to provide guidance to other Government
departments, not just the DETR but to all other Government departments,
on the impact of policy processes when these policies are being
first thought about, not when they are being decided how they
are going to be implemented. It could be extremely effective in
bringing that rural proofing about.
87. Would you see a role for the Countryside
Agency in actually monitoring what the different Government departments
as well as DETR are doing?
(Mr Rutherford) Yes, we do see that as an important
element but I think it is important that the Government also monitors
itself and has the right indicators to do that and also makes
the results of that public.
88. Just on the question of indicators, I would
like to try to get you to be a bit more specific. You do not favour
the model that the Deputy Prime Minister has adopted where he
is going to be monitoring a number of birds or that type of very
concise target or indicator?
(Mr Burton) No, we do. We welcome the headline indicators.
We think they are an important way of addressing complex issues
in a way which will communicate them more effectively. The major
flaw, and to be fair it is acknowledged by Government but they
have not yet done anything about it and the Rural White Paper
provides the opportunity, is we do not have an effective countryside
indicator, an indicator of a rural quality. We have suggested
tranquillity as an example.
Chairman
89. How do you measure tranquillity?
(Mr Burton) We have produced maps demonstrating the
effect of development and traffic growth on tranquillity in every
county of England between the 1960s and the 1990s. We have lost
an area of tranquillity almost the size of Wales in 30 years.
That is a resource that is diminishing rapidly. If we cannot capture
that and identify it and value it in a way that immediately resonates
with the public then there is something wrong with the methodologies
rather than the people.
90. Do you think your figures on tranquillity
really stand up? How do you measure continuous background noise
against severe bangs or shooting?
(Mr Burton) There are detailed methodology issues
that are faced by almost all the indicators. No-one is suggesting
that the GDP is a particularly effective indicator. No-one is
really suggesting that birds actually reflect all the biodiversity
aspects of changes in the countryside. What we are looking at
here is a set of headline indicators which communicate the issue
against which we can then make judgments. You can do that with
a degree of accuracy which we believe is possible in terms of
tranquillity or countryside character.
Chairman: So a combine harvester working through
a field, how do you balance that out against a couple of cars
on the road?
Mr Gray
91. Neither of those would be mooing, that sort
of thing.
(Mr Burton) Neither of those would be picked up in
our tranquillity indicator.
Mr Forsythe
92. Do you think it is realistic to frame rural
policy so that it provides "similar levels of opportunity
in rural areas as in urban ones" as the Country Landowners'
Association recommend?
(Mr Rutherford) I think it is vital that basic levels
of service provision and emergency requirements are provided in
rural areas. Also these basic services might be particularly important
in a rural context. You have only got to think about the role
of rural post offices. I think it is absolutely essential that
rural communities have got reasonable access to a post office
which does not just supply postal services, of course, but it
provides benefit payment opportunities and rural financial services.
It also provides a potential focus for perhaps integrated information
technology provision, centralising that provision and providing
it for rural areas. Emergency services and access to health care
services, also need to be provided in rural areas to a similar
sort of level to that which they are provided in urban areas.
How you provide some of the less essential services, such as perhaps
a sports centre or a theatre or a cinema, is more open to debate
and it is more of a political decision perhaps than a theoretical
decision. I think what we need to do is to be looking at the role
of market towns and centres within rural areas in providing those
services. What we need to do if you are going to look at that
approach is to look at how you get people to the service or how
you get the service to the people. It is not just a matter of
looking at whether the market town has a cinema or has a theatre,
it is whether the bus service shuts down at seven o'clock so people
who have not got access to a car in the village outside that market
town cannot use the service that is available if people want to
use that service. It is an integration of services and service
delivery, the accessibility to the service, that is crucially
important.
93. Do you think then that the urban areas should
subsidise the rural areas to provide those?
(Mr Burton) On some things absolutely. The price of
a postage stamp being the same across the country is something
which is a basic necessity which should be applied in both town
and country alike. That would involve an element of cross-subsidy.
94. Do you not find that people move to the
country and the rural areas because it is different, because they
want peace and quiet and they want to be away from the urban areas
and then when they get into the rural areas after a time they
go to their local representatives and say "look, we need
street lighting, we need a bus service, we need a cinema, we need
all of these things", so in the end they destroy the very
thing that they have moved to.
(Mr Burton) We recognise that and we are not suggesting
that rural areas should become like urban areas because there
are certain sorts of other services, certain other benefits of
rural life which are not available in urban areas. What we are
saying is that there is a basic set of minimum services which
need to be provided in rural and urban areas but beyond that not
every village is going to have a swimming pool, not every village
is going to have an opera house, and people living in the countryside
will need to recognise that and need to take a realistic view
about what they are expecting out of their daily services.
95. How should the service plans which you recommend
be drawn up? How should they be funded and how should they be
implemented?
(Mr Burton) The advantage of service plans, in our
view, is that they provide an integrated look at service provision
as a whole. So much of the current debate is about how do we deliver
this service or that service or the other service. Through some
work which we were doing with the Countryside Agency we drew together
representatives of most of the key service sectors and when we
actually sat down and talked the issues through there were certain
issues that were common to the different sectors. The service
plan is a vehicle, it is a process through which we can actually
look at those issues in the round at the county level, it was
suggested, at the same time as we are drawing up our planning
policies and we are drawing up our transport policies. It also
provides a forum within which the public can get involved and
make suggestions which we can then integrate it with some of the
answers. Some of the questions are about where you locate developments
and the answers are about how you can move people around. With
those issues coming together we believe that they would have a
more effective way of dealing with service provision as a whole
which would embrace the full range of services rather than an
individual sector.
Miss McIntosh
96. With a shortage of affordable housing in
rural England at the moment and against a background of poor public
transport, are you concerned that there will be a drift away from
the countryside into towns?
(Mr Burton) There is very little evidence of that.
The fastest growing parts of rural England are the most remote
parts of rural England. There is a very clear cascade in terms
of migration. There will at a very micro level be some signs of
that and some symptoms of where we see people moving into the
villages or moving into the towns but at a macro level the basic
forces for change, the basic pressures, the basic trends are seeing
the most remote rural areas growing far faster than anywhere else.
97. In the evidence that you presented to us
you said that "A comprehensive and socially equitable solution
to access in rural areas cannot be provided through cars alone",
but you do not come forward with any specific solution. If you
take my constituency, the Vale of York, we are 40 miles from the
north of the town and it is not inconceivable that people are
travelling 20 miles to access work. What solutions would you like
to see in the Rural White Paper?
(Mr Burton) The Rural White Paper could do a great
deal to look at the countryside not through the eye of a car driver
but through the eyes of people who do not have cars and who do
not wish to use cars or do not have access to cars and then start
to connect those services more effectively together. We have already
seen some initiatives from the Government in terms of rural buses
and in terms of initiatives in relation to pensioners which are
beginning to respond to some of those questions. One of the missing
planks is countryside traffic strategies and countryside transport
planning which is now intended to be an integral part of the Local
Transport Plans which individual local authorities are drawing
up. In the first round of Local Transport Plans, countryside traffic
strategies are really cinderellas in the process, so we are not
getting an effective mechanism for addressing the transport issues
in the countryside. The Rural White Paper needs to provide that
direction and needs to ensure that the countryside cannot be left
out of those strategies and needs to back that up when funding
decisions are made.
98. You said earlier that you would welcome
speed limits particularly on country roads and more recognising
of speed limits. We have seen less visible policing in North Yorkshire.
Who do you think will police the speed limits? It is a very low
priority for the police. There is an inevitable argument whether
it should be 40 miles an hour, 30 miles an hour, 20 miles an hour,
but at the end of the day, while I have some sympathy with you
on this, I do not see how this practically can be done?
(Mr Burton) There are already speed limits so the
question of enforcement already exists. We already have a speed
limit of 50 miles an hour. There are ways in which we think technology
can be used in enforcement, particularly speed cameras which can
be sensibly located and sensibly designed within the countryside.
There may be an incentive if the revenue from those speed cameras
and the fines was fed back into transport and traffic management.
Yes, we are in discussions with the police force on precisely
these issues and the questions about the wider cost to society
of the failure to enforce speed in terms of accidents, in terms
of the quality of life in rural areas, the things that we believe
they need to be giving more attention to in deciding their priorities
and the focus of their activities.
Mrs Gorman
99. Mr Burton, how would you describe the people
who are the mainstay of your organisation?
(Mr Burton) CPRE has got a very mixed membership.
We both have a fast growing membership in urban areas and a very
strong membership in the countryside. There is no typical CPRE
member, or typical CPRE supporter.
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