Examination of Witnesses (Questions 620
- 631)
MONDAY 19 JUNE 2000
MR RICHARD
WAKEFORD AND
MR RICHARD
LLOYD
620. Which one are we getting the answer to?
(Mr Wakeford) There are two answers: yes and no. A
statutory underpinning would help to give a bit more profile to
this particular issue and what needs to be done. It is not the
only area where people are either proposing or where statutory
duties exist. I suspect the issue is not so much about the status
which the plans have, but, like all plans, the methods which are
then employed to ensure that the plans themselves are implemented.
That is true whether you are talking about a land use plan in
the planning system, or plans in relation to sustainable development,
management plans in national parks or whatever. It may be local
agenda 21 plans, which are another example where lots of people
have made a great deal of effort to put plans in place. What is
more difficult is actually getting to the point where plans are
implemented, especially if you start to pursue the implementation
of all those plans in parallel. One needs to be able to make the
connections between them.
621. How would you prefer to see the plans being
introduced with greater influence?
(Mr Wakeford) Statutory backing would certainly be
helpful, but one needs to go on and actually make sure that biodiversity
is an integral approach to a whole range of other plan proposals.
One of the principal areas in the area of development is the land
use planning system where decision-makers need to bring together
a whole series of different material considerations and make them
fit together. That is not the only example; there are plenty of
other examples. In relation to access, for example, where one
is actually planning ways in which one can increase public access
to land, one needs to look at the obligations of biodiversity,
not only as a duty but also as an opportunity as well, to enable
people to enjoy biodiversity and gain a better understanding of
how their individual decisions as consumers can contribute to
biodiversity. At the moment there is a feel that perhaps if you
put it into a plan and the officials have to implement it, somehow
we have dealt with it as a society. Rather like the countryside
as a whole, we will not end up with biodiversity. We will not
end up with a better countryside by just putting it into plans.
We actually have to have full participation by people as well.
622. What particular actions are you taking
to make sure that this is better integrated into the system?
(Mr Wakeford) I would not necessarily see us taking
particular actions ourselves on biodiversity other than supporting
English Nature in the role that they are taking in pursuing these
particular objectives.
Mr Benn
623. How do you respond to the argument that
it is agricultural policy which over the last 20 or 30 years in
particular has had the most damaging effect on biodiversity? Would
you accept that argument if one were trying to look at the main
cause of damage? If so, do you think that shifting agricultural
funding from production subsidies to agri-environment schemes
is the single most important contribution we can make?
(Mr Wakeford) The answer to the first question is
yes. The Countryside Agency and its predecessor bodies have monitored
landscape over quite a long period now and we have been able to
show changes. In terms of shifting funds from commodity payments
to payments for environmental benefits, which is probably a good
way of putting it, that is the single most important thing that
could be pursued at the moment and we therefore welcome the modulation
decision which the UK Government has taken. We think it is a pity
that the European framework did not allow us to do more and we
are therefore working to inform the next reform of the Common
Agricultural Policy. We have, for example, a series of land management
initiatives under way where one is looking not only at biodiversity
but other aspects of the countryside, social, economic, landscape
features and so on, but where taking a joined-up approach over
the area of perhaps a dozen parishes can actually deliver a better
integrated whole. Those are land management initiatives and we
are pressing forward with them as demonstrations of how the Common
Agricultural Policy might be reformed in the long term. The difficulty
is that however well these experiments go, however well they are
written up, such research tends to get dwarfed by the scale of
the political arguments when it comes to the meetings of the heads
of state. Agencies like ourselves do have to keep on with the
research agenda, so there is a scientific underpinning to the
case for reform.
624. What specific further changes to policy
of modulation would you like to see when we get to that point?
(Mr Lloyd) We should like to see this addressed at
a Europe level and the target is degressive CAP payments so that
the support for production is chipped away progressively at the
European level and those resources freed up are put into the rural
development regulation so we can specifically fund a larger agri-environment
programme and also, incidentally, the rural development agenda
which is equally important given the current difficulties facing
the farming community. That is the target. At the moment we are
doing this domestically, as are interestingly the French, because
the framework is not there at the European level to have the degressive
payments. We have taken a national decision to do this through
modulation which is great but it is only a start. We should like
to see a continual chipping away at production supports and getting
the money redirected where it would do more good.
625. In light of the earlier answer you gave
about plans and statutory requirements and so on, is it your view
that if we get the funding framework for agriculture right, it
is likely to be a better way of achieving our objectives in relation
to biodiversity than lots of increased statutory obligations on
those responsible for the land?
(Mr Wakeford) If you look at what we have, we have
landowners who have a bundle of rights in relation to their land.
In different nations there is a different level of bundles or
rights; what you can do with your land in one country would be
different from another. Through things like basic environmental
codes, perhaps cost compliance, we can actually make it tougher
for landowners by giving them more obligations. The difficulty
about that approach is that if you do it unilaterally you are
leaving the UK farmer at an even greater competitive disadvantage.
The economics of farming are actually quite important for the
environment as well. When farming does well, one tends to get
better investments in the environment too. Not every farmer is
driven by pure economics. The baseline, the point of reference,
needs careful consideration. Over and above that then, direct
payments to farmers and landowners for the environmental and other
benefits which they deliver for society but which as free goods
they cannot charge for, seems to be the best way of delivering
what society looks for in the countryside but which the farmer
cannot charge for, unlike food. The farmer needs to see his product
as being in two parts: one part which he can actually trade in
the market and the other society pays for. The bit he trades in
the market is also susceptible to market pressure, consumer decisions.
For example a theme which we are trying to promote in the Countryside
Agency at the moment is that if consumers were to consume the
more traditional products of the English countryside, then farmers
would respond to that kind of market demand by increasing their
production of things which might relate well to traditional landscapes.
Chairman
626. Do you really think there is a market for
pig nuts and nettles?
(Mr Wakeford) I was going to give you an example,
not about medicinal leeches either, in relation to the South Downs,
which is a particularly interesting challenge at the moment. There
was a great deal of pressure over a long period and still is pressure
to designate the South Downs as a national park. The landscape
of the South Downs has changed fundamentally over the last 60
to 70 years; it is no longer the area that my mother walked over
when she was a child and enjoyed the springy turf and the wild
flowers and so on. What we can envisage are schemes where the
markets in the traditional animals, which on the South Downs would
be Sussex cattle and South Downs sheep, could themselves encourage
a new market in products which would deliver a landscape rather
better than the ploughed arable landscape that there is on much
of the downs now. Consumers, by eating the products of that particular
landscape, could not only have very tasty beef, because Sussex
beef is very tasty, but also could know that by consuming that
beef they were helping to generate a landscape restoration in
the South Downs. Even that part of the market which is not the
environmental benefit which the public would be paying for because
it is public goods, but is actually in the private bit, what the
farmer himself can do in terms of responding to signals in the
marketplace, even that is susceptible to some kind of influence
by consumers. This is why I come back to the point that there
is no point in seeing biodiversity or sustainable development
as doing something which can be boxed up and implemented by officials
and rules and regulations. Those regulations must play their part,
but they will only be successful if the public at large is convinced
that biodiversity is a good thing and will take decisions towards
it, or is convinced that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is
a good thing and will take decisions towards it, and so on.
Mr Benn
627. Are there any specific changes you would
like to see to the planning system to protect biodiversity outside
protected sites?
(Mr Lloyd) Biodiversity could be better reflected
in planning policy guidance. There is a place for encouraging,
if we do no more, local authorities and developers to take the
biodiversity agenda more seriously. Specifically in relation to
the Habitats Directive and the like, it is probably time to revisit
PPG9, the Nature Conservation PPG, and have a look at that and
make sure it does send the right signals so far as the broader
biodiversity agenda is concerned. It would also be appropriate
when PPG7 is revisited, Environmental Quality and Economic and
Social Development, that more is said about biodiversity there.
Even right back to fundamentals, the PPG on General Policy and
Principles. The biodiversity agenda is important and there are
things planning authorities should be encouraged to do. I think
we should certainly press for better reference and better referencing
in those key guidance documents.
(Mr Wakeford) It seems to me that the fundamental
principle of our land use planning system, which is what we are
talking about here, is communities looking forward 10 or 15 years
to see what sort of place they want to be, whether there is going
to be housing which is needed, whether the health facilities are
going to be there in the right place, whether the transport is
going to be there to link it up. If you are talking about a local
plan, you are looking ten years ahead and if you are talking about
a structure plan you are looking 15 years ahead. It seems to me
that a part of that visioning process ought to be a community
asking themselves what they value. That community must surely
value biodiversity as part of that. Part of the objectives of
where people want to be in 10 or 15 years' time ought to include
biodiversity as much as anything else. Then, in developing the
detailed policies of the local plan one can look to see what you
need to do in terms of a whole series of decisions of different
kinds in order to reach that position in 10 or 15 years' time.
In other words it is a bit more positive, a bit more envisioning
type of planning and a bit less of the development control where
if you come in and say here is an individual decision that nibbles
away at biodiversity a little bit then we are losing it all the
time. We need to be a bit more far-sighted in the way in which
we operate the planning system.
628. Would you favour companies which had large
landholdings being encouraged or required to produce their own
biodiversity action plans?
(Mr Wakeford) Companies and people. It goes from what
I am saying that we need the full buy-in from all the institutions
of the country.
Chairman
629. Limestone pavements. You are responsible
for them so you are actually destroying the Burren. Is that right?
(Mr Wakeford) We have started by putting an action
plan in place which I think is being reasonably effective in getting
the remaining English limestone pavement—because we are
an English agency—properly protected. Beyond that, what
we then need to do is start to lobby in the slightly more delicate
area of international trade. That comes back to two things: first
of all things like international trade agreements, but second,
consumers and whether they purchase the product, because most
consumers cannot tell, I know for certain, whether the limestone
comes from some English limestone pavement or from the Burren.
We have been doing the control through the landscape pavement
orders, but we have also been working quite hard with a public
relations hat on to try to encourage consumers—we work through
gardening programmes for example—not to buy the product.
(Mr Lloyd) The point about the Burren is that we have
been successful in largely preventing further destruction of UK
pavement, but the problem has now been exported because there
is still an avaricious demand for this stuff from people building
rockeries. It is now being delivered from Ireland. The problem
is that the Irish authorities say they have a rather larger resource
of limestone pavement on their side of the Irish Sea, some of
which is legally protected, some of which is not. They are very
reluctant to prevent landowners of the legally available material
from selling their wares. We do have a problem and it is going
to be difficult to come to grips with that with the Irish authorities.
We are trying to be more sophisticated now and look at other methods
of trade restriction rather than an out and out ban.
630. They can make the point that we have destroyed
most of our own, so why should we object to them destroying theirs.
(Mr Lloyd) I should like to think that the agenda
has moved on a bit and we are a little bit wiser than that.
631. Yes, but it has almost all gone. You can
be a bit wiser.
(Mr Wakeford) We are where we are. We
can only go forward from that. We have put a report called On
Stony Ground to the Minister. Mr Meacher has it. I do not know
whether you are interviewing him in the course of this inquiry,
but that might be something you would want to follow up.
Chairman: On that note, thank you very much
for your evidence.
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