Examination of Witnesses (Questions 191-199)
LORD WHITTY,
MR PAUL
ELLIOTT AND
MR JIM
DIXON
WEDNESDAY 10 JULY 2002
Chairman
191. Good morning. Lord Whitty, you are the
Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the Lords, responsible, among
other things, for the food chain and the environment. Mr Paul
Elliott is Director of the Rural Economies and Communities Directorate
and Mr Jim Dixon is the Project Manager for the Policy and Corporate
Strategy Unit. Welcome to the Committee. Lord Whitty, yesterday
you and I were at the Great Yorkshire Show.
(Lord Whitty) Yes.
192. I visited the DEFRA stand. It was rather
like visiting a cathedral after all the gates had been closed
and the congregation had gone home. There was an enormous stand,
staffed with extremely zealous and able people, but it was absolutely
deserted. The reason why it was deserted was that there was nothing
in that stand that any farmer visiting the Great Yorkshire Show
would have found useful. It was full of placards talking about
earth, fire, water, air and such blather words that have now taken
over at DEFRA, and there was practically nothing that a farmer
would say was applicable to him. I understand that exactly the
same criticism was made about the Royal Show. Does that indicate
that somehow DEFRA appears to have floated off into some kind
of Nirvana of aesthetics and lost touch with the industry with
which it is supposed to deal?
(Lord Whitty) At least, Chairman, you appreciate our
aesthetic touch. The design of the stand perhaps cuts against
its purpose. We have received a number of critical remarks about
the nature of the stand as it has gone round the major shows,
but not so much criticism has been made about the content from
those people who have actually been in it. Although the stand
is slightly hi-tech and rather open plan, there is a lot of expertise
that farmers and others could tap into. We had our vets there;
the rural development staff were there; the Environment Agency
was there; we had people dealing with the RPA there; and people
dealing with wider responsibilities of the department, such as
people from the national parks, which is appropriate for the Great
Yorkshire Show.
193. The only people who were not there were
the customers. I went there three times.
(Lord Whitty) When I was there there were a few customers,
but I agree that it was not oversubscribed at that time of the
morning. That is partly a factor of the design of the stand. It
is not sufficiently user-friendly; it is not sufficiently enticing
to people.
194. If you had gone down to the sheep lines,
there was a little stand—a DEFRA stand—all about the
national scrapie plan. That is of immediate relevance to farmers
as it concerns their business and their future. That was heavily
subscribed. Would it not have made sense for DEFRA to drop the
blather—I have used that word before—about what the
new DEFRA is about? It is an agricultural show, a county show
so should you not talk about matters of relevance to the local
clientele?
(Lord Whitty) Of the people who go to the show, a
small minority are farmers. Farmers need to tap into that information,
but also vast numbers of the public turn up. I thought that there
was a good turn out yesterday, despite the threatening weather
and the skies opening up just as I was leaving. The public also
need to know what DEFRA as a whole is doing. You describe it as
"blather" but we are actually concerned with air, water
and earth as well as with the techniques of farming. We need an
interface with the wider public. Therefore, I do not accept the
substantive criticism, but I accept some of the design and organisation
criticism. Clearly, it is important that where the majority of
sheep farmers are likely to go that we have something to do with
the national scrapie plan. That was separate from the DEFRA stand,
but the main stand needs to be reviewed in its design and content.
However, there was a lot of expertise there available to farmers
and to others who are engaged in environmental and land management.
195. I shall not pursue that line. I was not
bothered about the design, but I wanted to understand what it
was saying about the way in which DEFRA was projecting itself.
It seems to me that it was not projecting itself as the department
that is involved in the daily activities of people. A little while
ago the Agriculture Committee produced a report on Covent Garden
and its future. Since then we have kept in touch with Covent Garden
in order to find out what happens. The story that we are being
told is that they are constantly failing to get any sort of decisions
out of DEFRA about the future of the market, or about other topics
such as cooling towers or pollutants. The Environment Agency orders
the market to take actions which involve expenditure, but they
can never get decisions from the department. It seems that one
of the consequences of the fundamental spending review is that
the department freezes and there is a total inability for six
months before spending decisions are announced and no one ever
gets any sense out of it. Is that unfair or are they just unlucky?
(Lord Whitty) The situation at Covent Garden is difficult.
What comes back to me is not so much that we are not taking decisions,
but that the decision is no. There has been a limit on the amount
of capital expenditure that we can engage in at Covent Garden,
given the money supplied for this year and the number of other
areas of DEFRA expenditure. It is true that in this financial
year it has been particularly difficult to set the final budget.
That is partly because of the expenses relating to the creation
of the new department and partly because of the overhang of foot
and mouth disease. It has also been due to the need to allocate
the total budget within fairly restricted resources. Covent Garden's
capital programme is not as good as the Covent Garden Authority
would wish, but we have indicated to them how much money we can
put to it. In the mean time, of course, we have been engaged in
quite complex discussions with the Covent Garden Authority and
the City of London on effectively carrying through the remit that
your Committee pointed us to on the future of Covent Garden and
the future of London wholesale markets as a whole. As you will
know, we have recently appointed Mr Nicholas Caffrey to conduct
that review which effectively we are doing with the Corporation
of London. So we are looking at the totality of the wholesale
markets of London and their future. That will help us to define
what the future of Covent Garden will be and how we need to develop
it.
196. When a problem arises that no one can foresee
and Covent Garden is ordered by the Environment Agency to take
remedial action, what is the response of the department? Does
it say that everything else must be put on ice, or that you must
improvise measures to paddle through for the next two years? There
seems to be a short-term approach to this.
(Lord Whitty) The Covent Garden Authority has its
own financial structure and direction. It is at arm's length from
the department. As with any other organisation, if there is a
legal requirement to be met by the Environment Agency or anybody
else, some rejigging of the budget is necessary. I accept that
there has been a tight ceiling on the amount of money that is
available to Covent Garden over recent years to make capital improvements.
There are other complications on the future of Covent Garden,
as you will know, in relation to the range of activities conducted
there. It is a complex situation at Covent Garden, but I do not
think that one would expect the department directly to take responsibility
for what is the authority's area of judgment as to how they meet
the statutory requirements or the order requirements of the Environment
Agency. It has implications for the budget, which we have to look
at.
197. It would love to take responsibility, but
it is not allowed to because it needs your permission to do things.
(Lord Whitty) It needs our permission and it needs
the Treasury's permission for major capital expenditure. That
is true.
Mr Jack
198. I want to follow up on the Chairman's questions
on Covent Garden and the Horticultural Research Institute. In
this Committee's report on both of those organisations, we have
addressed the legislative requirements needed to regularise and,
in the case of Covent Garden, to give it flexibility to go beyond
what it is doing now and yet your department in the past five
years has singularly failed to secure any parliamentary time to
address the legislative requirements and to regularise the public
bodies of the Covent Garden Authority and the HRI. Those issues
have been around for a long time. Why have you failed to do that?
(Lord Whitty) The future of Covent Garden has to be
assessed in relation to the development of wholesale food supply
in London as a whole, which over the five years has changed quite
dramatically. The best way to do that is to look at it in conjunction
with the other wholesale markets that are owned by the Corporation
of London. Therefore, we have spent some time understanding those
markets. Not all of that understanding is shared. As you will
know, Covent Garden wish to extend its ability to trade at Covent
Garden to areas other than fruit, vegetables and flowers. In doing
so the corporation's markets see that as competition.
199. The question I asked was about why, in
the case of HRI and Covent Garden, you failed to acquire time
in the legislative programme.
(Lord Whitty) The answer is that we do not know what
legislation will be required for Covent Garden until we have completed
this inquiry with the corporation. I am not sure to what you are
alluding in reference to HRI, but we do not need any new primary
legislation in relation to HRI, but we need to sort out its financial
basis. A quinquennial review is about to take place on HRI and
we shall base our decision on that.
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