Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-45)

16 JULY 2003  

RT HON MARGARET BECKETT AND MR DAVID HUNTER

  Q40  David Taylor: I understand that a conclusion has not yet been reached. Is there sufficient time before January 2004 for that proposal to be implemented, if that indeed was what ministers thought was desirable? Is it on track for that sort of timetable?

  Margaret Beckett: I would have thought so, yes. I am not aware that there is a time problem and that there is not at least the possibility of implementing it. Obviously it has implications for testing, because we would not want to make such a change unless it was clear that you had the testing machinery in place to support a different approach. As far as I am aware we would anticipate that that would be the case.

  Q41  Chairman: Leaving aside market disturbance, it must be inherently extraordinarily desirable to get rid of the Over Thirty Month Scheme and at least to demonstrate that we can have a major animal health crisis and introduce the necessary emergency measures to deal with it and then, when it is dealt with, be able to dismantle entirely those emergency measures. That must be a very important way of sending a message to public opinion about the competence to deal with these sort of issues and to get back to normal.

  Margaret Beckett: I completely agree with that and, what is more, I think it has a resonance and a read through on other issues. I think one of the things that is very much needed is not only the capacity to deal with such a crisis and to be able to move away from those emergency measures but also to get the message that, not least in part as an aftermath of the very terrible events that hit UK agriculture, there is a very strong commitment right across the industry to quality and to meeting consumer demands about safety, to observing the precautionary principle and so on and that we are committed and the industry is committed to the kind of regulatory approach that will enable the re-creation of that kind of confidence.

  Q42  Ms Atherton: You will be aware that in the media and among the public there is a fair amount of concern about the "GM nation" debate. How satisfied are you with the conduct of that debate?

  Margaret Beckett: I find myself in something of a difficulty to be honest and it is a difficulty that will be familiar to all of you as politicians. The recommendation to the Government from the AEBC was that there should be such a debate and that that debate should not be conducted by the Government, because the Commission (who, after all, are our independent advisers on this issue) believed that there would not be quite the right degree of faith in the Government's approach and the independence on these issues that we might all wish to see and so they told us that they believed that we should facilitate and, not to put too fine a point on it, pay for such a debate. I believe their initial proposal was for something of the order of £Ô million, but they said that we should not run it and we accepted that advice, we do not run it. There is an independent steering board. Ever since the debate began I have come under pressure from people to take control of the debate process and I fear I am resisting such pressure because the advice was other people should run it, so we are letting other people run it. They now have double the budget that was initially suggested as far as I am aware. I understand that there are people who feel that there are problems with the debate and I also understand that that is contested. I think part of the difficulty is that, as ever, there is a limit to what the steering board can do, but what they are trying to do is to provide the facility for other people to run some discussions of their own and maybe that is not working as perfectly as people would have hoped. I do not feel, having committed to an independent debate, that I should abandon that commitment half-way through.

  Q43  Mr Lazarowicz: Do you think the timescale should be extended in light of the criticism that has been made so that the review board can change the emphasis if it feels the need to do so?

  Margaret Beckett: I do not think there is either unlimited time or an unlimited budget. I think it was something of the order of a year after I first gave agreement the debate should commence that we authorised some of the money before things got under way. I think there is great merit in having such a dialogue. I think there is not as much merit in it dragging on. I think there is merit in giving people information now.

  Q44  Mr Lazarowicz: We have obviously seen reports in the media about how the debate has been doing in different parts of the country and the reaction that it has evinced. Have you any feeling as to the main messages emerging from the debate?

  Margaret Beckett: Not massively. I have had a certain amount of feedback from the chairman of the steering board, Malcolm Grant, who feels that, although it is not perfect, a lot of the debate and dialogue has been very constructive and worthwhile. He does not accept some of the criticisms that I know have been made in various quarters of how the debate process has worked. Other than that, there has been little by the way of detailed feedback at present but, of course, they do not feedback to me, they feedback to the steering board. The Social Sciences Research Project is a small group of people who have already been commissioned by the steering board to follow the process that they are pursuing and to report back on it, so when this part of the process is over there will be the steering board's own report of what came out of the dialogue, there will be whatever is by then on the web site, there will be the Strategy Unit's report which was published last weekend, something like that, and very shortly there will be the report of the Science Review which is due to be published very soon. I hope all of that will help to inform the public dialogue and somewhere in and among that there will be a more specific report back from the "GM nation" debate as to what that element produced.

  Q45  Alan Simpson: Having just taken part in one of the "GM nation" debates this week, can I just ask the Secretary of State to look at the principal criticism that we faced on the panel, which is that we had to run the gauntlet of public criticisms about the difficulties of getting access to information from the organisers of the debate about the scientific case for advocacy and the scientific case for doubt and there was a lot of anger over what information was publicly available. Perhaps I could move on to the question that I was lined up to be asking on the fuel poverty report. As a Government we have a commitment to eradicate fuel poverty amongst the most needy households by 2010 and all fuel poverty by 2015. We have just seen the National Audit Office report which says that we are unlikely to meet that commitment on existing programmes since we will be falling short by at least 20% in terms of the most fuel poor and that the current programme only gets about 14% of its resources into the most fuel inefficient households. When we had the Permanent Secretary before the Committee, he agreed that the existing targets may not have been entirely appropriate, but in terms of Bills currently going through the House, one of the positions that has been taken by your officials has been to say maybe it would be a good idea to have no targets at all. Can you just say how, if we were to drift into a position of having programmes without targets, we would ever know what it was we were seeking to achieve and what we actually delivered and what plans you have for putting in place clear, identifiable targets that will be the bench marks for delivering the whole programme and not just part of it?

  Margaret Beckett: There are a number of points there and I hope I will pick up on the main ones. I think there is a difference. I am not aware anybody has suggested that we are not on course to meet our present targets. As far as I am concerned we are. Indeed, I think we are ahead in terms of meeting our PSA target. However, I accept that if you take the longer term there is a question about whether the programmes we now have would take us to our longer-term target. We accept that and that is an issue we have to look at over time. There is then the slightly separate issue of whether the kind of targets that we have had for the programme in the past and the approach we have had in the programme is the best and, in particular, whether it is the most effective in reaching the most fuel poor and that is a concern that we accept and recognise and there is a fresh consideration under way of what ought to be the shape of future programmes and what ought to be the shape of future targets. I do not recall hearing anybody say that we ought to abandon targets altogether. That might be a misunderstanding. Maybe that is where someone has said that we recognise there are questions about the precise targets we have now and that has been taken as meaning no targets, but I would be quite surprised if there was anybody saying we ought not to have some kind of means by which we measure the progress that we are making and I think there is real recognition that although the Warm Front Programme (or whatever it was called that it replaced) has met its short-term programme, that has shown up improvements that one would like to see made and that is something that is under consideration now.

  Chairman: Secretary of State, this is a much shorter session than we would preferred but we realise the circumstances. Thank you for coming. We will follow this with very great interest. May I just say in passing that we welcome very much the announcement about Horticulture Research International because that follows three reports by this Committee which has pushed that along very substantially and I think we are very happy with the direction which it is now taking, but we will, of course, continue to keep our eye on it and keep it under close scrutiny. Thank you both very much indeed for coming. We hope that you have a good break. Cancu«n is looming. We will follow that very closely indeed. We look forward to renewing our regular encounters in the new session.





 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2003
Prepared 15 October 2003