Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-80)
Wednesday 25 June 2003
LORD HASKINS
AND MR
MARCUS NISBET
Q60 Diana Organ: How could we make
it really accountable and transparent? I can tell you that people
have problems with the Forestry Enterprise and the Forestry Commission
in that they say they are not accountable, they do not consult
when they are living in communities within that area and the same
is applicable for The Countryside Agency. How are we going to
make this new Land Management Agency accountable when we have
difficulty with The Countryside Agency and the Forestry Enterprise?
Lord Haskins: The evidence I have
heard from talking to people in the National Parks and people
at the receiving end of the Forestry Commission is that those
agencies actually look after their customers better than the customers
that Defra are dealing with throughout the sustainable development
route. That is understandable because they do build up a continuous,
long-term relationship between the people living in the National
Parks and the National Parks. Remember, the National Parks have
a quasi local authority responsibility anyway. I found
that relationship worked rather well and I had hoped that we could
extend that relationship under the new agency.
Q61 Paddy Tipping: I think one of
the things that came out of foot and mouth was when people could
not visit the countryside the rural economy crashed. It is tourism
that brings wealth into rural areas. As I understand it, what
you are suggesting is that the economic part of rural development
will go the RDA route and the landscape management is going to
be with the new Landscape Agency. Where is access going to fit
in to all of this? What are the Government's major achievements
in terms of access? The Countryside Agency is struggling to deliver
it at the moment. First of all, there is a dysfunctional problem
in the short-term. Secondly, if we divide the economy from the
landscape how can we make sure that tourists are going to go?
Who is going to run this?
Lord Haskins: The access will
be managed by The Landscape Agency, that is one of the reasons
why it has got to be national, because the access has to be organised.
If you look at the remit of the government offices and the RDAs,
government offices are key to all of this decentralisation. It
is their job to make sure that what is set down by Parliament
as policy is being delivered by all these agencies in an integrated
way at the local level. In that particular case I would charge
the government offices for being accountable to make sure that
it is happening, but the local authorities are going to have a
wide role in environmental, economic and social terms as they
have at the moment. The RDAs have a remit. Their statutory remit
is to take account of social and environmental as well as economic
issues. I have been told that they do not do it as well as they
should. We are having discussions with them to make sure that
they do live up to their remit. Some RDAs are doing it well, some
are doing it not so well. All I would say is we have to start
from the basis that anything I suggest has to be better than what
is here at the moment. If it is not better than what is here at
the moment I am not going to suggest it.
Q62 Paddy Tipping: Let us stick with
the new Landscape Agency. It is going to have the English Nature
element, the scientists there who look after the birds and the
bees and the plants and all the rest of it and they have not been
too enthusiastic about access in the past. They want a countryside
for the animals. I want people from the towns to be able to go
and walk and spend their money. How are we going to resolve this
if they are all in the same agency?
Lord Haskins: Ministers will appoint
the members of these agencies and they have to choose the people
who are going to deliver the remit the Government lays down. If
it is going to be a case of putting people who are interested
in the birds and the bees in charge of this thing then they will
be appointing the wrong people. That is not to say the birds and
the bees are going to be thrown out of the window, they are going
to have a proper role in this agenda. You are right, we will have
to make sure that we get a proper balance in that agency. The
whole point about it at the moment is that the whole thing is
very disconnected and uncoordinated. What we want to do is to
get a much more coordinated approach to delivery. If we get a
more co-ordinated approach to delivery then the policy problems
will resolve themselves.
Q63 Mr Mitchell: You want to devolve
the delivery of policy to regional level. What advantages do you
see in that?
Lord Haskins: Devolving is an
interesting word. You can devolve or you can decentralise. Decentralising
is when you actually take the administration away from the centre
but you still want to meddle and interfere. Devolving is when
you actually give it to people and hold back. The merit I see
in devolving is ownership, the fact that people feel much more
in control of their own destiny or whatever and they feel that
they can implement things according to their local need. The dismerit
of it which comes back all the time is inconsistency and the charge
would come to Parliament that one particular part of the country
is delivering the policy very badly compared to another part.
This was Nye Bevan's bedpan thing, that he wanted everything to
be the same. They are both very laudable ambitions, but if I had
to choose in this area between consistency and accountability,
I would have more accountability at the expense of less consistency.
That would not necessarily apply in areas like health, but in
this particular area it would apply.
Q64 Mr Mitchell: When you say devolution
you are talking about the Regional Development Agencies, are you
not, which are in a sense given to you?
Lord Haskins: Yes.
Q65 Mr Mitchell: What about elected
regional governments, would you see power going eventually to
them?
Lord Haskins: We are going into
areas well away from my remit at this stage.
Mr Mitchell: We have just been presented
with a very weak agenda of powers for regional governments which
should be strengthened. I think you would agree with that; I certainly
do.
Q66 Chairman: The Chairman may not.
It is not a good subject to pursue.
Lord Haskins: What I would say
to you is the best example of rural delivery in all the countries
I have been to—I have been to nine in Europe—is Wales.
Q67 Mr Mitchell: Why?
Lord Haskins: Because they have
nice separation between the policy side, the Assembly side and
the Countryside Council for Wales. It has a very co-ordinated
approach towards the environmental, the agricultural and the rural
issues. It is very much listening to what is going on in the rural
constituencies or whatever. It is a small country and size comes
into the thing. If you try and deliver these complicated policies
for 50 million people it does not work. You can do it in Ireland.
Ireland has a very centralised system, but there are only three
and a half million people in Ireland. You can do it in Denmark,
but you cannot do it in France, you cannot do it in Germany and
you cannot do it in England. I think we are all beginning to realise
that it is not possible to have a decent sense of accountability
amongst citizens if it is all coming from round here.
Q68 Mr Mitchell: If you shift some
functions like delivery downwards and if we accept that Defra
has a diminished policy role because most of the policy decisions
are taken in Europe compared to other departments—
Lord Haskins: It is another difficulty,
yes.
Q69 Mr Mitchell: If the Countryside
Commission also has a policy role, which you emphasised earlier,
what is left for Defra?
Lord Haskins: Defra's main policy
job is to carry out these negotiations with Europe. About 80%
of our environmental policy is EU based. That is understandable.
I do not think many people would argue that having a European
approach to the environment or a global approach to the environment
is the correct thing. Their main job is to negotiate those in
Brussels. Agriculture is a legacy of the past, but 80% of the
agricultural policies are EU based and it is Defra's job, as Mrs
Beckett is doing this afternoon, to negotiate the best deal for
the country on those policies. The remaining area there is rural
affairs issues.
Q70 Mr Mitchell: And they could be
put elsewhere?
Lord Haskins: We come back to
the same argument as before. All I would say to the point is that
those rural policies are going to be run by the Department of
Transport, but Defra has the job of making sure the Department
of Transport takes proper account of those rural policies when
they are making their reply.
Q71 Mr Mitchell: Clearly one of Defra's
jobs is to look at the European cow, which it does very unsuccessfully.
Lord Haskins: I know your views
on this!
Q72 Mr Mitchell: Reflecting on what
Bernard Donoghue wrote in the papers this morning and certainly
in his book which I have not read because I have not received
a free review copy, he gives the impression that the old MAFF
was a front organisation for the farmer. Does any element of that
linger on in the present Defra?
Lord Haskins: No, I think they
have dealt with that very well. The old MAFF pre-BSE was very
much a farmers' Department, there is no doubt about that. That
has all gone now. I get a lot of complaints from farmers that
they are not getting a big enough deal and why is not agriculture
in the name of the Department, for example. I think that bias
in favour of farming has disappeared.
Alan Simpson: I am very keen and supportive
of the points that Lord Haskins has made about the localisation
of decision making and local accountability. I suppose I ought
to admit to being a paid up member of the Italian slow food movement,
which is about exactly the same thing—
Chairman: Long lunches, I think!
Q73 Alan Simpson: It is the accountability
of local food production to local food consumers. Lord Haskins,
when I originally raised this issue about the localisation of
food systems and I tried to raise it with officials in Defra who
had previously been part of MAFF, I was somewhat surprised to
be told, "That's alright in France or in Italy but we don't
have local food cultures". Do you believe that that cultural
shift as well as the economic and political accountability shift
is deliverable against a backdrop of presumptions that we do just
not have local food cultures?
Lord Haskins: You talked about
cultural shifts. I think cultures are things that governments
should not get involved in too much, frankly. I think culture
is related to people's behaviour. The Italian picture that I know
very well is wonderful, you get the best food in the world in
Italy and that is because the Italian citizens take their food
rather seriously, rather more seriously than the British citizens
do. If the citizens of Italy have developed a strong rural local
culture of quality food and the French have done the same, good
luck to them. I think to say we are suddenly going to invent that
overnight in this country is going to be hard. We have never had
that strong tradition of local quality food in England, Scotland
or Wales. On the other hand, to be fair, we do have in our supermarkets
the best quality of food sold nationally that any country knows
in terms of quality and people make their own choices. We are
a very centralised country, we have been a centralised country
for 200 years and we have got into that whole mindset. Unfortunately,
politically we were not all that centralized until the Second
World War, but to try and change that overnight is going to be
a very big battle for the Government to do. I really think the
Government should be careful about wasting time on changing people's
attitudes towards food. If you take organic food, I think we should
be making organic food available, but we should not be trying
to force the organic market to go from three to 10%. If we force
the organic, why should we not force the vegetarian market from
three to 10%? That would be a much more effective way of dealing
with the world's food problem, that is to say we have a policy
to make everybody vegetarian. Nobody said they wanted to do that,
but retailers use a lot of careless words about the organic movement
and organic food, but at the moment organic food gets more than
the 3% which means the farmers who are in organic food business
have a disaster. The price of organic milk today is 20p a litre;
it should be 30p a litre. Why is there no premium? Because there
is too much of it. One has to manage an organic market very carefully.
It is too hard to get a cultural change in people's attitudes
towards organic food.
Q74 Alan Simpson: I would be interested
in seeing the vegetarian mandate as well. Can I just ask you whether
you have thought through and whether you are likely to be commenting
on the broader changes that would have to underpin that shift
towards more locally accountable systems? One of the things that
was made abundantly clear to me in both Italy and France is the
fact that the economics of their policies are dramatically different
from ours. They have much stronger subsidy systems that reward
shorter lines of accountability between the food producer and
the food consumer, much stronger infrastructures of local markets
and to underpin that in practical terms there would have to be
a shift of those subsidies from Northern Foods to local foods.
Are you likely to be recommending that sort of shift that allows
the infrastructures of accountability to be devolved to a local
level?
Lord Haskins: It has nothing to
do with my remit whatsoever.
Q75 Alan Simpson: But it is how you
deliver, it is not a wish-list. If you want to make those sort
of changes the infrastructure has to support those changes.
Lord Haskins: I agree. Remember,
the rural infrastructure of France and Italy is very different
from here and it is declining. Six-sevenths of the farmers in
Bavaria have disappeared in the last 20 years. The decline of
the rural population in France is accelerating at a much greater
rate than it is here. The suggestion is that people are not supporting
the supermarkets in France, they are, they are going to the supermarkets
in France in a big way. Italy, for its own peculiar bureaucratic
reasons, is behaving in a slightly different way mainly because
its supermarkets are pretty awful, I think run by the Co-op. If
one were to say that there are wonderful things happening in France
which we should translate here, I would say that the rural revolution
that is taking place in France is one that took place here 100
years ago.
Q76 Chairman: As did other revolutions
as well dating from the beheading of the king. Lord Haskins, the
Environment Agency, you said earlier on that you felt it was doing
a fairly reasonable job, but you do seem to see its role primarily
as a regulator, as you have again emphasised with some extraordinarily
complex European Union Directives in the environment field coming
through. Of course, the biggest item in its budget is flood defence
at the moment. What would you do with flood defence?
Lord Haskins: Leave it where it
is. I think they do a pretty good job.
Q77 Chairman: So you would not regionalise
that. You are saying there is too much confusion, but flood defence
must be the most confused area of all. It depends how high you
are and who is responsible. There is a multiplicity of agencies
involved in it. It is about the least transparent area for somebody
whose back garden has just been flooded to find out who is responsible,
is it not?
Lord Haskins: Flooding is a problem
of climate change first of all. It is also a problem of river
management. They would argue, and I agree with them, that an awful
lot of the problems of floods at the bottom of rivers is because
of what is happening at the top of rivers and therefore to localise
the management of floods does not actually deal with the issue.
You have to be able to influence what is happening at the top
of the river. Therefore, I would encourage the Environment Agency
to participate in some of the conservation schemes. For example,
with farmers who are continuously growing maize at the top of
a river scheme, you create a crust on that land and when the flood
comes the water flushes straight into the river. Those are the
things that justify a national agency. I looked at the Environment
Agency two years ago when I was doing better regulation. We suggested
that they spent a little bit more time on helping people to comply
rather than penalising them for failure to comply and I am glad
to say they have taken our advice. I have had some pretty positive
things said about the way the Environment Agency is going through
its work at the present time, but they are very worried about
the new agenda and the resources and how they are going to cope
with it. At the moment the Environment Agency is interested in
10,000 English farms out of 170,000 farms. Those may be farms
where they have a licensing role in terms of irrigation or whatever.
Under the new regulations of waste and water control they could
make a case for saying they are interested in all 170,000 farms
and I am saying maybe so, but we must tread carefully so we are
not creating gigantic bureaucracy to deal with 170,000 farms where
the high risk numbers may be 30,000 or 40,000. That is where the
Environment Agency has to work closely with the local authorities
who can do quite a lot of the basic regulation for them.
Q78 Chairman: The most common criticism
which comes to us about the Environment Agency is the time it
takes to deliver decisions on things like approvals, the processes
for the burning of particular products in power stations, the
licensing of sites for particular purposes. The argument is made
that it is much longer than continental businesses have to wait
for approvals from their equivalent organisations. Are there any
lessons from the way the Continent deals with this matter which
we might apply to the Environment Agency even if its fundamental
structure remains the same?
Lord Haskins: It is not a question
I have asked them. I would be glad to ask them about the issue.
What I would be careful about is making comparisons. You constantly
get these comparisons that the bureaucracy and the regulation
works much more easily elsewhere in Europe and that we are at
a huge competitive disadvantage all the time. When you were in
power I remember Mr Gummer having this point raised with him and
people went round to check the enforcement of regulations in northern
Europe and they found that we were only in the middle of the league,
we were less regulated than most. We have done checks again recently
on the same basis and found that the idea that we are making our
life excessively bureaucratic compared to the others does not
stand up.
Q79 Chairman: Lord Haskins, if we
were to extrapolate from what you are likely to recommend for
Defra throughout the Government we would end up with an enormously
different shape of government. The DTI, as you have mentioned
yourself, have faced very strong criticism from the National Audit
Office in recent days about the inefficiency of the regional assistance
programmes. We have had a series of changes of policy from the
Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, formerly the DoE, in terms
of regional regeneration programmes and the building up of a whole
series of what appear to be overlapping problems. Finally, could
you just say what you think would be the ideal shape of government?
What would government in the 21st Century want to do with itself
if you were looking at government as a whole?
Lord Haskins: Forget defence and
crime. The area I am interested in is public service delivery.
The two economic departments, which is the DTI and Defra, I would
like to see devolving as much as they can do. Alan Milburn, when
he was Secretary of State, said that you cannot run an organisation
employing a million people, which is what the National Health
Service is, and the Government is looking at ways of doing this.
The trouble with the Government's approach—this is entirely
a personal point of view—is they are talking about decentralising
without losing central control. If it is going to work properly
they are going to have to lose some degree of central control
and that includes losing some degree of control over the famous
targets to make it meaningful for people. I think the danger the
Government has is it is going to decentralise but not devolve,
and I think you have to go the whole hog in those departments.
There are serious questions to be asked on Defra and on the DTI,
about the vast amounts of money that successive governments have
pumped into those sectors to stimulate economic activity or whatever
and whether the Government has had good value for money out of
them. Again, those questions of good value for money I would suggest
would be better answered by scrutiny at a local level than by
pushing them back into the system. In some of these National Audit
Office inquiries now we are talking about events that happened
10 years ago. You cannot do very much about something that happened
10 years ago. You ought to be dealing with events that happened
six months ago. Because of the size and the complexity and the
bureaucracy at the centre I do not think it is possible to carry
out the instant scrutiny that I think would be better achieved
at local level.
Q80 Chairman: Lord Haskins, you have
been extremely helpful to us. You have said a great deal of things
which will no doubt turn out to be controversial. You have said
one thing which is absolutely outrageous, which is that Italy
produces the best food in the world.
Lord Haskins: Supermarkets.
Chairman: We will leave that one aside.
You have also issued an invitation to us to invite you back again
and we may find that irresistible, and if you are right in saying
that your other self decides that up to now you have been a little
bit modest in what you are proposing then you might need to radicalise
your own proposals. Thank you very much indeed, both of you, for
coming here today. This is part of an on-going saga and we do
believe in coming back to these issues in order to do our job
of scrutiny properly.
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