Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200-219)
RICHARD WAKEFORD
AND CHARLES
SECRETT
15 SEPTEMBER 2003
Q200 Chairman: She is in charge but
she has got no levers to pull, has she?
Mr Wakeford: Well, collective
government responsibility.
Q201 Chairman: But Defra has got
no levers, has it, either on environmental issues or on rural
affairs issues? It is persuading other people to do things; right?
Mr Wakeford: In terms of sustainable
development you could—-
Q202 Chairman: You know; you are
on the board.
Mr Wakeford: It is easier to say
yes to your question, Chairman.
Mr Secrett: I think one can say
yes in terms of answer to the question as well, because we can
perhaps usefully draw a distinction between where leadership lies
in policy making terms—and there is a formal arrangement
around a particular issue for which department is taking the lead,
and we can see that Defra is that department but in this case,
as in other cases, there are two other things that are happening
or not happening that should be done differently. The first is
that there is a difference between that type of being the lead
department and showing leadership. We would not argue in this
case that Defra is taking the opportunity to develop leadership
in a meaningful way that leads to joined-up government, that leads
to integrated decision-making across departments. It is the perennial
political problem of how do you move from a system of government
and making judgments and developing policies that is used to a
silo approach to a truly integrated approach? There are institutional
questions here, for example, about how those mechanisms that have
been established to bring about this type of integration with
decision-making actually work, like the Green Ministers. We would
argue that they could be made to work much more effectively, and
one of the ways that they could be made to work much more effectively
is by demonstrating leadership in another way, which is by finding
a robust set of assessment tools that take you down from an overview,
say, at the level of principles, and we would offer our six core
principles for sustainable development, including the polluter
pays principle, the fair shares principle, putting sustainable
development as the organising principle of decision-making. From
that you can narrow down your decision-making tree into more specific
cost benefit or strategic assessments. A tool that might lie underneath
the level of principles, once you have applied them to a particular
sector, as we do in our evidence, would be strategic impact assessment,
and then underneath that one might have life cycle assessment
for different products, and in this way, if Defra were doing this,
we would be coming forward with a much more robust set of ways
in which we could make a decision that takes into account the
global and the local, the environmental, the social, the economic,
the special interest as well as the broader community interest.
It is this lack of a robust agreed methodology that takes these
separate tools that have been derived in different parts of a
whole political machinery from Europe through to Whitehall and
other places that is missing. Certainly, this is something that
Defra, nominally in charge of sustainable development for the
government, needs to be bringing together, whether it is to resolve
the difficult judgments over a question like sugar beet production
in this country or for wider sustainability policy matters.
Q203 Alan Simpson: Almost all the
Committee members would quite like to know what our policy is
in terms of sustainability and the impact assessment measures
we are using. We will have an opportunity to raise some of these
matters with the minister in the session that follows, but can
I just ask you both a specific question relating to biofuels?
In your submission you made a point about the need for rigorous
scrutiny against the concept of sustainable land use. We had a
very interesting presentation last week from Monsanto and AVC
who were saying that they agreed with at least one of your comments
that some of the bids about biofuels are naive but if you wanted
robust economics to underpin your research then you really had
to give the go-ahead to GM crop development because GM crops have
a reduced environmental impact and higher yield and they would
make the economics of the fuel itself much more do-able. Have
you yourselves taken any view on the role that GM crops could,
should or should not be allowed to play in that process, whether
we go down the path of producing biofuels from weeds, sugar beet
or anything else? Where would you see the arguments being put
by AVC and Monsanto?
Mr Wakeford: We have not gone
down that route and we have not done any work on it. I do not
think we have anything to offer you on that.
Mr Secrett: I could perhaps offer
a general observation in terms of a way in which we might approach
it. One first of all has to look at the claims of any special
interest group very carefully and I think that there would be
many scientists from both the public and the private sector who
would question the assertion that we need to use GM crops because
it is demonstrably proven that they cause less environmental harm
or damage. The jury would be out on that one. The second point
to make is to look at it in the global context, as one must do,
which is to say, okay; we have got a system of producing sugar
through sugar beet in this country and there are claims made that
that is a sustainable use. Whether they are GM crops or not, at
the moment they require an artificial market to prosper and flourish,
so another question becomes, is that artificial market justifiable?
Whenever you are looking at intensifying production in a rich
developed world market you also have to look in terms of the overview
of costs and benefits at the global situation. A core question,
a strategic question, has to be: what could the land that we use
for sugar beet be used for if we did not grow sugar beet on it,
if we concluded that growing sugar beet was not in our best sustainability
interests, economic, environmental and social all together? One
of the things that might lead you to that conclusion would be
to say that there are other countries that are blessed with many
more natural resources for growing sugar much more efficiently,
much more productively than we can. One thinks of Brazil, for
example, if one is thinking of biofuels, where there is a mature
biofuels industry with land that is already established for growing
sugar cane naturally and extremely efficiently. What are the consequences
for developing world economies for us to industrialise production
of a crop that, for whatever reason, they grow better? That type
of strategic question goes to the heart, for example, of the trade
talks that have just collapsed in Cancun. Part of the decision-making
framework has to be one that allows you to assess cost and benefit
between countries as well as between generations or between the
environmental, the economic and the social. We think that there
is a big question mark, whether they are genetically engineered
or intensively produced anyway, about the whole notion of growing
sugar on a large scale for fuel production from that perspective.
Q204 Alan Simpson: That is probably
the central point that we have to address as a Committee: does
it make sense for us to look not necessarily at the use of biofuels
but at the development of a biofuel industry within the UK? Are
you moving towards a view that says develop biofuels on a global
scale by all means, but the economics of doing so and the environmental
impact consequences of doing so in the UK would prompt you to
doubt whether that is a sensible direction for us to be going
in?
Mr Secrett: We have not done the
work yet as a Commission that has put this robust methodology
into practice to make that type of calculation. I think what I
am describing for us is a type of consideration that has to be
brought into account and that we do not yet see from emerging
policy in this area that it might very well be an inclusion that
would say, "Actually, we can use land for environmental,
economic and social reasons in this country much better both for
our own benefit and for the benefit of other citizens with whom
we share the planet if we do not grow sugar beet for fuel because
there are others who can do it better".
Mr Wakeford: Can I come with something
slightly more specific? It is quite an interesting report which
you may have had access to do. It is produced by EEDA (the East
of England Development Agency) and it is about the impacts of
creating a domestic UK bioethanol industry. In here it states
the price of biofuels if we buy them from Brazil for the moment.
It is significantly lower than what could be achieved in this
country even with a larger subsidy from the government. This is
where Cancun and the World Trade Organisation are rather important
because it is an important aspect of this- as it is in respect
of coffee, as it is in respect of food- that we should be able
to get information about the production regimes. It may well be
that the growing of sugar cane in Brazil is as Charles describes
it, but at the moment the rules appear to preclude getting information
about production systems and therefore that gets in the way of
what you might call ethical trade. If you can get the information
that it is ethical trade then you get to the natural advantage
that tropical countries would have in terms of growing this particular
product. Just coming back to your GM question in the first place,
I suspect that it would be plain that the benefits would be greater
growth and probably less use of pesticides, but the analysis done
on behalf of EEDA points out some of the other difficulties of
using sugar beet as a method of producing biofuels. In particular
it features worst on the ranking of issues for soil protection
because the report says that there is a high risk of erosion and
damage to soil structure. Whether you are in GM or non-GM sugar
beet there is also a difficulty in providing winter feeding on
nest sites of birds, so there are adverse issues for flora and
fauna which need to be factored in somehow. It is that which means
that if you go down that particular route, of sugar beet, even
if you could improve the sugar beet there are certain disadvantages
that you will still need to continue to weigh. I come back to
the issue about what the objective is of the policy. Is the objective
of the policy to increase Britain's production of biofuels for
some particular reason, in which case there are other sources
than sugar beet that can be used? Willow coppice is one. But I
come back to the very large amount of waste paper and cardboard
that we produce in this country which is also capable of being
converted into biofuels and for which a supply chain already exists-
something like seven million tonnes from commercial and industrial
waste a year and another five million tonnes from our own household
waste so that if your starting objective was to reduce the amount
of waste going to landfill then you might have to say, "Let
us take this paper element that is going to landfill at the moment
and convert that into biofuels, and that will help the Department
for Transport achieve the EU goal that has been set for using
a set proportion of biofuels in our transport industry by the
year 2010". These things are going on in parallel. They need
a joined-up approach where you clearly need to start with your
objective rather than starting with the solution.
Q205 Mr Jack: I notice in paragraph
1 that the Sustainable Development Commission reports to the Prime
Minister. Have you reported to him about all of this?
Mr Wakeford: Our Chairman has
regular meetings with the Prime Minister and covers all sorts
of issues, but I suspect that he has not picked up on this particular
one. I will write to you afterwards if you like, but I do not
know the answer to your question.
Q206 Mr Jack: I am interested, going
back to Mrs Shephard's line of questioning, as to who is in charge
of directing policy because you told the Committee in your earlier
answer that you thought it was all down to Defra, but I presume
that the reason for reporting to the Prime Minister is to try
and knit together across government some kind of response. Are
you telling me that you are not certain whether this has been
discussed and therefore cannot provide us with any commentary
as to how the Prime Minister, or those he has sub-contracted to
carry out this knitting together policy, is actually working?
Mr Wakeford: I am sorry if I misheard
your question. I thought your original question was whether the
Sustainable Development Commission had talked to the Prime Minister
about the issue of biofuels.
Q207 Mr Jack: Yes; that is exactly
it. You are right on the wavelength there.
Mr Wakeford: I do not know the
answer to your question because our Chairman has regular meetings
with the Prime Minister and covers all the issues of sustainable
development.
Q208 Mr Jack: Does he tell you what
he is doing then?
Mr Wakeford: Yes, he does.
Q209 Mr Jack: So you ought to know?
Mr Wakeford: I ought to know,
yes.
Q210 Mr Jack: But you do not.
Mr Wakeford: I do not on this
occasion but I have offered to find out for you and let you know
afterwards. You then moved on in a sense to the knitting together
point and my earlier answer, which was not specifically about
biofuels but was about the issue of the leadership of sustainable
development in government, that it is clearly with the Secretary
of State for the Environment.
Mr Jack: When you write, because I am
very interested to know how this reporting to the Prime Minister
mechanism works,—let us assume that your Chairman, Mr Porritt,
has talked to the great man about it—perhaps you could put
a "What happened?" paragraph in because I would find
that very interesting.
Q211 Mr Drew: I do not want to extend
this debate beyond what is useful to any of us but I thought that
the missing part of what you were arguing in terms of sustainability—and
this is something that we are not party to; this is all the DTI's
responsibility—is this issue about security of supply. Surely
one of the attractions of a biofuels industry is that to some
extent you balance this obsession we seem to have of taking what
energy policy we have off shore (and at least you have got some
knowledge of what it is you are producing and some control over
how much you want to produce by going along with this line) against
the technology of looking not just in terms of energy per se but
at transport if we are going to have any influence at all? Those
of us who went to Brazil were impressed at the way that government
intervention there, with no fear of the repercussions, began to
influence what people drove and certainly what they did not drive
and that was quite impressive. I do not know what your response
would be to that.
Mr Wakeford: The security of supply
is certainly one of the factors to incorporate in any analysis.
If your objective was to diversify supply of energy then it could
certainly play a part, as could saving energy- we are using too
much energy at the moment- as could other forms of renewables.
We understand, of course, the advantage that is often quoted for
biofuels is that it is actually the way in which you can use alternative
energy sources in transport fleet, whereas wind farms require
converting factors.
Q212 Mr Drew: That is a very strong
argument about, if you like, localised sustainability as against
the argument that you advance, which I have a great deal of sympathy
about, which is why do we grow things in this country when it
could be grown not just for social reasons but certainly better
for environmental reasons in other parts of the world? We could
countervail that with the thought that there are some good, local
economies to be obtained by growing it on land that would probably
not be used for anything else. We need to change the demand rationale
on how people respond to this. This has been the problem of getting
people to use alternative fuels at the moment. Government is trying
to kick start things, LPG for example, but it is pretty small
stuff, and if you drive one of these cars, as I do, you cannot
find a garage within 50 miles which actually supplies it. The
Government has to get its attitude right but you have to change
the mind set of the public. That is the thing about having this
on the ground, so that people can see it. It is like local food
sourcing, that is why it is attractive, people can actually see
it going on.
Mr Wakeford: There is a danger
that in achieving diversity in your energy supply by having more
local sourcing and less dependence ultimately on imports when
our own oil runs out that you may make it more difficult for us
to grow food products here, which ideally we should be growing
here but at the moment we are importing. This is all because the
cost of energy, especially in the aviation sector, does not properly
reflect the environmental impact. Much of the proposal in the
EEDA Report about biofuels is based on growing biofuels on land,
which is currently set aside under the Common Agricultural Policy,
so the main impacts of doing so are not on the other food that
we produce in this county but in terms of what happens when you
cultivate land which is currently not in agricultural production
at the moment. I mentioned those adverse effects to be taken into
account earlier. If you get it on the sort of scale that would
be necessary to produce 5% of the fuel used in transport at the
moment the amount of land that would need to be taken, as the
report here that I have been looking at says, is about 13 factories,
each of which would need to be served by 38,000 hectares. That
is actually starting to make quite a significant impact on our
ability to use the land for other issues, such as vegetable production,
which at the moment there is a kind of disincentive for because
of the perverse production subsidies that are in place under the
Common Agricultural Policy.
Q213 Mrs Shephard: There are not
any for vegetables!
Mr Wakeford: Exactly. There are
no subsidies for vegetables but there are subsidies for other
crops which therefore means that the balance is tipped against
vegetable production, which is actually rather more labour intensive.
If you were looking for a form of rural development it may actually
be that you look to remove the production subsidies on some of
the bulk products, biofuels would be regarded as a bulk product
in that way, and look at ways of incentivising the production
of things that we currently import and use quite a lot of energy
in the course of importing.
Mrs Shephard: As the Committee knows
from another inquiry it is currently concluding vegetable production
is indeed the labour-intensive, but mostly for people from Kosovo.
These arguments do not wash in isolation.
Q214 Chairman: If you want to widen
your bracket of factors to take into account perhaps illegal immigration
and asylum seeking. Before we know where we are we are hopelessly
diffused.
Mr Secrett: Can I follow up with
a supplementary, this whole question of, "we have been to
Brazil and we have seen it work there" leads us into this
difficult judgment about comparative advantage when it comes to
production and self-sufficiency. I think the significance of the
figures that Richard quoted was that even if we were going for
5% of fuel to be added, and that was to come from biofuels, an
enormous land area would be taken up in this country. It is a
bit like going to Scandinavia in the 70s and saying, "they
have a lot of forestry there; we will have some of that too please
so we can become more self-sufficient in wood products".
As soon as you start factoring-in the land question, how much
land is available and what else could it be used for it becomes
a much more complex judgment as to whether you set aside, whatever
way that is, all that land for production here or whether you
say global trade of a sustainable sort may well mean us not trying
to do everything ourselves but to trade from other countries.
Here, like with forestry, we have another one of those examples.
Q215 Paddy Tipping: Let us follow
some of those issues up because there is a lot of unpicking that
needs to be done here. You say in your evidence to us that you
have not done any real work on integrated biofuels. Mr Secrett,
tell us how much land is going to be taken up if we want 5% biofuel
for the United Kingdom source via sugar beet?
Mr Wakeford: According to this
appraisal we need 13 plants, each of which is served by 38,000
hectares.
Q216 Paddy Tipping: How much production
of sugar beet currently takes place in the United Kingdom?
Mr Wakeford: I do not have the
figures for that.
Q217 Paddy Tipping: That would be
something we would have to take into account using your appraisal
model.
Mr Wakeford: There might well
be benefits in developing countries flowing from this because
it might be if we use more of our sugar beet for energy production
we might find ourselves being able to put more business for sugar
products with developing countries that could do with the business.
Q218 Paddy Tipping: I agree with
that. What I find fascinating really is the changes which Mrs
Shephard mentioned at the beginning. I think we are all pressed
to find out who was the lead department on biofuels in the United
Kingdom. I think your appraisal too is an interesting one. Mr
Secrett told us, and I am sure it is probably right, we are far
better concentrating on sugar cane from Brazil than sugar beet
from East Anglia. Who is going to deliver this? If we cannot deliver
policy in the United Kingdom Government, how are we going to deliver
these global issues, the kind of issues that you are telling us
we have to tackle? I am not sure what the delivery mechanism is.
Mr Wakeford: One of the key delivery
mechanisms is in the way in which the market operates, because
of the subsidies which shape that market—whether that is
the subsidies which encourage the growing of wheat at the moment
or whether it is subsidy that the Treasury is thinking of.
Q219 Paddy Tipping: That is fairly
straight forward, you are saying to us perhaps we ought not to
grow sugar beet in the United Kingdom, perhaps we ought to focus
on the work in Brazil. How do we get from what you think we should
not be doing to what you aspire to? These are big issues that
go across continents and I am not entirely clear how we are going
to sort this out.
Mr Wakeford: This is a difficult
question and what you have to do is to step back to what the whole
issue of sustainable development is, past governments have addressed
it and this Government has addressed it generally through a strategy,
which it then applies to all of its business through mechanisms
of the kind which, as we discussed earlier, Margaret Beckett is
responsible for ensuring her colleagues are aware of. We are coming
up to the point where the Government is going to start this autumn
its latest review of the Sustainable Development Strategy. I would
hope that this Committee would take the opportunity to look at
the last strategy and what has been achieved against it as its
contribution to helping the next one address the sort of questions
which you are pursuing with difficulty. We do not find them easy
on the Commission but the more people who are engaged in this
kind of sustainable development field the more our consumption
as a nation will send signals to other countries that are more
positive than if we focus on production.
Mr Secrett: I think the facile
answer to the question is in the same way the analysis has to
be integrated the decision-making has to be integrated. It is
not just a question in a case like an agricultural crop that is
trading, it not just a question of integrating within Britain,
across Whitehall and Westminster and then with whatever relevant
agencies or nearer on the ground decision-making authorities it
also has to be integrated, and this is again a huge political
challenge, as far as European farm and land use policy is concerned
and then because of trade at a global level as well. Until the
Government starts developing not only a common language in which
to talk about these issues, these integrated, overlapping, complex
issues- which it is doing through the language of sustainable
development through Agenda 21—it then, as we have argued,
has to develop a common basis of methodology and analysis. We
have begun suggesting a way in which that can be done in a holistic
way that would complement this type of political decision-making
integration. Both will spring from leadership, when somebody in
Government says, "actually, this matters, it is going to
be important for us to do and therefore because I am in charge
or I have been told by the Cabinet or the Prime Minister I am
in charge this is how we are going to integrate it", and
the political integration has to happen at a policy and an intergovernmental
relationship way.
Q220 Paddy Tipping: I agree with
that, I am sure that is all right. All I am saying is I think
in the light of Cancun this is an awful long way away. Let us
just turn to a smaller issue which is palm oils. Palm oils are
a good energy source. There is some work that suggests that palm
oils or the exploitation of palm oils is leading to the destruction
of rainforests. Who is responsible for that within the United
Kingdom Government? Suppose we decide we are going to go the biofuel
route, suppose we decide, and I think it is probably true, in
calorific terms we are going the palm oil route it does mean destruction
elsewhere, who is the standard bearer on this, is it Mrs Beckett
again?
Mr Wakeford: I think that the
issue is one which applies not only to palm oils but to all of
our trade, it is a question of whether our trade is ethical. The
work that we did on sugar was designed to try and help the commercial
buyers of raw material products to ask the sort of questions that
they as consumers should ask, so that they could understand the
global footprint of their purchasing decisions. The point that
we were trying to get across was that these buyers needed to ask
some basic questions. It is actually quite difficult even to get
those issues before the people who take the big decisions, and
that is where the role of the consumer comes in because the consumer
is often aware of these issues but cannot get the information
that they need about the contents of products, how they are produced,
and so on. That is the important link back into the world trade
round. Quite often at the moment you cannot get information about
how products are produced and whether they are destroying the
rainforest or not. International rules prevent that information
being available. The dimension here is information so that people
can actually consume more wisely whether us as individual consumers,
which might be the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry,
or the minister responsible for food products or energy products
or whatever. I think the point is that you cannot pick this out
but ultimately the leadership has to come through to Margaret
Beckett because she is the one who is, in a sense, the lead minister
on stainable development and engaging colleagues in these principles,
but they have to be joined up across Government.
Chairman: Gentlemen and lady thank you
very much indeed. My own reflection is that one recognises so
many of these issues do involve joint working between departments
and governments and they often become extraordinarily opaque as
far as your ordinary citizen is concerned. Perhaps one factor
of your paradigm is there should be lines of accountability so
somebody knows where the buck stops and if you want to go along
to an MP's surgery on a Saturday morning he knows where to send
the letter because otherwise however necessary all of the inter-relationships
government becomes very, very confusing and rather impenetrable
for the person on the outside saying, "hang on, where do
I fit in?" That does not call for an answer, Mr Wakeford,
one of my privileges is to have the last word. Thank you very
much indeed for coming.
| 
