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Oral evidence Taken before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee on Wednesday 25 June 2003 Members present: Mr David Curry, in the Chair __________ Witnesses: LORD HASKINS, a Member of the House of Lords, Head of the Rural Delivery Review, and MR MARCUS NISBET, Head of the Review Team, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, examined. Q1 Chairman: Lord Haskins and Mr Nisbet, thank you for coming in front of us. This may not be the Alastair Campbell show but you have certainly pulled them in, and many I suspect, if we ask them to identify themselves, may well turn out to work for sundry agencies under the aegis of Defra who are wondering what fate lies in store for them! Just for the record you are the head of the Rural Delivery Review and Mr Marcus Nisbet is head of the Review Team. Just to begin, who has seen your report, Lord Haskins? Who has seen the summary of whatever it is that you have produced? Lord Haskins: The ministers in Defra have all seen it and I would not know who they have sent it to, but I think ministers and senior officials have seen it. Q2 Chairman: So for the purposes of this meeting we probably assume that English Nature or the Countryside Agency have probably not seen a copy, or they might have had one passed to them or to the trade union side or something? Lord Haskins: They would not have seen it. Remember, this was very much an interim report, so it was not appropriate. Q3 Chairman: If you were brought in to give a peer review to your interim report, do you think you would dub it to be radical or rather conservative, and would you say to yourself, "When I do the rest of the report I really have to make this even more radical"? Do you think you would say to yourself, "Phew, a bit difficult this one. Perhaps we ought to tone it down"? Lord Haskins: Doing reviews of this sort is always a bit of a journey into the unknown; you do not quite know which way it is going to turn. I had thought it was quite radical a month or six weeks ago but the more I think about it the more I feel we have been so far a little bit tentative in some areas and perhaps have not clarified our position. I think the worst of all is to be half radical because you can leave things in the air, so there are certain areas in which we may have to be more radical. But I think it is a radical report because we are dealing with a radical situation, and the new Department has come together very quickly with a very different remit with a hugely complicated agenda going forward, so one has to be radical. Q4 Chairman: So given that none of us here have seen the report, all we have seen are transcripts of programmes and various principles, perhaps it would be helpful if without hesitation, deviation or repetition you could give us a one-minute burst on what you think is the essential core of this report? Lord Haskins: The essential core of this report could apply not just to Defra but to the DTI and maybe other Whitehall departments. There are two issues particularly which are ones which concern me about the way Whitehall runs: firstly, the need to separate the policy making and the policy development process from the delivery process. If you have those together, people both making policy and delivering policy, then you lose accountability when failures arise, if there is a policy failure or if there is a delivery failure, and there are all sorts of examples in history where that happens. All ministers of all political shades have a wonderful capacity to get involved in the delivery side and meddle around in that, and when they do they create confusion. So that is one very key point in it - to improve accountability to separate as much as possible policy from delivery. The second point which is part of the same thing in improving accountability is to decentralise the delivery of policy as much as possible away from the centre into regions and locally as well, because in that way you get ownership and in that way at local level you join up the various bits of policy together. The only place where it matters that policy is joined up is at the receiving end so that if you have an environmental stream, an agricultural stream, a rural economic stream, a rural affairs stream, the place where you have to make sure that is joined up is at the local level. The third element which we have concentrated on which relates particularly to Defra is the huge environmental agenda building up in two respects: one the increased amount of regulation for protection of resource which is largely the Environment Agency's remit, and the other the huge increase, possibly after CAP reform, in incentives to enhance the rural environment, and we are trying to organise Defra in such a way to cope with that and it is quite difficult. Defra has great difficulty: at the moment it is implementing policies which it does not really believe in, the CAP, and it is very difficult to do that and we are trying to anticipate what will happen. What is happening in Luxembourg today will have a big implication on how Defra develops in the future. Q5 Chairman: Two things follow from that. Firstly, could you outline what you see as basically the role of Defra as a government department and how many people you think it needs to do that job: secondly, how confident are you that if one devolves to the region, you have the competence, coherence and organisational skills in the regions to deliver that job, given that the RDAs, for example, themselves are delegating some of these responsibilities. How far does that process go and how do you make sure there is a coherence and a cost effectiveness in that process? Lord Haskins: Firstly, Defra should be a policy-making Department, full stop, and it has a pretty ambitious policy-making remit covering those four strands - agriculture, environment, the rural economy and rural affairs - that is what it should be about and it should be concentrating on that. What Defra needs to do, however, in this process is listen more to the delivery side than Whitehall departments are in the habit of doing. Whitehall departments are very good at designing excellent pieces of legislation but they have fallen down time and again in not questioning whether their directives are deliverable, and they should be much closer to asking questions of those who are delivering on their behalf how they deliver. Secondly, on the capacity and the competence, we have a long way to go at this. Other countries do it better than we do - the French and the Germans do it better and have a long established record of having arm's length delivery agents who are trained to do it. However, I am looking particularly at a number of the agencies which are there at the moment. The Environment Agency, by and large, in my view does a pretty good job in delivering what it is expected to deliver. We have a huge resource in local authorities in this country which we have allowed to run down for the last sixty years in this pursuit of centralisation which probably started with the Health Service and Nye Bevan in 1948 when he wanted to be responsible for every bed pan in every hospital, and I thought that was quite a good idea until I got into Whitehall and realised that it was a very stupid idea -- Q6 Chairman: Pity you did not get into the hospitals instead of Whitehall! Lord Haskins: But most people in the countryside, like it or like it not, do identify with their local authority. The local authorities are there to go on to farms, for example, on all sorts of issues - waste, trading standards, cattle movement, all sorts of things - and I think it is a valid question to say, "Well, are the local authorities or the RDAs up to the job?" That is no reason for saying that we will not give them the job; we have to make sure and task them to ensure that they are up to the job. There are some excellent local authorities, as the record shows, and on the rural side the largely rural local authorities have scored very well in the NGA's recent report. Q7 Chairman: In this batch of questions, can I finally ask you this: a new policy coming out of Defra, which is a policy which was devised as policy and is going to be administered in the classical way, is the introduction of a broad and shallow scheme right across the country environmentally, and there are some pilots going on at the moment. Have you looked at this as an illustration, and are there any comments you would make as this is perhaps the most recent scheme which might be subject to the sort of prescriptions you are talking about? Lord Haskins: I have travelled around Europe looking at agri environmental schemes and talking to people and I have to say I have yet to find one which satisfies any of the governments delivering them. The French one which was tremendously ambitious, fell down and was too complicated and expensive and wherever you go the Germans are concerned about their schemes. I think our schemes have delivered but at a price. Now the interesting point about this entry level scheme is they are trying to introduce at a low bureaucratic cost a degree of self-regulation involved in it. Having said that, it already has 55 different options for farmers to choose from, and one of the difficulties I think we are going to find with these agri environmental schemes is they are optional and if we just leave the farmers to choose which bits of them to pick up we are not necessarily going to achieve the environmental end we might. For example, if we are worried about land management at the top of rivers and only one of 15 farmers chooses to join the scheme, and maybe that scheme does not even have an option which is in relation to run-off into rivers, then I do not think we would have a very successful scheme, so the government is going to have to go very carefully on this. I am glad they are doing these pilots and evaluating very carefully rather than rushing in because they have learned a lot of lessons, but it will not be easy. Q8 Diana Organ: Obviously the third bit of Defra is the rural affairs bit but could you just say a little bit about how you view the countryside? You have talked in response to the Chairman's questions about agriculture a lot, but how do you view the countryside? Lord Haskins: We have the Department of Rural Affairs. One of the first starting points I found is nobody can quite define what they mean by "rural". The Countryside Agency says everybody living in a town of 10,000 or less is rural. That enables them to say that they can speak on behalf of 14 million people which makes everybody feel terribly important and I think that is slightly over stating the case. The Scots, on the other hand, say a town over 3,000, so they are rather more ambitious and I suspect rather more realistic about defining what they mean by "rural". The French have an even vaguer but more intelligent approach in that they have urban/rural which is people living within 60-100 kms with a big town, and they say they probably have a better chance to deal with the future than rural/rural who are outside that. Now, if we used the French definition here we would not have a rural/rural problem. As far as the definition therefore of "rural affairs", I see it probably nearer to what the Scottish definition would be and I have to say that, having spent as much time as anybody looking at the rural countryside, the rural side of Britain over the last two years, the improvement in the strength and confidence that has come back into the countryside and into the rural agenda since foot and mouth is quite remarkable - not surprisingly in a way because of the amount of money the government has put in in terms of compensation, but I talked to 300 farmers in Malvern last week at the Great Malvern Show and they were in good spirits. Q9 Diana Organ: Are you convinced now, having got this far with your review, that we do need an agency that looks after the broader population of the countryside and their interests? Lord Haskins: Well, firstly, I am not meant to comment on policy. I am in the business of delivery so I would not want to stray into an area of that nature, except to do with capacity. I think there is a concern, and the Countryside March showed this, that the rural constituencies are not getting a fair deal: it is a matter of debate as to whether they are or are not. This Department has been set up to focus more attention on issues of concern in the countryside and there are issues - there are serious poverty problems; there are problems for people living in remote areas of the countryside; there are issues of access - some of them I suspect overstated. I see too many empty buses running around the countryside and I wonder whether we are getting value for money out of those; when people worry about what the government should be doing about pubs shutting down I say (a) they should not be doing anything about it and (b) if the pubs are shutting down in the countryside it is because people do not use them, and why do they not use them? Because of drink/drive laws, and that is not bad actually. On shops, again, the only buses I see which are full in the countryside show the buses laid on by the supermarket to take them to their shops. One of the difficulties of making policy in the countryside is separating myth and reality and it is not easy to get evidence. You cannot go to a place in the countryside and say "There is an example of what we have to do nationally", because it is so mixed. Q10 Diana Organ: And do you think that the Countryside Agency is an agency of delivery, or is it an agency that is advising government on its policy? Lord Haskins: That is a very good question. It has a remit for policy advice and a remit for delivery. The report, I believe, said policy and delivery should be separate. I think that remit should not be there and that the Countryside Agency, if it should have a role, should be a policy role and not a delivery role. That would be the justification. Q11 Diana Organ: Is that because you are not convinced that its delivery role at present is good enough? Lord Haskins: Well, its delivery role is inclined to be a top-down delivery role - big, clever ideas from the centre being handed down - and I do not think that is the way you deliver good policy. I think the way you do that is government setting out its policy and then the people at the delivery point looking at it, understanding it, and making adjustment according to what suits them and them feeling they own it. It is the same in management - it is a management point. When I was in Northern Foods, if I decided I was going to tell the managing director how to do a job he would just stand back and say, "Well, do it yourself". It is not good management style. Q12 Diana Organ: You said in your interview on Farming Today that you could see a time when agriculture would be treated like any other industry and so would the environment, and rural affairs would be dealt with by other departments. If agriculture is going to be dealt with like any other industry, are we going to unpick what Defra is now? Lord Haskins: That, like many things, was taken seriously out of context. I was talking about an ideal world half a generation away when everything has worked out in the way I would like it to work out, which would be that we would no longer have the CAP; farming in Britain and Europe would be in a free-trade situation so therefore the protectionist arrangement will have disappeared, therefore farming as an industry will be treated like any other industry, therefore the need to have an agricultural department will be less relevant. Now I accept that is not going to happen because we are going to have agricultural policies for as long as I am around, I suspect - that is the reality. As far as the rural affairs agenda is concerned, Defra's role at the moment is to champion the interests of the rural society; that is going to continue for many years to come, in my view, but that championing role is only necessary because departments are falling down on the rural agenda. If they were covering the rural agenda properly, there would be no need for that championing role - but this is all hypothetical. My job is to make sure the existing Defra arrangement, including its policy catalogue, is implemented efficiently and properly over what I hope is ten years, because one of the things we must be careful about is not making changes every two or three years. One of the problems in Whitehall is that new ministers come, change the chairs around, and they have hardly sat in the new chairs before they change again. Q13 Diana Organ: But it is clear from what you have said so far that you do not think that it has been very effective so far at putting agriculture and environment and rural affairs within one department? Lord Haskins: No, I think it is early days. This Department has only been in existence for two years and the very fact we are talking about agri environment schemes in a big way to create a strong agri environment method of delivery and policy implies that the thing is coming together. I would have thought it is coming together rather better than I would have expected. The issue of rural affairs is different. That is a championing role which ministers have to make on behalf of the countryside with other departments? Q14 Mr Jack: Lord Haskins, when I woke up on 18 June listening to Farming Today, by the time I had surfaced in my sleep you were in full flight and following along the line of inquiry which Diana Organ has raised, you said: "I'm anxious about the rural affairs agenda for Defra because a lot of the issues that Defra [has] ... about rural affairs it doesn't have the instruments to deal with...". What that says to me, and what you said at the end of that first paragraph of your reply, is, "... So I'd like to see that side disappear", and in that context you said, talking about rural affairs, "... so I mean it has to go to the Department of Transport if there's a rural transport problem it's got to go to the Department of Education, if it's [an] education problem. Much better the Department of Education deals with this rural issue itself". You could not have been clearer that the rural affairs portfolio of Defra should go back whence it came? Lord Haskins: No, I did not say that -- Q15 Mr Jack: Well, that is what you said? Lord Haskins: I think 2013 was the year mentioned in this. What I am trying to get at with rural affairs is that clearly, if you want to do something about rural transport, for example, the only way Defra can do that is go to the people with the money for transport, which is the Department of Transport, and therefore you could say the existence of rural affairs in Defra is a shortcoming in the other departments. Q16 Mr Jack: But you said very clearly that you are interested about policy delivery, and you know as well as I about the difficulties of getting one government department to transfer resources to another. So let us take your comment: you imply in terms that education or rural transport does not really fit very well with Defra. In terms of delivering the policy, should Defra do it or not, because you say effectively they do not have the instruments to deal with it? Lord Haskins: They do not. Q17 Mr Jack: So if they do not should it deconstruct itself, and is your report going to reflect that? Lord Haskins: No. Q18 Mr Jack: So you are happily on the record saying Defra cannot deliver properly in these areas because it does not have the instruments but you are going to produce a report that says "status quo"? Lord Haskins: First of all, those are personal comments. I have no report on policy making at all. Q19 Mr Jack: I am not talking about policy; I am talking about policy delivery, which is what you are talking about. Lord Haskins: Defra has a remit to champion, press, other departments to take a full concern of their rural remit. Defra itself will admit they cannot lay on money for buses. Q20 Mr Jack: Well, let us take something else, because you went on to say in the interview - and I was awake by this point! - "If there is a real need for the rural agenda to be championed within Whitehall which presumably is what the creation of Defra was about then maybe, but I'd like to see that phased out". Well, I admit it was early in the morning and there is always a little frisson, but you were very clear on this and I found this really quite interesting, because the government had welded together in the formation of Defra out of old MAFF and various bits of other departments a Department for Rural Affairs, and when we had evidence from the Permanent Secretary a year ago he expressed surprise that the total package that is Defra actually arrived in the way it did. The implications of what you said in this infamous interview are that the government welded together a group of bits that did not really fit and could now not deliver the rural affairs agenda of the government? Lord Haskins: On their own they cannot deliver it, and that is clear. The only way Defra can deliver it is to persuade the Department of Transport that there is a rural transport problem and to bring it to their attention. If you like, rural proofing is another role that Defra has and that Ewan Cameron has in terms of making sure that other departments in Whitehall take full account of the rural interest. That is Defra's rural affairs responsibility - not entirely but mainly. Q21 Mr Jack: But you have made an interesting point that, in your capacity as the Chairman and Chief Executive at one time of Northern Foods, you would have given the responsibility to the manager of a particular area to sort it out. You then go on in the interview to say, "I would like to see eventually in ten years' time this Department becoming the Department of the Environment because agriculture and food would be dealt with like any other industry. The rural affairs would be dealt with by the other Departments in a responsible way and it would leave an environment agenda which has got to be a priority going forward". Now, those last two points are entirely consistent with what you have just said, but the implications are that on a ten year timeframe you are prepared to see a sub optimal delivery of rural services because, by virtue of what you said in the first part, Defra does not have the instruments to deliver. I cannot believe that in your Northern Foods position you would have allowed a key part of that business to moulder on for ten years delivering a sub optimal result until sometime you got it put right? Lord Haskins: I think you are misunderstanding what I have said, whether intentionally or not. Q22 Mr Jack: Well, you have the opportunity to clarify it now. Lord Haskins: I will clarify. Firstly, on the issue of agriculture, many people before me have asked the question why should we have a unique Ministry of Agriculture looking after one industry, and the answer is because we still treat agriculture in a unique way economically, with all the subsidies. All I am saying is that, in an ideal world, if we got a real settlement of the free trade in Cancun in September and agriculture became just part of the single market, a trade agreement, we would not need to have a Department of Agriculture any more than a Department of Motor Cars. As far as the rural side is concerned, the government has taken the view that the rural agenda is not being taken seriously enough by other departments, and it has asked this department to promote and champion the rural agenda with those other departments. All I am saying is that in an ideal world they would do their job so brilliantly that there would be no need for them to be doing it in ten years' time. Q23 Mr Jack: "Road maps" are currently the in vogue expression for the way forward. In a world where the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy is completed and the WTO's work is done, are you going to put a paragraph at the end of the report to say to ministers, "In the Haskins ideal world when this nirvana occurs you should then strip out all these other activities and let them go back elsewhere into government"? Lord Haskins: No, because (a) it is not my job and (b) it is my job to make sure that the existing policy remit that Defra has is going to be delivered as efficiently as possible, and I hope I come up with proposals smelling of roses which you will all applaud, and say, "This is the way to run a modern department". Q24 Mr Mitchell: That will not happen because it is all pie in the sky -- Lord Haskins: I agree. This was just early morning contemplation -- Q25 Mr Mitchell: But still you are positing a kind of rosy future which is not going to happen? Lord Haskins: I agree, and in the agriculture world particularly it is not going to happen because we are going to play around with agriculture for as long as I am around - that is the reality. Governments will never realistically leave food alone. They are all -- Q26 Mr Mitchell: Nor will Europe. Lord Haskins: Not British governments, European governments, American governments, Indian governments - none of them will leave food alone. Food is too strategic for governments to let loose. I would like to see a much reduced engagement by governments and by Europe in the agricultural world - everybody would - and we would like to see less money going specifically into agriculture but that is going to take time to happen, but if these reforms of Mr Fischler's do come through and even if the French accept half of the proposal, in other words some degree of decoupling, that will be the most momentous change in the Common Agriculture Policy for 40 years. Q27 Mr Mitchell: We will wait! The Rural Review Team wrote to the Committee that, although the review is not concerned directly with policy, confusion in the policy background is having an impact on rural delivery itself. What is that impact? Lord Haskins: Could you say that again? Q28 Mr Mitchell: It wrote to us that confusion in the policy background is having an impact on rural delivery itself, so how is the delivery of rural services affected by the way policy is formulated in Defra? Lord Haskins: A lot of the delivery of rural services exists outside Defra at any rate. These famous buses are not controlled by Defra agencies but by agencies commissioned by the Department of Transport. That is what I am alluding to - that it is not as easy - whereas on the environmental agenda Defra has all the levers for implementing that agenda through its own agencies, and on agriculture the same applies. In the wider remit of rural affairs Defra has to rely on delivery of other departments, and it is a much more challenging remit than the other two. Q29 Mr Mitchell: Even delivery on other matters. When the Committee went to France, to Poitiers or somewhere, and talked to the local Chamber of Commerce I was struck by the degree to which farming policy and subsidies and the regulation and management thereof is run by farmers for farmers. What you are suggesting effectively is even more confusion because you want to bring in local government, you want to bring in the development agencies, the Countryside Commission, the Environment Agency - we are going to end up with a totally confused situation in contrast with the simple straightforward situation in France which seemed to work very well. Lord Haskins: I know the French system but there the local authorities are involved with the farmers in the delivery and other NGOs and pressure groups at local level are involved, and the French system is good because there is a degree of self-regulation. But remember, the French priority is one of getting money into farmers' pockets as quickly as possible whereas our priority is more complicated. We want to look after farmers but we also want to promote our environmental agenda and we also want to look after our rural affairs issue, and rural affairs is absolutely embedded in the French system. France is a much more rural country than we are. For instance, I went to Amiens and you do have a sense that the rural agenda dominates the French countryside. Now that is not the case here. I am afraid the reality is that half the people now living in the countryside within 100 miles of this city you cannot say are countryside people. They are people who move in and out, they are urban commuters creating their own forms of tension. If you take the issue of planning in France, for example, you never get the tensions on planning in the French countryside that you get here because you do not have that battle between the urban commuter who wants to go to the Cotswolds who does not get engaged with the countryside but does not want the view to be changed in any way, and the people who live in the Cotswolds wanting to earn a living being restricted by that. You do not have that problem in France. Q30 Mr Mitchell: Are you saying that you would like to have a situation more like the French situation? Lord Haskins: Ideally I think the French situation has quite a lot to be said for it. It is a very centralised system but the French agricultural policies are very clearly established by the department in Paris; they then hand them over to independent agencies; and they ask the agencies to design how they deliver it - the government does not deliver. The agencies then come back and say, "That is the way we are going to deliver." The French government then says "Get on with it", and this agency at local level organises through the sort of unit you are talking about, the farmers or whatever, and then lo and behold Napoleon's prefet arrives at the end just to make sure that everything is working. When we talk about joined-up government, that is the way to join up government - at that local level - and the prefet is there keeping a watching eye to make sure that environmental, social and all those things are coming together. We are trying to do that in Whitehall which is all very interesting but it has nothing to do with delivery on the wheel and we have to do it the other way round. When people accuse me of trying to break up an integrated sustainable policy, I am doing exactly the opposite. I am trying to make it meaningful as an integrated policy at the receiving end, in the regions. Q31 Mr Lepper: Is this a non-informational government? Lord Haskins: Far be it from me, a leading figure in the campaign for Yorkshire, to be saying anything like that but I think it is an argument for revitalising the role of local authorities and county councils. I think that is a very underutilised asset, and we all of us are learning to regret having run them down in the last sixty years. Q32 Mr Lepper: And among the respondents to your last consultation, have the regional development agencies had a lot to say to you? Lord Haskins: They have, and I am going to be recommending that the regional development agencies also take a greater responsibility for this rural agenda than they have done. Criticism has been made to me that many of the regional development agencies do not pay adequate attention to the rural agenda, and that is the reason why Defra has to be charged to make sure that the regional development agencies do. Q33 Mr Lepper: Can you give us some feel for the range of respondents you have had in your consultation, or of those people who have been consulted? Lord Haskins: I cannot give you the numbers. Mr Nisbet: Our written consultation of customers and stakeholders has so far yielded 106 responses from customers who are the direct customers and recipients of services and services we are looking at, and 150 responses from stakeholder organisations which covers a very wide range of organisations right across the spectrum of sustainable development. Q34 Mr Lepper: From what Mr Nisbet has just said it sounds as if you are confident that the whole range of the rural economy and those involved in it has taken an interest in the work you are doing and has had something to say to you? Lord Haskins: I have conducted hundreds of meetings up and down the country and I think anybody who wanted to have a talk with us has talked to us. Q35 Mr Lepper: You handed your interim report over to ministers last month, and you anticipate the final report in September? Lord Haskins: Yes. Q36 Mr Lepper: Will that be publicly available? Lord Haskins: Yes. Q37 Mr Lepper: And the evidence that you have had? Lord Haskins: Yes. Q38 Mr Lepper: All that will be available? Lord Haskins: Yes. Absolutely. Q39 Mr Lepper: Good. You used the phrase in terms of the proposals that you are likely to come up with of a vision of something happening half a generation ahead? Lord Haskins: No. That bit was daydreaming. The quote I am likely to come up with I hope will be to enable Defra to deal with its agenda over a ten year period. The difficulty we are in is we are not entirely sure how Defra's policy is going to emerge. The biggest period of flux has been in the last forty years and with what is going on today in Luxembourg and what is likely to happen in Cancun and all the increased environmental regulation coming through from Europe it is quite hard to plan, but that is the job of governments - to anticipate the job that has to be done rather than waiting for the policy to arrive and then start organising the delivery around it. We are trying to get the organisation endorsed there, and cope with the policy as it comes. Q40 Paddy Tipping: In the note you prepared there is this interesting phrase, " ... the most important lessons we have learned emerged at a relatively early stage in the process...", and now we are testing them out. What are the lessons you have learned? What are the priorities? Lord Haskins: I suppose the lessons we learned were the ones I said at the beginning: that when you have policy making and policy delivery muddled up it is very difficult to know where to go. Once you say that the objective is to separate them then all sorts of things fit into place. You are able to work out is that fitting in with those principles or not, and similarly on the decentralisation. It is a game. It is an approach I used when I was doing better regulation - I developed five good principles of regulation, which apply here too, by the way - transparency, accountability, proportionality, targeting, consistency - and if you use those I find in dealing with Whitehall things fit into place and you force people to think out why they are doing what they are doing. Q41 Paddy Tipping: You mention this phrase "a game". Do you not think this piece of work you do may be a bit dysfunctional? People must be concerned about the future. You are going to produce a report in the autumn and, if some of the changes we read about are to come about, it is going to take primary legislation, so we are talking about three or four years. Lord Haskins: Some of it could take three years. Q42 Paddy Tipping: Have you quantified the cost of change against the benefit of change? Lord Haskins: We will be doing all of that and evaluating it, and I do have to say that I am acutely aware that lots of people are sensitive and anxious about where they stand and, secondly, I have been very impressed by the quality of the people I have seen out in the field, and in Defra itself, doing work in very difficult circumstances. I think there has been quite a lot of unfair scapegoating of people on the rural agenda delivering. There is a high degree of competence and commitment and I do not want to lose that. I am sure we can avoid losing that if we are transparent and open, and tell people in good time how this is going to emerge over three years. One of the things to bear in mind is that if Defra does nothing there is going to be a huge demand for extra resource because of the environmental stuff coming along, so my comparison will be between Defra doing nothing and Defra taking my changes, because they will need more people and lots of people might be excess to requirements in one particular agency but they will find opportunities in other agencies as the thing develops. The three year programme is inevitable partly because of the primary legislation, partly because the Fischler reforms are going to take three years to implement and partly because the rural development scheme programmes are running down, and structural change of this sort needs time to take effect. I do not think people mind. As long as they know where they are going to stand in three years' time, they will be happy. What people hate, above all else, is uncertainty. Q43 Paddy Tipping: Come on, let us be clear about this. There is a lot of uncertainty at the moment. The Countryside Agency - how old is that? Defra - how old is that? You are proposing a major change and all I am saying is what is the cost of the change? Lord Haskins: There is a cost to the change. They asked me to do the job. What is obvious is when you create a completely new department then you have to look at the methods of delivery underneath that department to see if they are appropriate for the new department remit, and that is what I am doing. The big revolution was creating the department. Mine is not a revolution - all I am doing is trying to look at the delivery that has come into line with that policy change. Q44 Mr Simpson: Lord Haskins, this is just an observation really. You said earlier that you thought the desired global free market in food would not come about whilst you were around. For the record, there are large numbers of people in the sustainability movement who hope they are around for a long time to come because that is not necessarily their desired aim. Lord Haskins: Some. Mr Mondi(?) agrees that fair free trade is the way forward. Q45 Mr Simpson: He is entitled to make his own mistakes! In relation to comments you have just made, which were a repeat of comments at the interview earlier in June, you repeated the point about the need for rural services to be transparent and accountable. To whom? Lord Haskins: This always comes back to the same issue. If you are talking about democratic legitimacy, clearly most of these local services are delivered by local authorities so the accountability should be to local authorities. Q46 Mr Simpson: But in that sense is there any disparity of interest between the customers that those local authorities represent in respect of the interests of farmers, rural businesses, and rural communities? Is it the same line of accountability? ? Lord Haskins: Yes, I think that is right. At the end of the day the rural communities, whether they are farmers or non-farming businesses, share quite a lot of common interests. We know that and share common concerns, although one of the things that I have found, one of the difficulties you have in developing your policies, whilst they share a common concern, there is a huge amount of tension between the various stakeholders in the rural community - tension between farmers and environmentalists, tension between environments and evangelical environmentalists, tensions between urban commuters and people - all of which are very complex and make a reading of a coherent approach to rural matters very difficult. But at the end of it, where you have a county council which has a strong rural presence like my own in East Yorkshire, I find it does a pretty competent job for its rural constituency. Maybe the criticism would be at the expense of the urban constituency. One of the interesting points about going to Cumbria at the time of foot and mouth and looking at the great crisis, which there undoubtedly was in the rural part of Cumbria, was that people on the west coast said, "What about us?" Now, two years later, rural Cumbria has made a remarkable recovery and west coast Cumbria is still a problem. There are balances and you can but deal with them, and you lot have to deal with them as much as you can as well, but when you ask about accountability, it must be at local level. I do believe that. Q47 Mr Simpson: So just for the record, therefore, accountability of the delivery of rural services to those different groups of recipients, you are clear, would be through the same agency? Lord Haskins: Exactly, but where the government comes in, of course, government makes money available for them so if there is a failure on the buses, for example, and people decided that the buses were not working and there were empty buses, the question would be whether the organisation, the scheduling of the buses at local level was the failure, or whether the policy idea of having the bus in the first instance was a failure, and then at least we would be able to measure at the moment when that bus crisis come up, if there is one. It is very difficult to know where the failure is and whether it is a delivery or a policy matter. Q48 Mr Simpson: Following on from that, you have been doing lots of soundings about the views on rural services from those who are recipients. What would you say are the biggest disparities between what the recipients of services feel about them and what the policy makers who construct the ideas about appropriate services feel? What is the major area of disparity? Lord Haskins: One of the difficulties is that, if you take issues like rural services, people in the countryside cannot agree amongst themselves what the problem is. I have heard, for example in rural transport, that delivering a rural transport service in the middle of the day and expecting people to use that has not worked. The need is for youngsters in the countryside in the evening to have a public transport system to enable them to go in and out of the town nearby and, interestingly, that was exactly the problem we found in Germany. I went to this village which was only about 50 kms outside Munich and the Germans, being the Germans, had re-opened a one-track railway line into this village which ran through the evening and satisfied the needs of the kids who wanted to go in and have fun, so the public transport element is probably aimed at the wrong constituency. Q49 Mr Jack: Lord Haskins, in terms of your delivery mechanism which you describe for the future services in Defra, could you see a non-government solution to this? In other words, does it have to be public servants who do the delivery bit, or could you see contracts for delivery of various services being offered out for competitive tender, private enterprise, organisations coming together to bid for this so that you would have a very clear divorce between the formulation of policy and the delivery of services? Lord Haskins: That is happening in a widespread way. The regional development agencies are contracting with private companies to deliver lots of things, and there is a mix of public servants and private servants in that delivery process which has worked well in some areas and not in others. I do not think we should be idealogical about it. Q50 Mr Jack: That is interesting. Does that mean that you could see in the Haskins world, say, the Rural Payments Agency not being a public body but the payments mechanism and function being put out to tender for competition for a private, non-governmental body to be responsible for delivering what the RPA currently does? Lord Haskins: I would have no difficulty in saying that. All I would say is that at the moment there is a huge investment going into the RPA because it is a very complicated business putting money into the back pockets of farmers and making sure it is done expeditiously, and therefore if you were to say, "Let's put this up for tender now", you would create massive chaos because they are involved. But if at the beginning of the process somebody had said, "We have a choice of either a government agency spending that money or an independent agency", then you could have made a choice. Frankly, I would have been very frightened of the private sector being able to cope with the scale of the sort of investment that was involved in that Rural Payments Agency. It is very complicated, and the sort of failure that might arise in that situation, like when the passport process was privatised which fell down I know, in theory is fine but I think one has to be very careful what one is doing if you are doing a big chunk of administration of that sort. Q51 Diana Organ: Do you think the Countryside Agency at present is accountable and transparent? Lord Haskins: I think it is transparent. It writes good reports. What I am slightly concerned about is it has policies of its own about villages or whatever and it is also delivering them. I have no evidence that the policies are failing but what bothers me is if someone creates their own policy and then is in the business of delivering that policy it is not in their interests to express shortcomings, and therefore human nature being what it is, if they are separate with transparency separating policy from delivery, it is much more likely that you are going to see where the thing is right and wrong than if it is all linked up. I have no views at all as to whether the countryside Agency is doing a good or bad job on those schemes. Q52 Diana Organ: You said you could see a clear role for the Countryside Agency as a developer of rural policies, leading on research and demonstration. Could you tell me where you think the dividing line would come then between an organisation that was doing that and, say, within Defra, the team, and walkers' land use research and development team? Where would the one fit with the other? Lord Haskins: It is a very interesting question because, before Defra was created, there was no one championing a rural affairs agenda which is why the Countryside Agency - and the Countryside Commission before it - was doing that job, and they have been doing that job for nearly 100 years. Now that we have a department whose specific job is to champion rural affairs somebody might ask the question, "Do we have the need for a Countryside Agency if the department now has that specific remit itself?" It is a good question and I am not going to give you an answer to it. Q53 Diana Organ: Is that not what you are meant to be looking at? A review of Defra? You must be looking at the cost of having both the Countryside Agency and its team within Defra, and if you are talking about merging together and having a new land management agency, you must have done some work on the costs and the recouping of those for the taxpayer, on redundancies and merges for the team? Lord Haskins: We are right in the midst of that work and in six weeks' time, if you ask me back here again after August, I will be able to give you an answer to exactly the points you are raising because it certainly would be an option but it is not one I have come to the conclusion I should pursue at this stage. Q54 Diana Organ: You said earlier that you think there is a role for the Countryside Agency as a developer of policy but then you say, on the other hand, that you can see virtually the demise of the Countryside Agency because you would like to see a single new Land Management Agency. I am a little confused about at one moment you seeing a role for it and then on another you want to see it gone away with? Lord Haskins: The Land Management Agency has nothing to do with the Countryside Agency; it is predominantly a new environmental wing. It covers the National Parks, English Nature, and areas of outstanding national beauty, bringing them together in a coherent way. Creating this agency out of all of those agencies will retain their own identity in order to develop an enhancement agenda of land management in a more coherent way than at the moment. Although I am greatly in favour of localisation and decentralisation one has to recognise that on environmental issues there is an national and international element that you have to take into account, so I very firmly come to the view that we still need a National Environment Agency and that we should consider creating a national Land Management Agency, but those two agencies also would be very pressed to make sure that, as much as possible, they carry out their delivery at a local level. Q55 Diana Organ: And would you like to see this new Land Management Agency take responsibility for nature and recreation, because that would then include customers living in suburbs who would like to visit the countryside? Lord Haskins: Absolutely. All of that, and the Forestry Commission too, dealing with recreation and access to the countryside, existing conservation - but it has to be more than that, we have to be more proactive. The Environment Agency has the job of primarily protecting our environment from nasty things and helping people to avoid doing nasty things. This new agency would be in the business of producing good things in the countryside, enhancing the quality of the countryside, and we have to find a way of getting those two agencies working side by side. This is the core to rural policy, in my view, here and elsewhere over the next ten years. Q56 Diana Organ: But, as Mr Tipping said, the Department has only been up and running for a couple of years, the Countryside Agency a little longer, and with this reconstruction again are we not in a situation where government could lose valuable on-going programmes and there could be a horrendous cost to the reconfiguration with redundancies and all of that? We have had this before. We are just adding more and more cost without getting a lot of value for the taxpayer in access to the countryside, land management, opportunities for recreation - all these things you want to see - because some programmes that are in the pipeline now would be lost. Lord Haskins: The intention is that everything that I put forward will have to be justified against the principles of (a) sustainability, (b) value for money for taxpayers, and (c) better value for customers, whoever they are. If the recommendations do not help towards meeting those three requirements I would not put them forward. Q57 Diana Organ: At present it is the role of The Countryside Agency to give advice and suggestions about landscapes of a particular quality that might be suitable for Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty status or National Park status. Where would they fit in? Would they fit within the role of The Countryside Agency as a developer of regional policy or would it be under the remit and responsibility of this new land management agency that is responsible for nature and recreation? I am a little confused as to who would do that. Lord Haskins: The Land Management Agency. Q58 Diana Organ: The new Land Management Agency? Lord Haskins: Absolutely. Q59 Diana Organ: So effectively you are going to replace The Countryside Agency with this new Land Management Agency and let Anna Walker's team do the work in the department? Lord Haskins: The Land Management Agency has a much broader remit than the existing Countryside Agency because it is taking into account all the existing land management activities or whatever. As far as the rural affairs agenda is concerned, that will be Anna Walker's responsibility, absolutely. 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 Clive Evans' (?) 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. 80 per cent 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 per cent 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' issue, 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 ten per cent. If we force the organic, why should we not force the vegetarian market from three to ten per cent? 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 three per cent 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 idea 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 is a wonderful example 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 hogg 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 ten years ago. You cannot do very much about something that happened ten 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. |