Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
17 DECEMBER 2003
LORD HASKINS
AND MARCUS
NISBET
Q40 Mr Breed: Is not the brutal truth
though that the Government, having set up the Countryside Agency
literally only a few years ago, with an extraordinary amount of
money to do so, and since, will find it deeply embarrassing now
actually to get rid of it? Thus to try to thrash around to find
a role for it, rather than recognising that the Countryside Agency
was duplicating much of what Defra did, and that its functions
would be undertaken more properly in the way in which you are
recommending, they are not going to do that. Therefore, much of
the real streamlining and the real sort of decentralising out
that you are recommending is going to be frustrated?
Lord Haskins: No, I do not think
that is right. Government has not made it completely clear what
it means about the Countryside Agency, but it has said it is going
to be much smaller. What I read into that is, the Countryside
Agency currently manages a number of funding stream programmes
and those would devolve away from the Countryside Agency, either
to local deliverers, like local authorities, or maybe to the new
agency. The Countryside Agency would not be in the delivery business
at all. The second point of my report, of course, is that the
Countryside Agency was set up before Defra existed. The creation
of Defra, in my view, made a lot of the Countryside Agency's role
redundant and that is why I recommend that it should disappear
altogether, because Defra should be doing this for itself. Any
department has got a responsibility to look to independent advice
and policy issues. If Mrs Beckett decides that she has a small
Countryside Agency which is going to give her that sort of independent
advice, I could live with that, as long as it was not too big.
Q41 Mr Breed: In another way, you
are emphasising exactly what I said, that, in fact, actually to
dispose of the Countryside Agency totally would be an embarrassing
situation. As you say, it was set up before Defra, because the
Government, at that stage, had declined to set up a Department
of Rural Affairs. Because of the problems of MAFF, it was decided
that would be the best way forward, but, having already set up
the Countryside Agency, we had then a duplication, and a very
expensive one at that. At the end, if what you are saying is,
right, just to keep the Countryside Agency in name, with very
little cost, I suppose that would be right. Are you certain that,
in fact, as Mr Wiggin was saying, in terms of the delivery, the
delivery needs to be pushed down as far as possible to the most
local element? That seems to be something which has been fought
against in recent terms, we have seen centralisation rather than
decentralisation. How can you be certain that those elements,
which are very important, are going to be followed through?
Lord Haskins: You are right, I
am putting down a marker to say that this process of centralisation
started about 1944 and we have got to try to reverse that trend.
I am pretty optimistic that a large amount of decentralisation
will happen, but the critical issue is Defra's relationship with
the Government Offices, local authorities and the Regional Development
Agencies. I think those are the three critical relationships.
Q42 Mr Breed: Do you think it would
be a good idea if Defra removed itself from London and located
itself somewhere into a rural area?
Lord Haskins: Personally, as somebody
with roots in Yorkshire, I would be delighted if Defra were up
in Yorkshire, it would make life much easier for me. I think it
is a serious point. I do not think it will happen. The NFU is
moving to Warwickshire now, which I think is an excellent move,
and if Defra followed along the same lines I do not think anything
would be lost, but I doubt if it will happen.
Chairman: We had better adjourn whilst
we all put in our bids, but, before we do that, David Drew.
Q43 Mr Drew: The decentralisation
model, which obviously is very attractive, as Gillian teased out
from you, you do tend to stay at the regional level. Is there
not just a thought in the back of your mind that really you could
have gone the whole hog and actually decentralised down to the
local community level? Those of us, and I will declare an interest,
like Mr Taylor, who are existing parish councillors feel that
the problem there is that people know what they want to do in
their communities, but they have a panoply of different people
who come along to tell them of all the wonderful things that they
could be doing, but when it comes to the money it has all been
spent on the co-ordinating role. Could you not have been even
more radical and said "What we need to do is actually get
it down to the communities themselves," with some co-ordination
through rural community councils, for example, in county areas,
which do an invaluable job at a very cheap end of the cost scale?
Is not that really where we should have got to?
Lord Haskins: I think we have
to bear in mind that much of the agri-environmental delivery stuff
will require a high degree of expertise, of which there is plenty.
It is too much, to expect that every parish council is going to
have the expertise to manage the implementation of a complicated
agri-environmental scheme. On some issues, like Vital Villages,
I agree, the more that can be done at the local level the better.
The structure there is very uneven, we did find that, there are
10,000 parish councils, they are not all 10,000 brilliant ones,
I can tell you, and I think we need to go step by step on that.
I would be delighted if we could get the 173 rural local authorities
doing a proper job there, I would be delighted, if we could do
that.
Q44 Mr Drew: Just as a rejoinder
to that, is there not an argument that unless you give people
the responsibility they will always be subject to this view that
it cannot be decentralised? I accept that you could go part of
the way to local authorities, but in many rural areas there is
a tension, where you have got three layers, between the parish
councils, the district councils and the county councils. There
is a feeling that it is only a dribble of resource which gets
down there, and if you really want to make the changes and turn
round, let us be honest, some of the decay that there is in rural
areas, you have to give that level of responsibility and take
the risk?
Lord Haskins: Yes, I agree. It
depends. If you take some of the environmental things we are talking
about, you cannot leave them to just one council. The Environment
Agency in dealing with flood defences, may have to work with two
or three different regions, so you have to deal with problems
on a case-by-case issue.
Q45 Alan Simpson: Lord Haskins, I
would like to come back to a point which Gillian Shephard raised
with you, which is about accountability. In your answer to part
of her questions, you talked about, I think, a sensible business
would consult with those responsible for delivery. I am just a
bit anxious that, although I can understand the way you will see
this from a business angle, one of the differences here is that
customers in businesses can take their purchasing power elsewhere.
We have a different relationship here, where we are not talking
necessarily about purchasing customers but customers who are dependent
on there being a follow-through from policy to delivery. I am
just worried that what appears to be missed out here is the word
"accountability". Are you giving Defra a "get out
of gaol free" card? We have innumerable times on this Committee
where we get the Defra officials here, and they love policy, they
will talk about mission statements or emissions statements, or
whatever it is, but cannot be bothered to say how they are delivering,
and how we will know and how we can hold them to account, and
they disappear like dust. I am worried, you see, that in your
suggestions, radical though they may be, what we will lose is
this fundamental issue about accountability. How do you address
that?
Lord Haskins: Partly, this is
the fault of Parliament. Parliament and ministers love to get
into the nitty-gritty of delivery, to get involved in issues which
they cannot possibly manage or control themselves. The flat accountability
is with the local authority operating on behalf of Defra. Distinguishing
between a failure of policy and a failure of delivery is very
important. This is much more of a problem for a department like
Health perhaps than it is with Defra, where I would question whether
it is the Prime Minister's fault that a particular hospital in
London ends up having an old person waiting for an excessive time
for treatment. That to me would be the responsibility of that
hospital. If the Prime Minister and people in the centre are going
to take responsibility for every bed-pan in the Health Service
falling on the floor then you are going to have a completely unmanageable
form of government, and that is what you have got in the National
Health Service. That, to an extent, is what we have in Defra.
It does behold Parliament, I think, to concentrate on the policy-making
side, which is mainly your responsibility, to challenge the policy-making
side, to make sure the policy is sound and valid. Of course, Parliament
must also make sure that deliverers are accountable for spending
the money properly and delivering the policy that has been agreed
by Parliament, but we must try to separate them. I always use
the analogy, I think I used it the last time I was here, when
all the IRA prisoners were jumping out of Cambridge gaol, about
seven or eight years ago, when Michael Howard was then the Home
Secretary and Derek Lewis was running the prisons. There was a
question, who was responsible, meanwhile more and more IRA people
were jumping out, and eventually it was resolved by Michael Howard
firing Derek Lewis. There was a lot of controversy about this.
I think actually Howard was right, because the accountability
was with the Prison Service. It was interesting that the French
health crisis this summer, where all these people died in Paris
because there were not enough doctors around in Paris during the
heat-wave, when it came to it, the Surgeon General who ran the
Health Service resigned, the Minister did not. Now there is some
debate about this, because the Minister did not even come back
from his holidays. The principle of somebody in charge of those
hospitals being made accountable for them clearly is right. If
you had it the other way round then those people who were running
those hospitals would say, "It's not me, Joe," and they
would pass it up to the top, and eventually there is no accountability,
which is what happens across Whitehall departments at the moment.
Q46 Alan Simpson: I can see all of
that, and, in fact, that is pretty much the line we get from Defra
at times, I think. They like the notion that they make policy
but they want the responsibility to be passed elsewhere. As a
Committee, I think really we struggle at times to get answers
from the permanent officials, whom we are reluctant to sack, about
what is happening and why it is or is not happening. I have a
lot of affection and time for people in local government, that
was part of my route in here, but I think we ought not to have
a romantic view about local government. The various different
layers of local government are more than capable of falling out
with each other about not the delivery of services but who gets
the biggest slice of the cake. I am worried about the people who
are on the ultimate receiving end of this and there being no independent
voice which says, "Hang on, fellas, you're all messing up;
we reserve the right actually to hold all of you to account, not
to be the arbiters of some unholy scrap which takes place between
different layers of government." Why are you taking that
out?
Lord Haskins: That would require
400 ombudsmen, in each local authority for each particular activity,
just checking that their citizens are getting a proper deal. It
is quite ambitious, I would have thought.
Q47 Alan Simpson: I am not calling
for 400 ombudsmen. I asked for there to be an overall structure
which is independent of all this, which holds the whole process
to account?
Lord Haskins: You do have an Audit
Commission and you do have the National Audit Office. The NAO
is there to make sure that public money has been spent in a proper
way. The Audit Commission does a reasonably good job in that respect
on behalf of citizens. We have also the Rural Affairs Forum, which
is there to do just that. Some people are rather critical of how
the Rural Affairs Forums perform, because they may be a talking
shop but the principle of those regional Rural Affairs Forums
holding local deliverers to account is correct, and my report
deals with this quite extensively.
Q48 Mr Mitchell: I thought you were
saying, bring back Sir Walter Monkton, in your answer to Alan.
Why are we so concerned with delivery? I think there are two answers
to that question. One is that our minds do not work on a bigger
scale than the minutiae of delivery, and that is what we are about,
but, more important, we should be dealing with policy. We do not
control policy, it is all controlled from Brussels, from whence
all blessings flow. You want to make a distinction between policy
and delivery, but Defra itself is of very little importance in
the policy process, it is all decided in Brussels. Would it not
be better really to cut out Defra altogether and have policy just
formulated in Europe and delivered better on the ground?
Lord Haskins: In my experience
of government departments, the most challenging policy-making
government departments are those who have a European agenda, because
it is infinitely more complicated, more challenging. I sit in
another place and we spend a lot of time looking at European policy
issues, as you do here. It is important to have very high quality
people representing our interests in dealing with Brussels.
Q49 Diana Organ: Your proposals have
been radical, but why did you not make an even more radical proposal,
which answers the questions which have come from Mrs Shephard,
Mr Simpson and others, which is, why did you not just say, "Well,
let's have Defra, let's have all the delivery through local authorities
and a Rural Payments Agency, which will be run by Defra for the
payment for the stuff that is coming out of Europe"? Why
did you not do that? Why have you got this integrated agency idea,
why do we not just get rid of the second-rate, secondary agency
and have—
Lord Haskins: Would you get rid
of the Environment Agency too?
Q50 Diana Organ: Yes, as delivery.
Why cannot it come through the money stream to local authorities
which have accountability and the accountability is to the elector;
why not? Why could you not have been really radical, to say, "That's
what local authorities are for, they're for delivery, they're
for provision of services, they are accountable," and do
it that way, and have a specialist agency, the Rural Payments
Agency, to deal with the very complex issue of the payment for
CAP and levies?
Lord Haskins: Actually, I worry
about the processing of agri-environment schemes.
Q51 Diana Organ: It will be the Rural
Payments Agency?
Lord Haskins: It would be a gigantic
department. The Environment Agency employs 10,000 people. This
new agency, I guess, would employ 2,500. We have got 173 local
authorities involved in rural delivery. I can put up with some
inconsistency but I think you could end up with a very unsatisfactory
way of central policy being delivered. These are still national
policies being delivered at local level. Now if you get a huge
variation at local level then you get chaos. I think you have
to ensure some sort of cohesion.
Q52 Diana Organ: You could, say,
look at education, which is pretty massive, and how different
local authorities deal with it. We are left with the situation,
are we not, where there is a delay, it is fairly obvious from
your report that you were not hugely impressed with the Countryside
Agency and its delivery, hence you have made the recommendation
that, effectively, the Countryside Agency is to be completely
disbanded?
Lord Haskins: What I meant was,
events have overtaken the Countryside Agency. Whether there was
a case, or not, for the Countryside Agency, three or four years
ago, the creation of Defra itself meant that events have
overtaken the Countryside Agency.
Q53 Diana Organ: Given that, at this
point then, would you say that the taxpayer is getting value for
money with the work and funding of the Countryside Agency in its
delivery?
Lord Haskins: I did not actually
make that assessment, because I was not asked to make that assessment.
Q54 Diana Organ: Having looked at
it now, would you say that the taxpayer gets value for money for
the money which is spent funding the Countryside Agency?
Lord Haskins: I would say that,
generally speaking, a lot of these financial incentives, funding
streams, must be of questionable value. For example, one of the
Countryside Agency's national schemes: £1 million. That is
big, in terms of a national scheme. One of our strong recommendations
is that those 77 funding streams should be rationalised to give
better value for money, and obviously that includes the Countryside
Agency. I did not look at all the schemes in detail because there
were 77 of them.
Q55 Diana Organ: Given that we have
got delays, actually we are going to have to put up with the Countryside
Agency being a major deliverer, are we not? Why do you think the
Secretary of State rejected your recommendation that the Countryside
Agency be completely disbanded?
Lord Haskins: You will have to
ask her that.
Q56 Diana Organ: I am asking why
you think she rejected it?
Lord Haskins: As I understand
it, she agreed to the disbandment of all the Countryside Agency's
delivery responsibilities. They will go elsewhere. That was the
main objective behind the report, to rationalise the delivery
side. The policy side of the Countryside Agency was an add-on,
to me. I was not actually asked to look at the policies but I
did make the recommendation. On the delivery side, I am happy
that they are going to deal with that. Now how quickly that takes
place, we will have to wait to see what Defra comes up with in
April.
Q57 Diana Organ: What it is left
with is that it seems to be there is going to be a little bit
of the Countryside Agency which is going to offer advice to the
Government, but I understand that Defra already has its own Rural
Policy Unit, does it not?
Lord Haskins: It does.
Q58 Diana Organ: Why do we need the
Countryside Agency, it is neither of use nor ornament?
Lord Haskins: My report says that,
more or less.
Q59 Diana Organ: Yes, but I am trying
to tease out of you why you think it is that the Secretary of
State has actually gone against what seems to be a fairly clear
recommendation from you, when you have been asked to do this job?
Lord Haskins: She can do what
she likes with this report, at the end of the day. I have written
the report for her, if she throws it on the dump that is her business.
I am mildly encouraged that she has accepted so far the vast thrust
of the report, including the comments on the Countryside Agency.
The Countryside Agency budget is £114 million at the moment,
but, what Mrs Beckett is considering, I would be surprised if
it cost more than £3 million or £4 million to do.
|
