Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
17 DECEMBER 2003
LORD HASKINS
AND MARCUS
NISBET
Q80 Mr Liddell-Grainger: English
Nature has an agenda, which it has always had, which is to conserve
nature. Let us take flooding, for instance. If you do have a retreat
on a peninsula and you manage it, the Environment Agency will
say, "No, actually, we want to do this," English Nature
says, "No, we don't want you to do that." Then, in the
middle, you get the Countryside Agency, "Well, actually,
we've got a village at the end of that peninsula, we want to put
money into the village hall," for instance, that is what
they think of. You are going to have three lots of people who
are meant to be working together actually pulling in opposite
directions?
Lord Haskins: You have got this
tension all the time, if you take rural planning, for example,
the classic example. If somebody wants to develop a project in
the countryside, you have got five or six different groups, all
with perfectly good reasons, from their own perspective, for taking
totally different views on it. At the end of the day, those have
to be resolved by Government. The Government has got to make sure
that they have systems in place to make sure that, those contradictions
and those compromises, the contradictions do not take place and
compromises do take place, but it is extremely difficult. The
rural agenda is full of the sorts of problems you are talking
about.
Q81 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Which is
exactly what you started with saying, it has got to be give and
take on this, but the whole idea of this is to try to integrate
a system which will streamline the organisation, in other words,
Defra, whatever you are going to call it, the Environment Agency
and various bits and pieces. In fact, from what you have been
saying, that is not going to happen at all. It would make it just
exactly the same, but you could have sub-committees within, let
us call it, English Nature, for ease, where they have the Countryside
Agency bit, the Forestry Commission bit and the other little bits,
all saying, "Actually, we don't want that." You are
going to have exactly the same problem, are you not, you cannot
integrate this, can you?
Lord Haskins: The regulation of
the environment and the promotion of the environment are aimed
at the same objective. All I am saying is, from the delivery point
of view, I think it is more expeditious to have two agencies rather
than five, but I would prefer two rather than one. I think it
is a big step forward.
Mr Liddell-Grainger: I am not the slightest
bit convinced, I might say.
Q82 Chairman: I would like just to
follow up briefly on that line of questioning, because when I
tried to get a feel, an overview, of how the new Haskins world
would operate, the only sort of picture I could find was in paragraph
6.17 on page 66 of the report, in which, magically, agencies and
organisations appear and disappear. When I tried then to find
something which showed me how the local authorities, the RDAs,
fitted into it, I could not find a plan, all I could find was
a sort of amazing diagram at the back of the report showing how
rationalised services were going to be delivered, assuming, of
course, that we have elected regional assemblies. I am struggling
then to try to think through from the policy responsibilities,
on the various bits of legalities, which are currently Defra's
responsibility, these agencies' responsibilities. I am finding
it very difficult to relate a list of the things which Defra has
to do to the delivery mechanisms, and under the new Haskins world
how then those items are farmed out. To follow on from what Ian
was saying, if you go to paragraph 6.18 of your report, we have
got some remarkable, broad-brush statements. You say: "Rationalising
the current arrangements in an integrated whole would bring together
functions relating to: access and recreation . . . ; natural resource
protection". But then you have just told us that the Environment
Agency, who are tasked with regulating that very role, are to
be left out on the right wing of paragraph 6.17's plan because
that would make too unwieldy and big a body. Then we go on to
item three, "biodiversity and wildlife protection;"
that is all about regulation, is it not, so that is the Environment
Agency, but they are not involved in this. Then we go to "landscape
protection and enhancement." Then in the next thing you seem
arbitrarily to have decided what the agenda is for this new integrated
agency, but then not helpfully describing where the rest of all
the things go.
Lord Haskins: You mean the non-environmental
stuff?
Q83 Chairman: Anything else, the
service delivery and anything else. I was really struggling to
get a picture of the new, post-Haskins world when all I have got
is a picture of what is on page 66?
Lord Haskins: That picture is
purely the environmental picture. We did not do a social and economic
picture, but there are words. If you take, for example, ERDP,
the England Rural Development Programme, we say quite clearly,
in that, that the economic element of that, of which there are
two, clearly would go down the Regional Development Agency/local
authority route. It says very clearly the Countryside Agency's
Vital Villages/Market Towns initiative would go down the local
authority/Regional Development Agency route.
Q84 Chairman: Can I stop you at that
juncture and ask, because you made an interesting point earlier
on, you said that the amounts of money which the Countryside Agency
had for these various schemes were relatively small.
Lord Haskins: Not all of them.
I gave an example of that.
Q85 Chairman: You gave an example.
Let us stick with the example which you chose, a policy for £1
million. The Countryside Agency, at the moment, as a pump-priming,
innovative body, has the task of giving out this relatively small
cake to stimulate activity. You say, "Okay, I'll give some
of this job to the local authorities, because they're really at
the coal-face, they know what's required." Who is going to
decide which local authority gets what money to undertake that
kind of role, who is going to make that decision?
Lord Haskins: First of all, on
the pilots you are talking about, actually Defra can commission
those pilots themselves.
Q86 Chairman: The role of the Countryside
Agency, which commissions pilots, has now reverted back to the
centre in your model, so where is the local initiative which is
going to meet these local demands when, effectively, you have
already got the people in the middle saying, "Right, well,
here's a policy, and a bit for you and a bit for you and a bit
for you"? How are they going to exercise this locally?
Lord Haskins: My experience is
that they had found many of the Countryside Agency's innovative
projects in local authorities. For example, there is a bicycle
one, which they found in a Shropshire local authority.
Q87 Chairman: Wheels to Work?
Lord Haskins: Wheels to Work came
from Shropshire, I think I am right in saying that. There is nothing
wrong with that. The local authorities are there, with the scope
to carry out these initiatives, and I have seen examples of local
authority initiatives on all sorts of things, the local authorities
have got a lot of discretion.
Q88 Chairman: Just to be clear, you
are saying then, you say to local authorities, "Here is a
range of areas of interest, responsibility," call it what
you like, "you're going to be responsible and get all these
local authorities dreaming up wonderful ideas to enhance their
rural communities." Then they have got to look around for
some money to make these things happen, and you are saying that
they will go back up the line to Defra then and say, "That's
a really good idea, can we have some money, please?"?
Lord Haskins: With the system
of local government we have here, where only 25% of the money
they spend is their own money, I cannot help that. You guys have
made it that way, that 75% ought to reduce.
Q89 Chairman: If 50 rural communities
in the Haskins world think of 50 different ideas which they would
like to pursue, they are all perfectly good ideas, and they all
turn round and write to Defra, to the Secretary of State, Margaret
Beckett, it lands on her desk, 50 letters, "Here is a great
idea to rejuvenate our local village," how, in the new world,
are the decisions going to be taken to adjudicate on that type
of approach?
Lord Haskins: I do not know, but
I hope that money would be available for local authorities to
use discretion.
Q90 Chairman: Hope is one thing,
reality is another?
Lord Haskins: If you take the
Vital Villages money, that could be made available through the
Regional Development Agencies and down to the local authorities
to be spent with discretion.
Q91 Chairman: You are still going
to have somebody at the centre making policy decisions, first
of all, about what level of budget will be allocated for such
activities. Then in the way that policy is made, you know as well
as I do, the Treasury does not hand out money to departments like
Defra without having some idea of how it is going to be spent.
So we have a generic "to improve life in rural villages",
do we?, or is it Defra at the centre, in the new world, going
to be a bit more prescriptive, because the more prescriptive they
get at the centre the less initiative is going to be out at the
outposts?
Lord Haskins: I am on the Regional
Development Agency in Yorkshire, and the DTI has actually let
go quite a bit, and, the famous single pot, a lot of money, in
our particular case, £300 million, is made available for
the Regional Development Agency to spend, obviously within the
criteria of Government policy but with a great deal of discretion.
I would like to see that same thing develop in the Defra context.
Q92 Paddy Tipping: In the work that
you did, you kind of bumped into the Rural Payments Agency and
you bumped into the Environment Agency, but they were not your
major focus.
Lord Haskins: They were not in
my remit. The Rural Payments Agency was not on my remit and the
urban element of the Environment Agency was excluded.
Q93 Paddy Tipping: Let us just check
out the Rural Payments Agency. This is a big deliverer of services
to the farming community. In crude terms, it takes pound notes,
puts them in brown paper envelopes and sends them to farmers.
It did not do it very well, actually.
Lord Haskins: Yes, I have heard
this said.
Q94 Paddy Tipping: I think there
is a commonality of agreement around the country about that. The
switch is going to be, as you have described it, through CAP reform,
some of that £2.8 billion, £3 billion, is going to disappear
and go to more environmentally-focused schemes. In a sense, the
RPA overlaps into what you are talking about?
Lord Haskins: Yes. The RPA, it
seems to me, is purely a sort of processor of these goodies, and
it is actually quite easy, as you say, to put money into brown
envelopes and give it to farmers. The costs of running the RPA,
the cost of the total scheme, about six percent is in administration.
The problem with the agri-environmental schemes, is that they
are so much more complicated, because by the nature of things
you have to check that you are getting for value for money. The
figure could be as high as 30%, and that is the thing which really
frightens me. When going round Europe, I did not find a single
agri-environmental scheme which, it seemed to me, was working
to the satisfaction of all three parties, i.e. is it delivering
environmental good, at the same time is it giving the farmers
incentives to deliver that environmental good, and is the taxpayer
getting value for money out of it. I think we have all moved from
Pillar 1 to Pillar 2 rather too readily, without understanding
the huge consequences of applying a complicated agri-environmental
scheme right across Europe. Really I worry about it.
Q95 Paddy Tipping: I think that is
right, and some of the policy workers at Defra are looking at
this now. There is a review of agri-environmental schemes going
on, and, in a sense, there is going to be some kind of pyramid,
with a broad and shallow line integrated approach at the bottom,
and more selective. The difficulty is, I think, as you were alluding
to, it is easy to micromanage, or overmanage, those.
Lord Haskins: It is very easy.
I know that Curry is trying to make that as simple as possible,
so that a degree of self-regulation comes into play. That is fine,
but the French tried that, and the French farmers saw immediately
where the cheap option was and they nearly broke the system by
all going for the option which was the easiest way of getting
money out of the taxpayers. These schemes are not easy because
they have to be tailor-made for every farm-owner, and that is
the problem.
Q96 Paddy Tipping: I would make just
the simple point that money is going to be transferred out of
that RPA system of payment into agri-environment schemes, and
there is a discussion there about how you get value for money.
Lord Haskins: The Rural Development
Service, which is currently in existence, is actually developing
a payments system, a computer system, to deal with that, which
I hope very much gets linked into the RPA and we end up with one
IT system.
Q97 Paddy Tipping: Then I want to
talk a little bit about the other giant in this landscape, which
is the EA, which you have pressed very strongly, and I think rightly,
as a regulator, but one of the things which is in your report
and is in everybody's thinking at the moment is a whole-farm approach
to farm inspections, because there is a myriad of different inspections
taking place. The EA is going to be tasked fairly soon, with others,
on the very difficult problem of diffuse pollution. If there is
pollution in this country, the biggest polluter is farmland. They
have got a big role in this and yet they are not being included
in the Land Management Agency, that whole discussion of diffuse
pollution. Where do you think that should be taken forward? Who
is the driver for change?
Lord Haskins: The Environment
Agency is responsible for diffuse pollution, and are interested
in any schemes which tackle diffuse pollution. Obviously the Environment
Agency have a role in stopping pollution but they also want to
be involved in the Curry entry-level scheme. The Environment Agency
has been involved, not as much as it should have been, to make
sure that options are there to give incentives to tackle diffuse
pollution. I see the Environment Agency playing a more prominent
role in influencing these incentive schemes than they have done
in the past.
Q98 Paddy Tipping: In a sense, part
of that is going to be policy work, around redesign of the CAP,
so the overlap between the EA and the new Landscape Agency, whatever
it is called, is going to be fairly wide at some point?
Lord Haskins: I hope so. I think
that they must complement each other. As I say, you could make
an argument for them all being together as one. Personally, I
think that is wrong. I still feel more comfortable that people
who are regulating should be regulating, people who are spending
taxpayers' money, which is what the new Agency will be doing with
incentives, should be accountable separately.
Q99 Paddy Tipping: Can you just take
us through this notion of a whole-farm approach, which is in your
report, which I think is in the Curry Report as well. There is
a lot of work to be done on this, but what is the broad shape
of it, in your view?
Lord Haskins: At the moment, the
Government, through the Rural Payments Agency, is engaged with,
I think, 80,000 or 90,000 farmers but there are 170,000 out there.
Under the new scheme, the Environment Agency say they are interested
in the whole 170,000. At the moment, I think the Environment Agency
is directly involved itself with only 15,000, a very small number,
the ones they offer licences to. The Environment Agency say, "We've
got to get very proactive and get engaged with all of these,"
and I am saying, hold on a second, let us do a sort of HACCP[4]as
it were, and identify the farms which are high risk. When you
do that, the information I have been given is that about 75% of
the farms are not really high risk farms and those ones could
carry out a whole-farm accreditation, self-regulation, if you
like, with inspection by exception. That is why I wanted the local
authorities to be the ones to make sure that, although these farms
are not high risk, they will still have to be regulated and have
to be checked that they are not doing any nasty things and leave
the Environment Agency to concentrate on the high risk areas.
Their inspections will have to go up from 15,000 to 50,000, maybe
that is right, but there is no need to start creating a gigantic
bureaucracy to regulate every one of the 170,000 farms, assuming
they are all a big threat to diffuse pollution, because they are
not.
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