Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
16 JUNE 2004
SIR BRIAN
BENDER, MR
ANDREW BURCHELL
AND MR
LUCIAN HUDSON
Q60 Joan Ruddock: Exactly when might
that be?
Sir Brian Bender: That one would
be spring 2005. What I am not sure about is exactly where things
stand on the availability of our delivery plan for the present.
I can check and provide the Committee with a note on that.
Q61 Joan Ruddock: If we are not expecting
any kind of assessment, then we will not able to see any judgments
about this until spring of next year, and that would be rather
alarming, would it not?
Sir Brian Bender: I will come
back to the Committee on that.
Q62 Chairman: Can we probe you a bit
about page 258, Appendix 4, PSA Target 2 on the subject of carbon
dioxide emissions?
Sir Brian Bender: What would you
like me to say? Would you like me to say how we are doing?
Q63 Chairman: I would like you to explain
why you are not doing what you said you were going to do. Why
have you found it difficult to keep on track towards the original
PSA target?
Sir Brian Bender: There is a two-part
target, as you will appreciate. We are on track for part one,
which is to meet the Kyoto target to reduce emissions of the basket
of greenhouse gases by 12.5% below 1990 levels. We are on track
for that and indeed the emissions of that basket of gases fell
by 15.3% between the base year and 2002. The second part of the
target is moving towards reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide
by 20% below 1990 levels by 2010. On that one we have reported
a slippage because on current or most recent forecasts from the
DTI on emissions projections we think that we are heading at the
moment to between 12 and 14% on current policies for CO2 reductions
by 2010.
Q64 Chairman: What has gone wrong?
Sir Brian Bender: What has changed
is that increased emissions from coal-fired generation is higher
than previously expected, and there has been higher than previously
expected GB growth and shortfalls from carbon savings from transport.
We are trying to put two things right. First, the national allocation
plan for the EU emissions trading scheme that we put in would
increase that figure and be consistent with a 15.2% reduction
in CO2 emissions. Secondly, as I mentioned when the informal session
in the Department happened last week, the Climate Change Programme
is being reviewed by the end of this year and we will need to
look at and reach collective agreement in government about what
needs to be done to be more confident in saying we are moving
towards it.
Q65 Chairman: Can I be absolutely clear
in the context of this review: are you as a department in charge
of it?
Sir Brian Bender: We are leading
it.
Q66 Chairman: The question I ask is:
who is in charge of it? Who is going to be the Minister who says
that this is the Government's policy? Would it be Margaret Beckett?
Sir Brian Bender: I would be very
surprised if it was not. I would assume it was but it is still
collective. It still has to have buy-in from DTI, Transport and
Treasury.
Q67 Chairman: Somebody has to be in charge
because, going back to the previous line of questioning about
sustainability, it is all right having the class monitor but it
is a question of who is the head, who is in charge? Who is actually
going to crack the whip about saying: what is the content of the
policy? The sense I get from you is that, whilst you would be
surprised if it was not your Secretary of State, there is still
an element of doubt as to who is driving this thing.
Sir Brian Bender: I have no doubt
she is driving it. I am certain of that. What I am not clear about
is what you might say the governmence arrangements are going to
be. The target itself, as you will appreciate, is a shared one
between Defra and DTI. It is not currently shared with Transport.
That is a subject that is, as we speak, under discussion in Government.
There will have to be some process of getting collective decisions
at the end of it, as you well appreciate, but I have no doubt
that, in terms of who is driving it, Margaret Beckett will consider
that she is driving it.
Mr Hudson: May I say on climate
change that it is quite clear that the Prime Minister takes this
very seriously and has given his leadership internationally and
nationally. Our own Secretary of State is always keen to impress
that.
Q68 Chairman: As this Committee has highlighted,
for example in the context of the many debates we have had on
bio-fuels, we have your department being an enthusiastic promoter
of it; we have your department publishing glossy leaflets telling
us what a wonderful impact it is going to have on the rural economy
and rural employment. Then, on the other hand, we have the Treasury
under attack for not providing sufficient inducement to get an
industry based on UK oilseed rape oil as a source for the bio-fuel
under way; we have no bio-ethanol industry to speak of; we have
no connection between any of this and the Department of Transport;
and we have the DTI wired into an increase in hydrocarbon-based
energy policy for the United Kingdom. This does not smack of a
policy that is being properly co-ordinated with one department
clearly in charge setting a sustainable agenda.
Sir Brian Bender: As I say, I
do not know what the Government's arrangements will be. I have
no doubt Margaret Beckett will be driving it. I have no doubt
that the DTI will be co-owners of the Public Service Agreement
target for the period ahead and therefore they will have a public
stake. There is a matter of debate going on as to whether the
Department of Transport should also be co-owners of this target.
Chairman: I think the Committee looks
forward to conducting an inquiry towards the end of the year into
this area when we can return to it in more detail. We very much
hope that both the driver and the road map might form part of
our evidence.
Q69 David Burnside: Can I turn to communications
and the Department in a wider sense? Perhaps you could let us
know what you regard as your greatest communications success over
the last 12 months and your greatest failure and why on both?
Mr Hudson: I can certainly address
the former. The latter I will have to think about. I think for
me the biggest single success, and obviously the Permanent Secretary
pays a very close interest in communications and will take a view,
was GM. It was a highly contentious issue where I think 18 months
ago the view was that the Prime Minister had made up his mind
and that we, the Government and civil service, were not talking
to anyone. I think what has emerged 18 months later is that we
have put more research into the public realm than possibly any
other Government; we have been open and transparent, not least
with the GM public debate process, in which this Committee took
a close interest and where we very much agreed that there were
lots of lessons to be learnt. To get a policy announced which
showed that we were basing our decision on sound science whilst
at the same time acknowledging public concerns and reflecting
what the regulatory structure was I think was quite a communications
achievement, given the degree of scepticism, given the degree
of hostility. It was a tricky, contentious issue, on which nonetheless
I think we did a lot to show that we were engaging people, that
we were listening, and yet taking a decision, in my view.
Q70 David Burnside: And failures?
Mr Hudson: There are various things
that I am working on and I do not want to sound as if there is
a lot to work on. I would not pick out a single failure as such.
Can I address it this way? If you ask about things on which we
are working, I think it is this whole area about how we are more
effective at influencing public behaviour on climate change and
waste and the area of how we can communicate more effectively
with farmers, even though obviously we have picked up that we
are improving our communications.
Q71 David Burnside: Can I just continue
with that? All right, there has been no major failure over the
last 12 months. There is some sign recently, frighteningly, about
a new brain disease in cattle—The Guardian
story—which hopefully will never take place and hopefully
we are not going to into another BSE or whatever it is called.
There is some criticism not only from The Guardian
but from The Times on the way you handled that in public
relations terms. I cannot predict what is going to happen but
you were criticised and not just from the source of the original
story. Have you learned any lessons from that?
Sir Brian Bender: May I respond?
When a case like this arises, and what happened was that an animal
that died on a farm in Cumbria last September was found at post
mortem to have a particular apparent infection, it is sent to
one of our VLA laboratories for testing. They then looked back
at previous cases they had had and they identified that over the
last 10 years there were 21 similar cases—20 in sheep, one
in cattle. They then did two things in parallel: they prepared
a letter to go to the Veterinary Record for publication
and they set up a meeting of an inter-departmental group called
the UK Zoonoses Group chaired under the Chief Medical Officer.
That met in April and its remit is to look at new, emerging or
potential animal diseases from a public health perspective. What
then happened was that a summary of the results of that meeting
was placed on the Department of Health website and on the Defra
website. With hindsight, it was a partial summary because it said
simply that members had been informed of this possible new and
emerging disease in cattle but it did not go on to say that the
Health Protection Agency had been asked to lead a precautionary
assessment on an urgent basis as to what the public health risk
might be, and it did not go on to say that a publication was being
prepared for the Veterinary Record, which has now appeared.
Are there lessons to be learned? Yes. I do not think it was put
into the public domain as smartly as it might have been or as
fully as it might have been. I think that is something we need
to look at with the Department of Health.
Q72 David Burnside: Staying on communications,
you spend a considerable and significant amount of money on publicity
campaigns, both above the line and below the line, on waste reduction,
whether it is recycling or reduction. Can you give us some sort
of feel for the success of these campaigns? How do you judge the
marketing, advertising and public relations activities, which
I believe have massively increased, against the end result on
recycling and waste reduction? Can you give us some judgment on
another great success within your Department?
Mr Hudson: I said there was work
to be done on waste. As a general point on campaigns, I would
say that we are a department that thinks quite carefully about
where we should spend money. We are well aware that there are
some public information campaigns where the information you convey
is something that people want to hear and they want to follow
up. The kinds of campaigns we are going to attempt to become involved
in will tend to take people out of their comfort zones. We are
very conscious as a department that often marketing alone will
not do the job. We have certainly had research carried out by
Green Alliance and DEMOS to suggest that we have to be very careful
not to assume that information leads to awareness or that awareness
leads to action. That is research we commissioned, which is very
much helping to shape how we think about campaigns.
Q73 David Burnside: If that is information
that does not lead to awareness and does not lead to action, what
are you carrying out the campaigns for?
Mr Hudson: If there is a connection,
then fine. An example of an effective campaign is Think
about drink driving which has a powerful communications message
and a powerful campaign around it but it is also linked with strict
law enforcement.
Q74 David Burnside: The police will prosecute
for that.
Mr Hudson: Yes. We take this very
seriously in government and in our communications thinking in
Defra and we need to evaluate just how effective these campaigns
are. We need to know that the money, if it was spent, would have
the right effect. On waste, it so happens that we are putting
money towards it. We are planning a local campaign and a national
campaign. We have assigned £10 million for a national campaign;
the remainder will support local authority campaigns. The public
awareness campaign will consist of two interlocking initiatives.
On the local side the "how to" of waste minimisation
will be aimed at local authorities and their communities, which
we will roll out later this year. The national campaign will be
the "why" of waste minimisation. We have already assigned
a budget for the national campaign that covers television advertising,
the press and awareness-raising events. As a general principle,
since you are digging at that, you can spend £100,000 well
on, say, "five a day", the campaign about eating fruit
and vegetables, because you have a really strong network and that
network is working with others to get the message across, or you
can spend in the order of £2-3 million on an effective television
campaign. Invariably those campaigns could cost as much as £7-8
million. Working Family Tax Credit cost about £16 million.
There are different ways in which to do this. We are well aware
that it is not just down to money; it is also to do with the networks
you work with and the interests of the media. I am very aware,
partly because of my background, of the degree to which television
now can deal with serious issues and yet link those with entertainment.
It could well be, particularly when we are targeting young people
who are very important in a lot of the issues we want to communicate,
that we will have to work more with the media which are doing
programmes on this and link into what they are doing and think
about how we respond to that and how we provide information around
it.
Q75 David Burnside: Why can you not get
Zak Goldsmith and the environmental lobby and the organic lobby
on-side? They are very sceptical of your Department and its performance
in relation to the future of farming in this country.
Mr Hudson: I think there was scepticism,
not least for the reasons that Sir Brian gave about when we started
as a department. Increasingly, thanks to the involvement of others
at summits and so on, people have seen that our own Secretary
of State is someone who gets the business done, is on top of the
brief and gets results, not least at the World Summit on Sustainable
Development in Johannesburg and on CAP reform in Luxembourg, which
all had a very important environmental dimension to them. I think
we are winning a lot of respect. We do see these groups perfectly
understandably as challenging us, keeping us on our toes. We cannot
always see eye-to-eye with them. Obviously their job is different
from ours. I do not know if I want them so much on-side that they
are silent. I think they perform a vital role. Equally, we have
to be seen to manage those expectations and put what they say
in some context.
Sir Brian Bender: I am not sure
if it is the goal of a pressure group to be satisfied with what
we are doing.
Q76 Joan Ruddock: Chairman, I am bound
to make a comment I think about the success of the GM strategy.
I can actually understand the claim you make. As a technical process
dealing with a very difficult situation, I can well understand
your self-congratulation and can approve of that but it was a
huge democratic failure and it needs to be recognised by the Department
at every point. Whether it was the public debate, the science
report, the economic report or the farm-scale trials, the whole
lot, there was no debate in Parliament. I know that is not a matter
for civil servants but it was huge democratic failure in that
sense. I am not asking for a response. I do want to ask about
the communications strategy and take you back to the fuel price
rises. That caused the greatest crisis that this Government has
had and there were demonstrations. We could have predicted that
at another time of difficulty, and again you could have predicted
that because of the Iraq war, this issue would surface again.
There was a huge need for public education between those two points.
I just wonder the extent to which you feel you have done anything
in that field and why there has not been a budget for television
advertising that links sustainability of this behaviour—waste,
transport and other things—to climate change. People do
feel strongly about climate change but there has not seemingly
been a way of connecting the behaviour of people with Government
aims, for which Government can take a lot of credit and that is
indeed very positive. Is there a bid in the CSR? Are we going
to get more money? Can we do more in this field? Do we want to
do more?
Sir Brian Bender: I do not think
I am going to predict what the results of the Spending Review
are. We have been spending a total of about £13 million on
climate-related communications, mainly looking at areas like energy
efficiency and renewables. We are also doing some work as part
of the national curriculum in science and geography and so we
are looking at younger people. We are also doing some work with
DTI, Carbon Trust, Energy Saving Trust, on public attitudes towards
climate change in the period ahead. The point you are making is
one we are looking at and trying to work on more. I am not sure
whether television advertising is the answer but we are doing
some work on how we do improve public opinion on these issues,
and that links in to the whole sustainable consumption and production
agenda and how you encourage people to consume sustainably.
Q77 Joan Ruddock: You cannot tell us
whether you have made a bid for more?
Sir Brian Bender: I can tell you
that Margaret Beckett wishes to spend more money in the years
ahead in areas around climate change, energy efficiency, fuel
poverty and so on. What I cannot say at the moment is what the
cake may look like and how it will be allocated.
Mr Hudson: It will definitely
have a communications dimension. We have already started talking,
not just with officials but with stakeholders. We have commissioned
some study by COI to help us form our view on that. Rest assured
that on climate change communications there is that work going
on but, as Brian says, we cannot quantify that at the moment.
Q78 Alan Simpson: I want to move on to
quality issues, but you must just allow me to follow Joan Ruddock
on the GM issue. As a communications success, I just want to congratulate
the Department on communicating a complete volte face in
its position as a consistent policy initiative. For the record,
I think this Committee needs to remind the Department that it
was seen as taking a remarkably laissez faire view of GM
crops in relation to their impact on agriculture and the environment
and that the Department and its Ministers have had to be dragged
kicking and screaming to an acknowledgment that you could not
give the technology away to consumers, let alone sell it. If that
is a success, you deserve all credit. I will leave it there. In
terms of the targets and air quality, one of the Committee's criticisms
of the Department over the years has been that whenever there
have been targets the Department's first move has been to try
and lower the bar. I just want to pick up on a couple of specifics
in relation to air quality. On page 50 of your report, you look
at the problems about emissions and particularly the problems
about nitrogen dioxide and particles, or particulates. It states:
". . . although the vast majority of the country will meet
those objectives, there will be some areas (mostly urban and roadside
locations) where, with present policies and technologies, it is
questionable whether the targets will be achieved by the relevant
dates." I found that astonishing because it is like saying:
we are meeting our air quality targets where there are no vehicles
but wherever there are vehicles we might not hit the targets.
I would like you to tell me, given that this is the area where
we are likely to see the generation of most nitrogen dioxide and
where particles are likely to occur in greater densities: what
are you doing to ensure that those are precisely the targets that
we hit?
Sir Brian Bender: May I pick up
part of your point which you slightly threw away? We are on course
for the majority of the individual components of the air quality
targets. It is the two or three you identified where there is
a problem. In most cases, although in ozone there is also a problem
in some rural areas, as the report says and as you quoted, the
problem is at roadside. Point one, as I think the report says,
is that we need to do more to achieve the nitrogen dioxide, ozone
and particles targets. What are we doing? The first thing is that
local authorities have been asked to develop air quality action
plans for local air quality hot spots. There is a dialogue between
the Department and local authorities about that. Local traffic
management plans can play a powerful role and in London there
is obviously the Mayor's own plan. Secondly, the Department for
Transport are looking again over the summer at the 10-year plan
and air quality will have its role in that. There is a discussion
to be had and it is being had with the Department for Transport
about that. This is a target that they jointly own. Thirdly, at
European level there are issues around reduction of vehicle emissions
with future design and indeed combustion plan emissions, which
is of course separate from traffic. There is a series of actions.
We do have to do more. I do not see any sign of anyone looking
to relax the targets.
Q79 Alan Simpson: May I follow that up
specifically? Of the 63 local authorities that have action plans
and 120 that have defined their own air quality management areas,
can the Committee just be quite clear that your guidance notes
are about meeting the targets and not getting close or redefining
the targets?
Sir Brian Bender: I think I had
better come back to you on that. You are asking a very precise
question that I am not able to answer, but I will.
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