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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1225 - i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE environment, food and rural affairs committee (sub-committee on the government's rural delivery strategy)
The Government's Rural Delivery Strategy
Tuesday 2 November 2004 PROFESSOR NEIL WARD and MR TERRY CARROLL MR TIM ROLLINSON, MR PAUL HILL-TOUT, BARONESS YOUNG OF OLD SCONE and MS MARIAN SPAIN MR DAVID MARLOW, MS JUDITH BARKER and DR RICHARD HUTCHINS MR MEURIG RAYMOND, MR ANDREW OPIE, DR ANDREW CLARK, SIR HENRY AUBREY-FLETCHER and MR NICK WAY Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 112
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee (Sub-Committee on the Government's Rural Delivery Strategy) on Tuesday 2 November 2004 Members present Paddy Tipping, in the Chair Mr Colin Breed Mr David Drew Mr Michael Jack David Taylor ________________ Memorandum submitted by the Centre for Rural Economy, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Professor Neil Ward, Director, and Mr Terry Carroll, Visiting Fellow, Centre for Rural Economy, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, examined. Q1 Chairman: Can I welcome everybody to this first session. It is basically to look at arrangements post-Haskins Review. We are very pleased that the Centre for Rural Economy has been able to join us; Professor Neil Ward, Director, and Terry Carroll, researcher. I am grateful to both of you for your evidence. I got the impression that you were not very enamoured with the Haskins Review and you felt that there was far too much focus on agriculture and not enough on rural policy? Professor Ward: Yes. I think it is fair to say that we welcomed the fact that there was a review going on and certainly recognised that there was a need for a review. There was a lot of complexity in the system, but it took nearly three years from the start of the review process to where we are now and I think we felt disappointed with how far we had got. It still feels a little bit like work in progress. There are unresolved issues, and perhaps there is a sense that the farming and land management side is further advanced than the rest of it. When it comes to rural affairs, there are more questions raised than answers given. Q2 Chairman: Would you like to complete the picture, "this is work in progress"? If you were composing an old master, what else would you add in? Professor Ward: The Rural Strategy is called the "Rural Strategy". I think we would want to argue that it is not a strategy, it is a set of institutional changes and it is not really very rural. There are big questions in terms of the rural affairs and the rural agenda. It is quite a step forward, I think, for the Government to set out its priorities under these three headings: economic and social regeneration, social justice for all and enhancing the value of the environment. It is interesting that in two of those, social is mentioned. Yet, when it comes to the mechanics and the nuts and bolts of the rural delivery - the delivery end - there is a silence in terms of how delivery might work. I think one of the arguments that we wanted to make in our memorandum was that this is a set of reforms from the perspective of the centre. It talks a lot about the need for decentralisation and devolution, yet, when it comes to an analysis of what works locally and the strengths and weaknesses of different types of delivery models, there is a silence. Q3 Mr Drew: You also had a go at Haskins's confusing misunderstanding of decentralisation. Can you define what you mean by decentralisation? Professor Ward: When you look at a decentralised approach, you would ask who are the people at local level that should have discretion and a greater role in rural delivery. At other local levels, local authorities are quite important; in local rural development and in local delivery. So, at a more decentralised approach, you would expect some discussion of what the role for local authorities might be. There is very little in the Rural Strategy on what local authorities might do in terms of rural delivery. Q4 Mr Drew: Is not part of the problem this misconception that there is this homogeneity in rural England? In fact, rural England in many places is dysfunctional; there are lots of conflicts, there are lots of groups who have little time for one another and that makes it very difficult to have some form of holistic rural policy. What you end up with, if you decentralise, is a whole series of variegated policies, is that true? Professor Ward: Yes. I think part of the problem over the last 40 to 50 years has been an over-emphasis on a National Framework for Rural Policy. One of the success stories, if you like, in rural affairs over the last five or six years has been the recognition that that is a problem and we need a more differentiated approach, that this entity of rural England or "the countryside" is nonsense, and anything that unites rural Surrey with rural Northumberland under the category "rural" is far outweighed by all of the differences between those two places that come from that and social and the economic structures. Q5 Mr Breed: Over a period of time now the Government has followed a sort of strategy in lots of areas of separating policy, which governments do, and delivery, which others do, sometimes departmentally and sometimes agency. Therefore, it is no great surprise that Haskins has followed through on that sort of idea and has made quite a great play for the need to separate the policy aspects of what we are trying to achieve and the delivery aspects. It seems that you have been, I suppose, critical of that in a way and you are suggesting that it is a lot more complex than that, and it is a rather simplistic way of looking at the way in which Rural Strategy can be developed. Can you tell us what specific adverse effects you believe would arise from that very clear agenda to separate policy from delivery in this particular context? Professor Ward: It is a clear agenda in the sense that it was the centre-piece of Lord Haskins's analysis, separating policy and delivery. I noticed that when he is questioned about that and talks about it, he often refers to Northern Foods and the way he ran Northern Foods. My argument would be that running Her Majesty's Government is a different kind of entity from running Northern Foods. There are all sorts of other factors that have to be taken into account when running public policy compared to a private corporation. I feel that policy and delivery cannot be easily separated; it is much more a spectrum of activities. If you look at the development of agri-environment policy in the UK over the last twenty years, a lot of that has been through piloting and experimentation. Policy and delivery are all tangled up together. The work of the Countryside Commission in developing things like the forerunner to the Countryside Stewardship Scheme was an experimental exercise and was part of policy and delivery all tangled up together. It was tested and rolled out to become an industry, a sort of centre-piece of the British approach and it influenced wider European agendas. To separate policy from delivery, and then couple that with a silence on the role of local government and local authorities, I think, really risks falling into a trap of policy being sorted out centrally and delivery being done in regions and local areas. When you come to our region in the North East, and look at the organisations that are responsible for delivering on rural development, you will see that they want to have a policy role as well and local authorities have policies. Q6 Mr Breed: We are not confusing policy with strategy, are we? They are rather different. Professor Ward: You have policies for regions and you have policies for local authorities. The danger of having a silence, in terms of the role of local agencies and local authorities as there is in the Rural Strategy, is that people begin to talk in terms of policies as a central thing and delivery takes place outside of that. Q7 Mr Breed: Providing the people, who are going to be charged with the carrying out of the delivery, have at least some involvement in the policy, what would really be a negative effect of having a clearer separation? It seems to me that, in fact, it could have quite a lot of benefits so that people know exactly what the policy is, and then, the people who have got to deliver it, who hopefully have been involved in the policy, have a very clear idea of their role. Otherwise, you will have a rather confused position. How can we get clarity if we role them in together? Professor Ward: I think Lord Haskins's objection, when he drew on examples to illustrate this problem, talked very much about the Countryside Agency having a national policy role and them being responsible for programmes that he delivered. He was concerned about a single organisation having responsibility for evaluating its own programmes. That is the main example that he draws on to press the case for separating policy and delivery. I think you could separate those functions without assigning some institutions with a policy role and other institutions with a delivery role. I do not see a difficulty in having local authorities having policy and delivery roles. Q8 Mr Breed: Do you see that policy could suffer if it is distanced entirely from delivery? Professor Ward: Yes, because I think there is quite an important relationship between policy and delivery. Q9 Mr Breed: Only if it is going wrong? Professor Ward: Yes. There is both positive and negative feedback to it really. Q10 Mr Breed: In other words, a policy might be laid down, the people and the agency do their very best to deliver it, but unfortunately, it cannot be delivered for whatever reason and therefore a viable policy has to change in order to achieve that. Can that not happen anyway even if there is a clear separation? Professor Ward: I think there are benefits in having policy. The risk with this argument in a Rural Strategy is that particular bodies become solely responsible for policy and other bodies become solely responsible for delivery. In a strategy, you have this very limited discussion about the role of local agencies in rural development and rural affairs and the risk is that that policy role is going to be marginalised. Q11 Mr Jack: In your evidence, in paragraph 4.6, you said: "The Rural Strategy gives us institutional change, when what is really needed is a clear strategy to cope with these major policy agendas". Can you spell out in more detail what you meant by that sentence? Professor Ward: I think that was partly a frustration that this is called a Rural Strategy, yet it is mainly about reorganising institutions. There are really big agendas that pose very big challenges, I think, in the rural way; whether it be on development of agri-environment schemes and CAP reform; whether it be how to manage the interface between land management and water protection and the way that the Water Framework Directive, over the next ten years, is going to pose really big challenges for land management. Also, I think, on the rural, social and economic development side, and in the context of regional development and things like the Northern Way Initiative in the north and city regions, there are big questions on how rural communities and rural economies are going to fit in with these rather dominant urban and regional development strategies and, that a set of tinkering about reforms with institutions does not instil confidence in the ability to face these big challenges. Yesterday, I was at a workshop where some Environment Agency research was presented where some modeling had been done. It was suggested that in order to meet the Water Framework Directive in certain catchments in the East of England, you might need to take 50 to 60 per cent of arable land into new types of land uses in order to meet the objectives of the Water Framework Directive. That is a huge challenge, and I think there are other ones in the rural economy and in rural social exclusion type issues as well that require big policy strategies. This is not really a Rural Strategy in that sense, whether it is a clear vision of how those objectives are going to be met. Q12 Mr Jack: In terms of the lines of accountability, I tried to draw a diagram of what this change meant and I found it very difficult. What I ended up with was, on the outside of the policy, Government Offices and the Regional Rural Affairs Forum, and it talks in a way that somehow these bodies are going to improve accountability in the relationship between the rural economy and the rural environment and then setting policy. It does not really smack of the real world to my way of thinking. Professor Ward: There is a lot of faith put in place here at the regional level, that things will have to get sorted out at the regional level and these Regional Rural Delivery Frameworks, which I think are animating a lot of activity at regional level, are working out how those things are going to be developed and how things are going to work differently in regions. We have been doing some work in the North East, looking at who is responsible for what and how changes can be accommodated. The land management and environmental side of things will be the responsibility of the new Integrated Agency. Some socio-economic programmes will be the responsibility of the Regional Development Agencies, and some activities will be the responsibility of the Government Offices, particularly on the community development side. So, you have the three pillars of sustainable development: social community, environment and economy and it is three different organisations that are responsible for this area of activity. A lot of faith is then placed in frameworks that will bring that all together and get it working in synergy. I think there are big questions there about the capacity to put these frameworks together and about the accountability structures that surround them as well. Q13 Mr Jack: I get the impression you are saying to us that really this is a bit of a mess, in the sense there is not a clear strategy, because you said so, and the organisational framework which has been devised does not actually join together terribly well. I am thinking of the North East and the fact that a lot of your rural economy has a relationship with the Forestry Commission - the Forestry Commission give up some of their powers to Defra but on the other hand they have ended up being a free-standing body with forestry management issues, yet if we look at the rural communities of Northumberland what happens in those forests is very central to the well-being of those communities and the Regional Development Agencies have no input into that whatsoever. That is why I find it difficult to make my diagram work. Professor Ward: That is why there is a sensible thing called work-in-progress; unfinished business really. It is a set of institutional reforms and it does not look particularly tidy as a set of institutional reforms, some things were included in the Haskins Review and some things were not, and there is not a clear justification for what was in and what was not in. Q14 Mr Jack: Have you worked out what your clean sheet of paper would have on it if you were redesigning it, if you were given the sole task to produce a new way of dealing with all the issues of rural Britain which was coherent and met your critique of this proposal? Professor Ward: That is a good question. We do not start with a clean sheet of paper, of course, because there are a whole load of institutions which are at work at the moment. One of the problems is that their work is being hampered now by the impending reforms and people are unclear as to what is likely to happen. Certainly this question of co-ordination at the regional level seems for us to be quite central, and the accountability as well about how different stakeholders can be brought in. At the moment you have these Regional Rural Affairs Fora and there is quite a lot of faith put in those as a sort of mechanism by which messages can be communicated up and down. In the North East, our Regional Rural Affairs Forum has a secretariat which is one-eighth of one person, that is the kind of capacity for running the Regional Rural Affairs Forum. Q15 Mr Jack: Who is on it? Mr Carroll: It is a combination of the usual public sector agencies with a rural development remit, but then they also try to attract the representatives of rural business, community groups, environmental groups, but increasingly I think those individuals felt it not very worthwhile to attend, they did not think it was a very productive use of their time. Q16 Mr Jack: So we have a defunct body informing the policy, and a policy which does not stick together very well and a policy which is not very well supported and a policy which people do not turn up to support. It does not smack of a meaningful use of time, as you are saying. Professor Ward: This is our point about the reform from the perspective of the centre. The Haskins Review was about rural delivery but we would have liked to have seen a much more detailed analysis of the local and regional levels and how organisations can ideally work together to deliver, and at the moment the strategy deals much more perspective on that from far away, from the centre. Q17 Chairman: Remind me, who is the secretariat to the Regional Rural Affairs Forum? Is it the Government Office? Mr Carroll: It has been the Countryside Agency but that is now passing to the Government Office. Q18 Chairman: Who is going to set the agenda and drive that forward? Professor Ward: It depends on how the development of these Regional Rural Delivery Frameworks gather pace and whether people feel there is a sort of strong strategy and vision behind that and how the different interests come together. For that to succeed it really does require those Fora to work properly and for people to feel it is worthwhile getting involved and that things can be adequately shaped at the regional level, and there is some way to go on that. Mr Carroll: One of our criticisms is that at the regional level the agencies responsible for these three pillars of sustainable rural development, environmental unity and the economy, are all in separate silos. The Rural Affairs Forum and the Rural Action Plan we have in the North East have to be the level at which all of that is put back together again, and we think that is extremely important. The North East Rural Affairs Forum, in our experience, is engaged but it is a kind of talking-shop and that is how it has been criticised. In our suggestions for the Rural Delivery Framework which we have been asked to help with, we suggested that the Rural Action Plan should be the responsibility of the new integrated agency, the Government Office, and the RDA; they have to produce their Rural Action Plan and to say what they are going to do with these three new simplified funding streams. They have to tell us how they are going to spend all of that resource. The Rural Affairs Forum, with its independent chairman, we think has to be in the role of scrutinising that. Those three organisations - in Haskins's terminology "the priorities board" - have to present their plan of action year on year to the Rural Affairs Forum, which scrutinises it and holds them to account. We think the chairman of that group should have some research capacity, some wherewithal in order to be able to drill down and see whether these three Government agencies are delivering the goods. Q19 Chairman: Let us just take one of them, the RDAs, and Professor Ward spoke about the RDAs earlier on. Are they up to the job? Some of them are heavily criticised for being into urban policy rather than rural policy. Professor Ward: On balance, over the last five or six years they have been going, I think they have become increasingly sophisticated in their approach to the rural agenda, and partly that was the safeguards in the legislation about having a rural board member and paying due regard to the rural areas. I think you probably could make the argument for some regions that the rural side of things has been given more consideration than otherwise it would have done without those safeguards. It is difficult to generalise because they are in different regions and they have different types of approaches, they are different organisational structures within the RDAs, and they have different approaches to accommodate "rural". Some of them have a separate chapter in the strategy, others have rural sub-themes which run through everything. I think it would be too simplistic to dismiss them all as urban dominated; they did quite well in the foot-and-mouth crisis, for example, and responded quite rapidly. Q20 Chairman: Let us turn to a big player. This new integrated land management agency is going to look after the environment, and you were giving us an example about diffuse water pollution run-off from farms. The EA is going to be a big player in this, so is the integrated land management agency, so is the policy coming from Europe. There seems to be an awful lot happening in this area. How are you going to link it together and make it happen? Are we clear about the boundaries? Professor Ward: I am personally not clear about the boundaries and I do not understand why some things were included in the Haskins Rural Delivery Review and others were not, and the interface between land and water is a really big issue. I did a big study in 1989-1993 on diffuse agricultural pollution from Newcastle University, and then I was studying CAP Reform and other things for about ten years and just recently I have returned to diffuse agricultural pollution, and I have been quite shocked by how little has changed in that ten years. We have to talk about the Water Framework Directive but there is a sort of sense of there being not a strong momentum on the policy issue of dealing with diffuse pollution issues from rural land management. In the development of agri-environment policy, which has come on in leaps and bounds in that ten year period, that land and water interface has not been one where there has been a lot of progress made - I am sure examples can be pointed to where things might have changed, I do not know - and you sort of sense that has been a bit of a blind spot in agri-environment policy. With the new Integrated Agency and the Environment Agency, the relationship between those two institutions is going to be crucially important, and some of those challenges in meeting water quality objectives, which will inevitably require new land management practices, a whole shift in land-use, are really big. From reading the Rural Strategy, we do not really get a sense of how that kind of scale of challenges is going to be met through these kind of changes. Q21 Chairman: That has got us off to a good start. Mr Jack used the phrase earlier, "blank sheet of paper", and I was asking you to compose an old master, when you are on your way back to the North East and you have had time to reflect on this, would you like to try and draw us a little diagram of what would be the effective way of delivering policy and, secondly, the point of the policy practice recirculation because they do inform each other, do they not? Professor Ward: This is without any sense of there being institutions already at play, because obviously that is a restraint on how you perform? Q22 Chairman: Yes. Professor Ward: In an ideal world. Mr Carroll: And that is covering the social and economic end of land management? Q23 Chairman: Will you do that for us? Professor Ward: Yes. Q24 Mr Jack: Perhaps you might just pen, if not in detail, a line or two as to what the strategy should be? You were critical in your opening phrases in replying to colleagues' questions about the lack of a strategy in your judgment, and what you talked about was a series of ill-thought-out managerial changes. In the context of having a proper strategy, in the context of what the Government has brought forward - and they have dismantled various bits of the current institutional framework and reblended them together, some bits have gone into the Integrated Agency and other bits stand by themselves - they have taken some of the existing architecture and repositioned it, but your model might rub that out and create something new. If there is an alternative, we would like to know what it is, but in the context of the strategy which you say is missing from this approach. Professor Ward: I am happy to do that. Q25 Chairman: So two papers there. Thank you very much indeed, thank you for getting us off to a good start. Professor Ward: Thank you very much. Memoranda submitted by the Forestry Commission and the Environment Agency Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Tim Rollinson, Director General, Mr Paul Hill-Tout, Director for England, Forestry Commission, Baroness Young of Old Scone, a Member of the House of Lords, Chief Executive, and Ms Marian Spain, Head of Strategic Development, Environment Agency, examined. Q26 Chairman: Can we welcome some old friends back to the Committee, Baroness Young and Marian Spain from the Environment Agency, and Tim Rollinson and Paul Hill-Tout from the Forestry Commission. Perhaps I will start with the Forestry Commission because you must have followed this saga fairly closely. My impression was that Haskins in his original work wanted to put your delivery functions into the new Integrated Agency, but at the end of the day that was not agreed. Can you tell me the arguments around this and why we have ended up where we are? Mr Rollinson: Can I pick up a couple of points which were made in the earlier evidence, because I think there is an interesting issue here about the balance between distinctiveness and clarity of roles of organisations and structures, and integration across either strategic areas or delivery areas. If I play back slightly the feature of two recent reviews of the Forestry Commission, Haskins and, before that, the Forestry Devolution Review, the crucial questions in both of those were seen to be whether there should be full integration of forestry within wider rural affairs responsibilities, or whether its distinctive profile should be retained for forestry within Government. So in the review of the Forestry Commission in the context of political devolution in 2002, the Government took a view, and indeed the devolved administrations did as well, that maintaining that distinctive profile for forestry was important, but it was always a fine balance. I think it remains so. Indeed the arguments were again finely balanced when we were looking at the recommendations from Lord Haskins, who was suggesting, and indeed believed there was a good case for, integrating the Forestry Commission into the new Agency. But against that the other argument was the same one, "Do you want to retain a distinctive profile for forestry and the expertise and skills which go with it", and at the end of the day the Government has chosen not to integrate the Forestry Commission into the new Agency. So these arguments are actually quite finely balanced, but I do believe that it is very important indeed that whichever way you go you retain clarity, and also a degree of distinctiveness, so you do not lose the expertise and the skills which are around in the organisational structures which exist irrespective, if you like, of how you then move them around and reorganise them. Q27 Chairman: So the decision has been made and it was a finely balanced decision. How are you going to work alongside the new agency and how are you going to be aligned? What is the nature of the relationship? Mr Rollinson: Let me just remind you and then ask Paul to say a few words about the detail. Under the new relationship, or the new way in which we are working with the Agency, it was agreed that forestry policy would be removed from the Forestry Commission into Defra. I actually think that is a fairly sensible thing, I do think that is a good move. It will allow forestry policy to be more integrated across other Whitehall policies; I do think that is going to be an advantage. Where I think Haskins has been very useful for us in the Forestry Commission is in focusing on delivery. It has actually reminded us as a Forestry Commission that we are what it says on the can, if you like, that we are actually a delivery body. The key function we do is managing big forest estates, we do a lot of other things as well but we are essentially a delivery body and Haskins has been helpful in reminding us of that. Perhaps Paul can say something about how we expect that move to work out in practice. Mr Hill-Tout: Of course it is early days at the present time, because in order to be an aligned partner we need to have a partner to work with, and of course the Integrated Agency is evolving through its constituent bodies over the next few years. We have these three main delivery functions, first of all, grants for creating and managing woodlands; secondly, the regulation of tree felling; and our largest single function, which was not addressed in the Rural Strategy at all, which is the management of the public forest estate, is the single largest delivery vehicle that the Government has for direct action. I would like to illustrate a couple of the approaches we are taking at the moment, and the ideas which are under way. Firstly, on the question of grants, we are introducing a new English woodlands grant scheme next year, and we have developed that alongside work in Defra and the RDS on the agri-environment scheme, so as much as possible they have reasonably consistent values and approaches to work taking place. So that is the foundation laid for next year. As regards IT and business systems developments for the interface with customers, we have been developing our Glade electronic contract management system alongside the Genesis developments within Defra, so we have the basic software capability to be interoperable to the extent and degree which is decided over the next few years. Thus we are developing the capability that we could have one shared web interface with customers as and when those decisions are taken. On the regulation of tree felling, as an example of the new approach, one of our roles in licensing tree felling is to enable a smooth land-use change if, for example, it is decided it is in the public interest to restore land back to heathland from trees. We can see there are real advantages to joining up our felling licence regulation arrangements with a new agri-environment arrangement, so there is a smooth handover in the land-use change, and arrangements for sustainably delivering those public benefits in the long-term. Finally on the public estate, although that has not been addressed in the Rural Strategy at all, we believe we have a great deal to bring to the table. With a quarter of a million hectares over the whole of England, the largest single vehicle the Government has available for delivering directly, we see there is a real role there for being an exemplar of sustainable land management, an exemplar of the provision of access and recreation facilities, and, for example, in the management of SSSIs, but also we have hundreds of individual woods, and it gives us a real opportunity to work as a catalyst, sharing experiences and supporting other landowners working on issues which can only be tackled on a landscape scale, things like biodiversity and larger strategies on recreational access. Q28 Chairman: That is all important and I buy all of that, but I am not clear how the linkage is going to occur. Let me give you an example: you have a fine man who works in the Government Office of the East Midlands, Austin Brady, who is involved in a whole range of things, with this new agency set up how are you going to ensure that the Integrated Agency and the Government Office of the East Midlands and your activities actually link together? What is the mechanism for making that happen? Mr Hill-Tout: I think the key vehicle we see there to take these broader principles forward at a local level is the work we already have in train, which is the development of regional forestry frameworks. By the spring of next year, we will have regional forest frameworks in place for all nine regions including London. These are owned, led, by Government Offices in the RDAs, and they will be a recognised part of the regional frameworks and their spatial strategies, and, picking up the point of discussion earlier, they are going to be radically different. For example, in the North East and the South West the emerging themes are very strong on rural development and the economic role of forestry, but the one which has just been published in South East England is very strong on the role of woodlands in conserving high quality environments and providing recreational access opportunities and interest in forestry and its skills in terms of maintaining forest and woodlands in appropriate conditions to deliver those objectives. So we will create at a regional level a clear understanding of exactly the role that woodlands and forestry should serve in each part of the country, as a kind of Jacob's cloak of many colours, a distinctive understanding of our roles and therefore we will adapt accordingly. Through the initial woodland grant scheme we are introducing regional flexibility, which will enable us to shift the emphasis to the different priorities within the national framework as the regional forestry framework governs. Q29 Mr Jack: In the Defra publication, it lays out these proposals and they say, "Defra will assume full responsibility for rural and environmental policy functions including the policy functions of the Forestry Commission." You have just described a whole series of areas which are covered by paragraph 8 of the evidence which you gave to the Committee. Can you spell out what are the policy strands which Defra are going to take from you? Mr Rollinson: The phrase we have been using with Defra in terms of the transfer is "strategic policy". Q30 Mr Jack: What is it? Mr Rollinson: We have an England forestry strategy which was prepared and published about seven years ago. That was prepared by the Forestry Commission - I actually was the lead author of that one some years ago - and that was prepared by an interdepartmental team which brought together a whole range of government departments but was chaired and led by the Forestry Commission. In future, we would expect preparation of the England Forestry Strategy to be led by Defra. That is a practical example. Q31 Mr Jack: What is the gain? Mr Rollinson: Can I use personal experience of dealing with old MAFF? The Forestry Commission and MAFF from years and years gone by were essentially government departments which were responsible for different land-uses and they were competing land-uses and they were constantly at loggerheads. When we wanted to try to integrate forestry policies into wider land-use policies we could not do it, we could not talk to MAFF, and MAFF could not talk to us; there was such a difference of culture, a difference of views, and we were still acting as if we were competing land-uses. So we could not get forestry policies plugged into wider land-use policies, and that is not good. It is not good for the forestry but it is certainly not good for Government and not good for landowners. So the advantage is that Defra will be able to take a much wider view of the land-use policy, including forestry, without forestry somehow being over here or sidelined or in another box of its own. Q32 Mr Jack: In terms of Defra's organisation, where will the Forestry Commission sit? Will you be on the Defra board, will you be on the policy board which determines what the new strategy is going to be? Where are you plugged in? Mr Rollinson: The new arrangements have not yet been completely worked out, but we are plugged into the Defra policy group, so we would be expecting and indeed insisting that their policy was very closely informed by the delivery that we are carrying out. Indeed that has started to happen. Q33 Mr Jack: Where will they get their expertise from? Mr Rollinson: They will essentially call on the expertise of the Forestry Commission; expertise in delivery. Q34 Mr Jack: So they are going to ask you to do what you are doing but then take responsibility for it? Mr Rollinson: No, they are going to try to look at wider land-use policy issues and say, "Where does forestry fit into that"? They will be able to do that because they are plugged into a much wider land-use policy framework than we could ever be plugged into, and when they want specific advice on forestry implications in particular we would expect them to be talking to us and coming to us for that advice. Q35 Mr Jack: Where does the commercial accountability then lie in terms of the Forestry Commission? You carry out a whole range of very practical functions, you have to raise your own money, you sell your products, but the decision-making in future on the policy which will determine the strategy you will follow is not going to be of your making. So if you run into problems, who is responsible? Mr Rollinson: In terms of strict accountability, the Forestry Commission will remain accountable for the functions it is responsible for. Q36 Mr Jack: Notwithstanding the fact that the responsibility for the policy on the use of the land for which you have stewardship is going to be taken out of your hands? Mr Rollinson: I do not think it is going to happen like that. I do not think it will suddenly suck away all our responsibilities, we will work with Defra and they are going to say to us, "Well, you have a forest estate, against the backdrop of wider land-use changes we would expect that forest estate to be used in different ways", and we would have a dialogue with them and say, "We are not sure you are entirely right, we are not sure you understand all the issues", or we might be saying, "Actually, you have a good point there, that is not something we were as well aware of as we should have been and we will adapt our management accordingly." I do not see a reason why there should be a clash. Q37 Mr Breed: Our questions so far have given you a flavour of the areas we are looking at and I am going to turn now to the Environment Agency, because they have been getting off quite lightly up to now. We have talked about distinctiveness and clarity and everybody understanding where they are, but we need to be sure that the boundaries of responsibility for that have been very clearly drawn, they are clarified and are very obvious. Part of the problem with the Countryside Agency and Defra is that it all became rather blurred. Are you happy that the boundaries have been properly defined in the Government's Rural Strategy between the Environment Agency and the Integrated Agency? Baroness Young of Old Scone: I think we are pretty clear what we are going to do and we are pretty clear what they are going to do, but there is quite a lot of work being done at the moment to try and work that through in any future Bill and to get that codified, as it were, and written down and agreed. I think there is a potential for confusion. For example, if we are all to do with air, land and water, the primary role of the Environment Agency is the protection of air, land and water, and the new land management agency, the Integrated Agency, will have a clear role in air, land and water, but it must not be its primary role, its primary role is bio-diversity, landscape, access, recreation. Our primary role is air, land and water. We will work very closely together because without clean air, land or water they cannot have decent bio-diversity, access, landscape and recreation. We, likewise, have got a responsibility for things that the Integrated Agency delivers, in that we have to give them the building blocks of clean air, land and water. I hope that has not confused you completely. I think there is a clarity and it is there to be got, but it needs to be written down very carefully otherwise we could tread on each other's corns. Q38 Mr Breed: Is it most appropriate for that to be done through the governmental process, or do you think it is better done by some sort of memorandum of understanding between the agencies themselves which can be worked through in a rather more integrated way? Baroness Young of Old Scone: I think it needs to be done in both ways. I think the statutory descriptions need to be pretty clear and distinctive, because that is the start point, but then the fine grain of it and how it is going to work nationally, regionally and locally will have to be worked out between the two agencies, as is appropriate for delivery agencies working out their own modus operandi together. That will include things like a memorandum of understanding, joint action plans, shared objectives and targets, shared programmes, things like the work we will inevitably have to do led by the agency around the catchment for the Water Framework Directive, the work the Integrated Agency will be doing in leading on agricultural incentives, but people need the agricultural incentives to deliver for air, land and water, so we will need to have a strong role in installing those and in decisions about work priorities and delivering at local level. So it is going to be a very rich relationship. Q39 Mr Breed: That is one way of putting it. What you would agree with is that you need some formal relationship, if you like, underneath the statutory responsibilities, so it is very clear on the ground whether the sort of issues which are going to become part of our postbag as such will be EA responsibilities or Integrated Agency responsibilities? Baroness Young of Old Scone: I certainly think there needs to be a worked-through clarity both in national terms and in regional and local terms. So if it was coming through the MP postbag test, I hope it would be reasonably clear who had responsibility for the particular issue, but there might well have been a collaborative process, not only between ourselves and the Integrated Agency but also the Forestry Commission and also local authorities. For example, the Water Framework Directive envisages anywhere in the region of 30-odd bodies around the catchment being involved in reaching decisions about priorities and programmes of action, and then there would be a clear allocation of responsibilities for who was going to do what within those programmes of action. Q40 Mr Breed: In this wonderful nirvana of everybody working together for the public good and all getting on with it and everything else, there is a potential - and we see it in other areas - for when the budget head for instance becomes an important thing this group's responsibility suddenly happens to be that group's responsibility, because essentially everybody is protecting the bit of money they have got. As I say, we can all hope it is going to work together but when push comes to shove there are targets to be met and budgets to be met and everything else, and there is this tendency, when you have lots of people who are jointly responsible, for everybody to say, "It is not mine, it is theirs" and we find ourselves orienteering around various departments and agencies, none of whom are actually saying that it is their responsibility. Baroness Young of Old Scone: I do not think the new arrangements will be markedly different from the current set of responsibilities, where there are quite often issues where a large number of people are responsible and have to work collaboratively. I hope the new arrangements will be slightly clearer because we have the opportunity to design them from scratch. The only really big slab of money which is moving around in this is the Rural Development Fund and, we make no bones about it, we would prefer it if Haskins had given us that money because we believe some of the priorities in the future for agri-environmental funding are very much going to be in the air, land and water areas, protecting the basic building blocks of the environment and of the economic wealth and social justice. In the past, the primary focus of the agri-environment schemes has always been access rather than the landscape, so it is slightly bizarre to give away a slab of money considering it is a body which will have traditional responsibilities for which that funding operated, but nevertheless would not have responsibilities for the new objectives which we want to see agri-environment money focused on in the future. Mr Breed: The use of money is an area which would be very ripe for some sort of memorandum of understanding. Chairman: On that note, we are going to adjourn to vote for a minute. You have certainly wound us up to come back with renewed vigour to talk about that. The Committee suspended from 3.53 pm to 4.07 pm for a division in the House Q41 Chairman: You left us with the provocative thought that you could spend the agri-environmental money a lot better than anybody else. You did not quite say that but --- Baroness Young of Old Scone: Not "a lot better than anybody else" but as well as. Q42 Chairman: You could do things with it. What I want to do is change focus a little, because we have talked about a draft Bill being available in the New Year and perhaps you could sketch us in on that. Secondly, you described the set of relationships as "rich relationships", and this is a changing canvas as we speak because my impression is of staff and work groups being moved around. Maybe both bodies could talk about the actual nuts and bolts of moving to change. I think it is quite hard to move to change when you are not - and I certainly am not - entirely clear what the final target is, so that makes management quite difficult. We will start with you, Barbara, and then go to Tim. Baroness Young of Old Scone: Clearly the Bill is for Defra and, though discussions are beginning on how you define the roles and responsibilities of the Integrated Agency and also other mechanisms and other bits of stuff which need to be in the Bill, we are not wholly involved in that because we are not one of the agencies which have been rolled in. However, we do have a very real interest in making sure there is a distinctiveness about the Integrated Agency's role so it does not collide with ours, and also so that built into the Bill there are statutory mechanisms for making sure (a) it takes account of sustainable development and (b) it has a statutory duty to work with the Environment Agency on those things we do need to work together on. In terms of change, I am a bit nihilist about change, I always think structural change is the last refuge when you cannot think of anything else to do. The important thing as far as we are concerned on the Integrated Agency is to make sure we continue to focus on environmental outcomes. The important thing really is that we get through all the routine stuff of making structural and organisation change happen as quickly as possible in the most simple way, and then get down to the real work which is really going to resolve the issues, which is how are we going to frame joint environmental objectives, how are we going to be targeted as agencies which work together, and how we are going to make sure at national, regional and local level there is a clarity about these objectives, that all who have to deliver them are part of that partnership and that we have some clear action plans for making that happen on the ground, and that particularly we have got some very good relationships with the farming and land management community. At the moment, we have some pilots operating with the RDS, English Nature and the Countryside Agency, working with groups of farmers around catchments in ways that will mirror the future joint working of the Integrated Agency with the Environment Agency, very much focusing on what are the things which need to be delivered in these catchments to improve the environment and what are the actions which need to happen. So let us get through the organisational crud and on to the practical stuff as quickly as possible. Mr Rollinson: I would echo what Barbara said and refer you to what we said in our evidence. The really practical things which matter are going to come out later in the process, because we are having to go through the legislative part of this which is very taxing and complicated. What we are trying to do within the Forestry Commission is to ensure people understand what our distinctive role is while trying to ensure it is complementary; that we focus very much on the needs of the public and the other customers we have, whether they are landowners or people who use our forests, and we see them as very important. We know they value the services we provide, we want to ensure there is still a strong focus on them. As we work our way through, looking at paragraph 11(f), we talk about "Shared Services". These are the really practical things but they will come a little further down the track when we start to see the shape of the new agency in its own right; how are we going to work to develop truly shared services, where we are going to start looking at maybe co-locating our staff with those in the Agency, we are going to start to set up "first stop shops" where that is appropriate, but we are still a little bit down the track from being able to have that real discussion until we know much more about the shape of the agency. Mr Jack: You both sound like people who, from the point of view of public consumption, want to say nice things about this policy which is being dropped on you by the Government, and yet, Barbara, you are going on about the list of things which need to be worked out and the strategies which have to be sorted out and the practical relationships. It all sounds to me as if somebody has published the marriage contract without the two people actually having fallen in love with each other. There is a great sense of unfinished, undeveloped business. Chairman: That's the divorce! Q43 Mr Jack: Perhaps we have the divorce first! Perhaps you have to work backwards in this. I just feel there is a lot of unfinished activity. Our previous witnesses indicated that in their own analysis. What we have is, if you like, structural change but without a strategy and policy to go with it, you have to build it backwards, and what is the right way of going about announcing it? Baroness Young of Old Scone: I think there are a number of policies which the new arrangements will take forward. There are clearly some policy statements in the Rural Strategy, there are clearly quite a few policy objectives which are already within the Environment Agency's responsibility to deliver, and there are a number of economic and social delivery policies which lie at the moment with local authorities and RDAs, and all of those are policy objectives we need to focus on. If you think back to the successive attempts to put the Countryside Agency and English Nature together, this is the third attempt I am aware of and I resisted the first two but I gave up on this one, to be honest, because there is a case for bringing together the work of the Countryside Agency, the work of English Nature, and bringing the agri-environment scheme, RDS work, into a relationship with one of the big agencies, and if it is the Integrated Agency, fair enough; we would prefer it was us. There is a natural period of flailing around and putting structural change in, we want to keep that to a minimum because the risk at the moment is that everybody takes their eye off the ball of real delivery and we have major things happening in the Water Framework Directive, we have major CAP Reform changes under way, as you know, and major changes in the whole move towards sustainable food and farming. So let's try and keep structural change as smooth as possible, get it over and done with, and then in the new setting we can do the collaborative working through how we are going to deliver policies, as we did in the old setting, it is just going to be a slightly different alignment of players. Mr Jack: Okay. Q44 Chairman: The message from both of you is, keep your eye on the big picture and the outcomes, with some details and process to be worked through, and you can manage that. Baroness Young of Old Scone: I think that is right. Q45 Chairman: What sort of timescale are we talking about? Timescales are important for people who work in these agencies. I can see Marian nodding there. Certainly I know in the Countryside Agency people are worried about their jobs and the future. Is there some sort of planning blight coming in here? Baroness Young of Old Scone: Marian may want to respond because we stole her from the Countryside Agency. Q46 Chairman: A case in point! Ms Spain: The point about timescales is that we cannot afford to wait until the structural changes have happened. As Barbara has already said, we have already started to work with the bodies which will make up the new Integrated Agency on how we are going to work together on catchment pilots, and I think that is probably our major concern. We have identified three areas where we need to work together with the new agency, because there are things we need to tackle now; the timescale has to be now. The other point, to answer your question, is that we are not starting from having no relationships, we already have a relationship with the three bodies which come into these agencies, and we have already sat around the table with them and recognised that all of that work carries on and it must carry on whatever the structural changes are. So we have two programmes which will deliver bio-diversity action plans, and they will carry on regardless of the movement of offices and the movement of staff and the redefinition of relationships. From our perspective, it is start now to deliver things which need to be done but also start to look ahead at the challenges which will arise in the next two or three years, which are the Water Framework Directive, which are sustainable food and farming, and I think the other big challenge is how we as national agencies will get involved in regional government. Chairman: Events are conspiring against us today because there is another vote. There are one or two things which we would have liked to have pursued with you and we will drop you a note on them. This is two-way traffic. Having sat the other side of the desk, you have come with messages for us, so if we drop you a note and say, "These are the outstanding things we are concerned about", do take the opportunity to say, "By the way, we wanted to tell you about so-and-so and so-and-so", that would be very helpful. I am sorry it has been so messy but we will have to stand you down now because we are going to stack up lots and lots of people later on. You have been most helpful. Thank you. The Committee suspended from 4.17 pm to 4.27 pm for a division in the House
Joint Memorandum submitted by England's Regional Development Agencies Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr David Marlow, Chief Executive, Ms Judith Barker, Head of Environment and Community Development, East of England Development Agency, Dr Richard Hutchins, Corporate Director, Sustainable and Rural Development, Advantage West Midlands, examined. Q47 Chairman: I am sorry we have kept you waiting. Would you introduce yourselves to the Committee please? Mr Marlow: I am David Marlow, Chief Executive of the East of England Development Agency. Dr Hutchins: Richard Hutchins, Corporate Director at Advantage West Midlands. Ms Barker: I am Judith Barker, the head of Environment and Community Development in the East of England Development Agency. Q48 Chairman: You heard us earlier taking evidence from our last witnesses, but we are keen to talk to the RDAs because in a sense you are acquiring new responsibilities, new powers, maybe some new finance, can you take us through what you think is happening? Mr Marlow: Very briefly, the Rural Strategy does envisage the RDAs taking on additional responsibilities for some socio-economic rural development, and it does provide for about a £21 million additional Defra contribution for the RDA single pot in order to deliver improved results in rural communities. Q49 Just remind me, there are nine RDAs? Mr Marlow: There are nine RDAs in England, yes. Q50 Chairman: Sometimes they are criticised for being a bit urbocentric, how are you all coping with these new powers and responsibilities which have been put on you? Mr Marlow: I think the RDAs would argue that since we were established five years ago, we have actually been involved integrally in rural development, that we have had some successes over the first five years of the RDAs, and indeed Defra has been contributing something around £45 million into the single pot in the first five years. We have had some successes; just as we probably could do better in the urban environment I am sure there are improvements we could also make in the rural environment, but we do have a track record of rural delivery. Q51 Chairman: Dr Hutchins, the West Midlands conjures up the Black Country and Birmingham. I know there is a lot more to it than that, some nice areas, but how does the rural dimension feel to you? Dr Hutchins: I think you are right, the perception of the West Midlands is that it is an urban region, but quite the contrary to a large extent. If you take the areas of Shropshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire, where I am responsible for the delivery activity of AWM's remit in those parts of the West Midlands, clearly they are highly rural sub-regions. To put it into come form of context, Advantage West Midlands has a single pot of around £300 million, and we put around £40-50 million a year into those three counties in the rural West Midlands alone and there is the Defra contribution of around £5-6 million. We have established a rural regeneration zone as a key delivery vehicle in our rural western sub-region of the West Midlands, and our allocation to that delivery vehicle is currently around £8 million a year, rising to £16 million over the next three years. So our investments into the rural western sub-region of the West Midlands are quite considerable. Q52 Chairman: I think David Marlow used the phrase that you had been asked to take on some "socio-economic responsibilities". I am clear about the economic responsibilities, but just spell out what the socio-economic responsibilities are. Mr Marlow: Clearly there are links between social, economic and environmental investments, and it is very rare that you actually have a pure economic investment which has no social or environmental impact and consequence, and that would certainly be the case. What we are in the middle of agreeing with Defra and indeed with Government is the tasking framework for RDAs. Q53 Chairman: What does that mean? That is a posh phrase, is it not? Mr Marlow: It is the results which RDAs are expected to deliver which contribute to Government's, normally public service agreement, targets over the next three years, 2005-06 through to 2007-08. In terms of the rural domain, we would expect the results that Government seeks from RDAs to include contributions to sustainable development, as that is defined in the public service agreement, to rural productivity, to sustainable food and farming, and all of that has social as well as economic consequences. Q54 Chairman: So you are being asked to take on new jobs from 1 April and you are still defining the tasks which are given to you? Mr Marlow: We are defining the specific contributions which we need to make to those tasks. Q55 Mr Jack: You mentioned rural productivity, does that mean you are going to help farmers to farm better? Mr Marlow: It means we want to help Defra achieve increases in productivity across rural districts, part of which is farming, but actually, if you take the East of England for example, there is far more employment in manufacturing in rural districts than there is in farming, and far more employment in tourism. So it would be as part of the RDA's overall enterprise skills remit, competitiveness remit, to raise productivity across rural districts in a variety of sectors, including farming. Q56 Mr Jack: Is the answer to my question "yes"? Mr Marlow: It includes farming. Q57 Mr Jack: It includes farming. Are you going to have any resources to invest in farming to help achieve that increase in productivity? Mr Marlow: I will pass over to Judith in a second, but broadly speaking in the short-run farms are like any other business in terms of getting access to business support, which RDAs are providing and will take on more responsibility for from next year. We are also having increased involvement in the European funding which is provided to farm businesses and that will increase over the period, particularly post-2007. Ms Barker: Obviously RDAs have been working very closely with Defra in terms of their delivery for the strategy for sustainable food and farming, and there are a number of projects which RDAs have received funding for alongside the Government Offices to take forward regional partners' projects in terms of the food and farming agenda. One of the other things we are taking forward as part of the Rural Strategy as well is looking at issues of business support for farming as well as the broader rural business community, so that is another area in which things are coming up and we are taking forward. The third area that is obviously critical is in terms of working with farmers and the business support providers in terms of meeting the challenges of CAP Reform, and that is another major plank of the work we are doing in terms of that agenda. Dr Hutchins: It is difficult to separate out farming distinctly. There are one or two things we are doing in the West Midlands. Just by way of an example, we have established a food and farming team specifically to help farmers - and other rural businesses it has to be said - in terms of delivering the sustainable food and farming strategy. It is not exclusively for farming. Q58 Mr Jack: What you have both identified is an interesting agenda, particularly in the light of the resources thrown up by the single farm payment to generate potential new economic activity in a rural setting, but the question I asked was about farmers' productivity, and you neatly danced round that one by focusing on economic activity in a rural area. I do not blame you for answering in that way, but I am still waiting to have an answer to the question about productivity on farms. Dr Hutchins: I do not think there is a specific answer to it. There are a number of interventions which RDAs are delivering in rural areas which apply to farmers, for example the provision of rural broadband will help farmers become more economically viable, and we have a number of interventions which will take broadband to rural areas, up to 100 per cent in places in the West Midlands over the course of the next two years. That will help with farm-based productivity but it is not directly tied to farming, it will encapsulate farming productivity though. Mr Jack: Okay. Q59 Mr Drew: If we could look at the issue of accountability, how would you as RDAs want to be measured in terms of your effectiveness in delivering these policies in rural areas? Mr Marlow: RDAs obviously have multiple channels of accountability, we have to contribute to Government public service agreement results, and that is a lot of what grant-in-aid is for. We also formulate with partners, and we are the host for regional economic strategies, and most of those strategies have rural dimensions about what are the changes in the rural economy and rural communities which should be prioritised for the region. Thirdly, and one of the things which does come out of Rural Strategy 2004, is the concept of Regional Rural Delivery Frameworks which would be work convened by Government Offices but including all major rural providers of services and responsibility to stakeholders to actually set out a framework for improving rural service delivery. So I think there are various strands of accountability through central government, through the regional economic strategy and then through the new area we are working on with colleagues on Regional Rural Delivery Frameworks. Q60 Mr Drew: Can you give me one example in your own region of how you see this working better? Obviously you cannot compare it with before, but working better than you were led to believe the situation was? Just a simple example of some good practice in the West Midlands of rural delivery. Dr Hutchins: Is the question directed at the West Midlands or --- Q61 Mr Drew: I am directing it at the West Midlands because that is what you know best. Dr Hutchins: What I know best, they can obviously comment from the East of England perspective. I will take the Market Towns Programmes as an example. There are 34 market towns in the West Midlands, we receive funding of around £2 million to support that programme. We put in an initial £10 million to support the Market Towns Programme which we believe works in terms of rural renaissance and economic development for those market towns. There is obviously a very significant, additional investment into the Market Towns Programme. If I can give you an example of one market town, Evesham in Worcestershire, it has just won a national award, jointly with another market town, and they have been very successful in matching the investment which Advantage West Midlands have made into Evesham, which I think was around half a million pounds over the period, to deliver their plan with other funds from Europe, for example, from the Heritage Lottery Fund and from other sources. So you develop a momentum there in terms of leveraging other sources of funding, matching it with other single pot funding from the RDA and the result is therefore plain to see in an award winning market town. Q62 Mr Drew: Is that very much what you are trying to do in the east of England? Mr Marlow: I will give you a slightly different example. In the east of England the RDA has established rural enterprise hubs, hubs where business can get advice, innovation support and so on particularly for rural businesses. Under the regime clearly there are multiple agencies and multiple strands and channels of advice that rural businesses can get from RDAs, from Business Links, through the SBS route, from Defra routes and so on. We think that one of the potentials of the Rural Strategy 2004 is actually to reduce the number of channels and the simplicity to the customer and to make rural enterprise hubs much more business driven and transparent and easy to access for the customer; we think that that would be an improvement. We have got six in our region at the moment, in each of the sub-regions effectively and actually joining up the different channels and making a single access point and a single advisory service and a brokerage service can help businesses to improve. Q63 Chairman: I would just like to go back to money because I think you told me a minute ago that you were getting an extra £21 million. My impression was that the pot was going to go up from £45 million to £72 million. Why are you only getting an extra £21 million? Mr Marlow: In a sense you will have to ask Defra that. Q64 Chairman: How does it feel to you? Mr Marlow: The RDAs as a whole are pretty excited by the increased opportunities, not only from the Defra additions to the single pot, but actually from the opportunities of other new responsibilities, new roles and functions coming out of the Spending Review 2004 because, as Richard said, RDAs invest a lot more in rural development than comes out of Defra. Yes, the additional resources that Defra wants to put through the RDAs are helpful. It actually only amounts to about one per cent of the RDAs' single pot as an addition, but if you join it up with the new responsibilities from DTI and the Small Business Service, some of the issues that are coming through in terms of having more influence on the European funding programmes, which are quite significant, some of the work on skills and so on, that is where we can really make some sort of step change in rural development terms. Q65 Chairman: Why did you not get all the money that you were promised to begin with? You have told us that it is about one per cent on your budgets, but this is to be shared out between the nine RDAs. What is the allocation formula for that? Are you all going to get an equal share or are some areas more rural than others? Mr Marlow: That is a matter for Defra and for ministers to decide, but there is an existing rural formula that determined the original £48 million. Q66 Chairman: Judith, you seem to know about this. Ms Barker: Firstly, in terms of the £45 million going up to £72 million, obviously there were predictions in the mix about Defra's single pot contribution increasing into 2005/06 anyway, so there is an element of that in the £71 million and then you have got the £21.3 million on top of that. RDAs had looked at the Countryside Agency's corporation plan produced in 2003/04 looking forward and at that time the socio‑economic element of the Countryside Agency's budget was around £37 million. So we had originally anticipated that we would be getting nearer that sum rather than the £21.3 million, but there were cuts to that corporate plan subsequent to it being published, particularly to the socio‑economic element of that and so the figure has been reduced from £37 million down to the figure that we see now. Q67 Chairman: David, you told us earlier that you were still working on the tasks that you were going to do and you still do not know how much money you are going to get because it has not been sorted out, and you are going to kick off live on this on 1 April. That is a tight timetable, is it not? Mr Marlow: Yes. We would like to think that the RDAs have a 'can do' mentality. I think, being perfectly frank, 2005/06 will be a learning year. We also want to work very closely with colleagues on the rural pathfinders which will also throw up some lesson learning. I do not suppose it will be a finished project in 2005/06. Q68 Chairman: We could have a bit of a planning failure here, not on your part. Dr Hutchins: It is important to recognise that each region is working closely with its government office on developing the regional rural delivery framework and that is a very tight timetable, but I think there has been good progress on that so far. A draft of each of those has to be ready by December of this year. From next year in some regions it is likely, although the funding allocations have not been signed off yet, that some regions will inherit a fully committed programme of legal commitments. There will be no headroom for sub-regions to do anything radically new next year unless they put in extra funding from the single pot. 2005/06 will be a year of transition and learning rather than radical change in terms of delivering. Q69 Chairman: This is all about improving rural delivery. Here we are, we have been told it is a learning year and there are expectations out there, but you have got no money to spend. Dr Hutchins: That is not true because, as I said earlier, the RDA has put in significantly more investment into rural areas. Q70 Chairman: I am talking about the fact that there is no uncommitted money. Dr Hutchins: For some regions that may well be true in terms of the Countryside Agency's socio‑economic programmes. Q71 Mr Jack: I just want to follow on the Chairman's theme because paragraph 56 of Defra's Rural Strategy 2004 tells me that they are going "to task regional development agencies to work with local authorities and other regional sub-regional and local partners to contribute to securing Defra's target to improve access to services", and then in paragraph 57 it lists 13 different areas where you are supposed to be working with lots of people on everything from affordable housing, local transport, post‑16 education, children's services, mental health services, services for older people, drug treatment and rehabilitation services, business support, the uptake of sport and recognise creation, productivity of the tourism industry, employment rates of disadvantaged groups, road traffic accidents and community engagement. That is a colossal list of activity in an area where clearly your resources are stretched. How much extra management are you taking on to be able to put your finger in the pots represented by paragraph 57? Mr Marlow: I think your analysis is quite right. What the strategy says is that we will be working with others to achieve those improvements. One of the things that we welcome is the work with partners on the regional rural delivery frameworks which would cover that terrain. Q72 Mr Jack: Let me just add up the number of partners. You are going to work with local authorities and at least three other blocks of partners and you might have four meetings a year with them; that is a colossal amount of activity, it is something like 150 different meetings you could all be involved in. Have you seriously got the resources to be able to service that agenda together with other partners? I appreciate you are not delivering it all. It just seems a hell of a workload. Dr Hutchins: I think different regions will tackle this in different ways. Q73 Mr Jack: Are you confident that you can provide a full input to all of those areas to make in your lower year of learning or perhaps at the end of your year of learning or thereafter some progress in all of those areas? Dr Hutchins: I think that most RDAs will already be engaged in some way with most of those partners and that may be just in terms of dialogue or at a strategic level. Let me give an example from the West Midlands. We are devolving responsibility for delivery in terms of a large part of our rural intervention to a rural regeneration zone which may become incorporated over time on which sit representatives of LSPs, local authorities and so on and so forth. Many of these partners are already working together on a strategy, on zone implementation plans, on business plans and on delivering a large programme. In the case of the rural regeneration zone it is an £8 million programme rising to £16 million in the next three years, so I think it is already happening to a certain extent. Yes, it is a big demand upon resources. Mr Marlow: Your question is self‑evidently right, that the regional rural delivery framework being convened and co‑ordinated by government offices will consider all those issues. The RDAs will clearly then have to prioritise where we can make a value added contribution and it will not be down that list of issues. It may be through a particular institutional development, as Richard has said, or rural regeneration companies, it may well be in the enterprise agenda where I gave you a particular example of rural enterprise hubs and one would incrementally develop priorities and outcomes. Q74 Mr Jack: What Defra say is that that long list I read out is about securing Defra's targets to improve access to the services on this long list. If you do not improve that access then Defra is going to be holding you accountable for any deficiency. It is a very long and ambitious list. The impression I get is that you are making a brave face of it by saying you are in some of this business now, but you are then going to have to prioritise the areas where you can really make a difference. How much dialogue have you had with Defra to explore the deliverability on an agenda like this? Mr Marlow: We are having a lot of dialogue about that. The RDA's role in access to rural services, given that we are not the majority direct service deliverer, is in strategic added value, helping partners weigh up the priorities and determining where we can add value to the outcomes. We are having a lot of discussion about how RDAs would demonstrate our contribution to that and the RDA position would be that we are not a principal or even a major affordable housing deliverer, nor are we a principal or even a major rural transport deliverer. How do the RDAs add value? It is actually through enabling, for example, the skills issues or the enterprise issues or the productivity issues to be fed into the agendas of local authorities or colleges or whatever so that they can actually provide improved access to services. That is a debate that we do need to firm up. Q75 Chairman: Just help me on the mechanics of this. You were talking about partnerships, Dr Hutchins, but let me quote Defra properly. Defra say there are "regional rural affairs frameworks to be built up". Whose responsibility is it to convene the discussion on this? It is social, it is economic and it is environmental. Who is the driving force to pull all this together? Mr Marlow: Defra have asked the government offices to convene that. Q76 Chairman: Are you comfortable with that? Mr Marlow: Yes. Q77 Chairman: How will it work? Ms Barker: How it is working in the east of England at present is that there is a board that has been established by the Government Office, chaired by the Government Office, on which the Regional Development Agency, the Regional Assembly, English Nature, the Countryside Agency and the Rural Development Service sit to work through the regional rural delivery framework which will be submitted to Defra in December. What we are doing is we are working through a series of 13 priorities at present and we are then looking at identifying which are the ones that we really need to make a difference on in the east of England and which are the ones where we need to deploy our best human and financial resource to take those agendas forward, and that process of prioritising the priorities is what is happening at the moment and that list is being taken into account in that process. So the players around the table are being chaired by the Government Office and they will receive that submission in December. Q78 Chairman: Each region has got one of these Regional Rural Affairs Forums. Would it surprise you to hear that one of our earlier witnesses said that they would not give them a lot of marks out of ten? How many marks would you give the east of England one? Ms Barker: The project board that I was just describing is part of the over‑arching project management of the regional rural development framework. Within the work of the regional rural delivery framework is the review of the Regional Rural Affairs Forum. In terms of the east of England, they have engaged very actively in the process of review believing that they need to review their own processes, the way they work, their membership, etcetera, to be able to deliver for their stakeholders in terms of this new agenda. I think that shows that we are all committed to moving forward and perhaps we all need to look at what we are doing at the moment to improve the future. Q79 Chairman: Marks out of ten, or would you say they are trying hard but could do better? Ms Barker: I would not like to be drawn. I would rather involve the chair of the forum in making that decision. Q80 Chairman: What is the position in the West Midlands, Dr Hutchins? Dr Hutchins: It is very similar. We are working very closely with the Government Office on developing the regional rural delivery framework. In fact, we are chairing one of the subgroups that is looking at the economic strand of that and that process is working well. I would caveat that by saying that the timetable is very tight. In terms of the West Midlands Rural Affairs Forum, it is chaired by a former Advantage West Midlands Board Director called Dr Tony Harris, it is a very large forum and that needs to be looked at by the Government Office in terms of its effectiveness, but it is a very important forum and I think at the moment it is providing the service that it is there to do. Q81 Mr Jack: Does the strategy that you have drawn up with the Government Office go to Defra for approval or do you offer it to stakeholders in a wider forum for their approval? How do you get the tick in the box that it is okay or do you just do it? Dr Hutchins: In the West Midlands we have another group called the Rural Accord Group which in a sense is a bit like a Regional Rural Priorities Board. There are all the public sector organisations in one group and that is the group which will oversee the development of the regional delivery framework. As to where it goes from there, Judith may be able to provide some guidance on that. Ms Barker: Certainly ministers will be approving it shortly after the end of December, I hope. What Defra are requesting is that stakeholders, rural stakeholders, business agencies, etcetera, have all been involved in the process. In fact, in the east of England we have got a conference on 12 November to do exactly that, to involve them in the priorities, the delivery mechanisms, the Rural Affairs Forum Review, all of those aspects, so people can see the direction of travel and that is a critical process in order for ministers to be able to sign up to what is being submitted. Q82 Chairman: I guess there are groups like the RSPB and The Wildlife Trust who would say that the focus of RDAs is primarily economic and you are being very successful in getting some hard measures out of there, but your remit on the environmental agenda is pretty limited. I think there is a reference to sustainability in your terms of reference. By chance, I was with the chairman and the chief executive of the agency for the East Midlands today and they were saying that we could do more on the environment. Is that a fair comment? Mr Marlow: I think we can always do more on the environment. I must say that we take the sustainable development purpose in the RDA Act very seriously. I do not know if the chairman has shown you, but the RDAs did produce a publication called Smart Growth which actually highlighted some of the contributions that we have made to sustainable development. We could always do better, but it is actually pretty central to everything that the RDAs are trying to do. Even when our entry point may be an economic entry point sustainability is at the heart of what we do. Chairman: You have told us an awful lot. If there is anything you want to add afterwards then do drop us a note. I wish you all the best of luck with a very tight timetable. Thank you very much. Memoranda submitted by the Country Land and Business Association and the National Farmers' Union Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Meurig Raymond, Vice President, Mr Andrew Opie, Head of Policy Services, and Dr Andrew Clark, Chief Countryside Adviser, National Farmers' Union; Sir Henry Aubrey-Fletcher, Vice-President, and Mr Nick Way, Director of Policy, Country Land and Business Association, examined. Q83 Chairman: We are joined by some partners from the CLA and the NFU with whom we have had a long relationship. I will not go through all the introductions because I know people have got other commitments later on this evening. Where do you think farming fits into this new Rural Strategy? Is it a high priority in the strategy or pretty low down? Mr Raymond: I was delighted to hear the Secretary of State say that farming is still at the heart of the rural society. I would regard farming as being very high on the priority list. Sir Henry Aubrey-Fletcher: We have just produced a paper about grazing and what it does apart from just fatten cattle and provide grass for milking cows. The countryside we love and the outside world loves, which hopefully the public are prepared to pay for, is the one we have got now and it has got there as a result of farming. If you take cattle and sheep and farming activity out of the countryside it is going to look like north of the M25 and nobody wants that. Farming is absolutely essential to the continuation of the countryside as we know it. Q84 Chairman: So this notion of farming being multi‑functional fits well within the new Rural Strategy? Sir Henry Aubrey-Fletcher: Yes, it underpins the whole thing. It drives the aspirations of others, and people who want access to the countryside go there because they like looking at it and they get inspiration and solace from it. If it changed, would they still get that? I suspect not. Mr Raymond: I agree. Agriculture is very multi‑functional; it is a fairly large industry. A lot of those in the farming industry have diversified over the years and added value to the rural areas. I think we have a good story to tell. Q85 Mr Drew: If we look at this issue of the Integrated Agency, do you think the boundaries are drawn in the right place? We seem to have come to a situation where we have separated the human geography from the physical geography in terms of the way in which the agency will operate. There were those of us who thought it was rather strange that the Environment Agency and the RPA were excluded from the Haskins Review. I wonder what your views are looking at where these boundaries have been drawn. Have we got a more workable solution than previously existed? Mr Raymond: The National Farmers' Union represents 55,000 professional farmers and another 60,000 countryside members. The view of our membership is that we agree in principle with the Haskins Review, in devolving the delivery of the Rural Strategy down to the RDAs. I think we are in favour of streamlining the system that has been there over the years. I think it was picked out in the Haskins Review that there were well over 100 funding avenues. In general we are fairly supportive of the recommendation and the boundaries which the RDAs operate within I think would fit very well with local delivery. Mr Way: I think we do see some risks in the way the boundaries have been drawn, recognising that they have been drawn now and the job is to make it work. The risks we see are that the Integrated Agency may become identified very closely with environmental objectives only, that the RDAs may be identified with economic objectives only and the new Countryside Agency with social objectives only, whereas in the first question we were talking about the links between farming, the environment and the social and economic side of life in the countryside. We would like to see an economic and social purpose built into the way that the Integrated Agency goes about its business. Equally, I think the Countryside Agency and the RDAs would need to have a similar tripartite purpose built into theirs. That is not so say they should all do the same thing because the Integrated Agency is going to be the lead agency on securing the value of our habitats and landscapes, but each of them has to look to the three pillars of sustainability otherwise the boundaries are going to be too distinct and problems will arise. Q86 Mr Drew: If we look at the issue of timetabling, we have got this notion that it is all going to be levered into place by the start of 2007. Is that realistic? The CLA paper intimates that you welcome the fact that it is being brought forward in terms of a rapid timetable but, realistically speaking, that that does not give very long for all these different agencies to know what they are doing and to lock into the wider EU reforms. Dr Clark: We accept that it is a rapid implementation timetable. The Integrated Agency is an entirely new agency. It is not simply an evolution of English Nature with a few bits forged on top of it. What we are talking about here from our point of view is a new agency which takes a new view towards the delivery of land management in the countryside and I think a 2007 introduction early in that year probably does give enough time to allow that to happen. I suppose the regret is that at the same time we have got CAP reform coming on-stream which will already be up and running at that stage. We have got the new rural development regulation which is going to start delivering from 2007. You could say the agency does not have a role there anyway because they are supposed to be delivering whatever is decided, but they are not being involved in that process at all. There is obviously a bit of a mismatch in terms of the timing. As regards the agency itself, I think it is very important that we recognise that this is a new agency and we need to have time to make sure that we are involved in helping to develop it. Mr Way: I am not sure that Defra can win on this one because if it is a longer timetable there will be even greater problems than there are already with staffing and keeping the existing agencies going in the meantime and so on. Although we have said it is a good thing to come in in 2007, we said so because that is what we hope will happen. We are not in a position to say whether it is realistic or not, but we think it would be the best outcome if it could. Mr Raymond: It is a huge challenge to come in in 2007. We would be delighted to work in partnership with the new agency in making certain that that challenge is fulfilled and it is developed and up and running by 2007. Q87 Mr Jack: I noticed an interesting article in the Western Morning News of September 23 which reports the National Trust Director General, Fiona Reynolds, as saying, "Defra has made real progress in changing some parts of the agenda but a joined‑up strategy for managing our land and natural resources is currently missing and needs urgent attention if the imminent new integrated agency is to get off to the right start. Without it, the agency will be a delivery body in search of a purpose." Gentlemen, do you agree with that? Dr Clark: The problem is that I do not think we would know what an integrated delivery strategy looked like until it almost comes on-stream. The Rural Strategy provides the start of it. Q88 Mr Jack: You have just been making all kinds of nice noises about working with it and finding out about it and it is all very 'softly, softly', let us hold hands with the Government, but then you agree with a rather blunt thing which says we have put the organisational superstructure into place, now we will find it something to do. Dr Clark: The agency is about delivery. The strategy is something we have to sort out with Government right at this moment. Q89 Mr Jack: Do you not think it would be more sensible to know what it was supposed to do and then find a mechanism to do it afterwards? Dr Clark: I think we recognise that the current system is not working properly and that we need to get a delivery mechanism sorted out that is going to do it better. What it does is we are all working towards what we feel is a better approach and part of this is the Rural Strategy. Q90 Mr Jack: Perhaps when you retreat back to Agriculture House you might like to write down on one side of a piece of paper what you think this agency ought to be doing. You said you agreed with the phrase in the first place and afterwards you seemed to backtrack slightly. I would like to be clear on that. Perhaps the CLA might like to comment. Sir Henry Aubrey-Fletcher: I think I know what this agency ought to be doing and I know exactly what Fiona is saying: it should be supporting the delivery of a sustainable Rural Strategy and that means supporting the people who have got to do the work on the ground, which are the NFU's members and the CLA's members very largely, in delivering that strategy. We are practitioners, I am not a policy maker, we need support and help with the advice, we need training, we need resources in areas where we cannot provide them and that is what I hope it will do. Q91 Mr Jack: Let me pick you up on your use of language, "that is what I hope it will do". It suggests to me there is still a scintilla of doubt in your mind as to whether this has the remotest chance of delivering anything rather better than the current situation. Sir Henry Aubrey-Fletcher: When you buy a new piece of hi‑fi you do not know until you plug it in whether it is going to work or not. Q92 Mr Jack: Most people try before they buy. You can read in Which? magazine some tests of it or you can buy Hi‑Fi Monthly and have a comparative test of umpteen different ones. Here it is, plug and play, but you are not quite certain what is going to come out when you touch the On button. Sir Henry Aubrey-Fletcher: I hear exactly what you say. If it does what it says on the packet, which is to support the people on the ground to deliver a sustainable Rural Strategy, with all three elements of the stool being supported, then it will have done its job. Q93 Mr Jack: It would be helpful to us to have a piece of paper to identify the key areas where you still think that Defra have got to fix the idea to make it work. Mr Raymond: Let me pick up on part of that question. I understand the concern, but the three pillars have been laid down and I think it is important that the agency works in close partnership with the people on the ground within the rural agencies to deliver the economic benefit and the sustainability. Q94 Mr Jack: I think we all understand the need for close working and the harmony with which you greeted this proposal at the beginning was commendable, but I am just concerned about the practicability of what sounds like a good idea and whether it will work in practice. Let me move on to the Western Morning News - I read nothing else! On 28 July Mr Anthony Gibson, who is certainly known to the gentlemen on this end of the table, told us, "... we were told very firmly that our intended title of the South West Chamber of Agriculture was a non‑starter because 'the RDA can't get involved in anything to do with farming.' So, with Mrs Beckett effectively disowning us, and the RDAs is not allowed to adopt us, who in Government does speak for agriculture? The answer would appear to be no‑one." I quote that because I asked the partners from the RDAs what they were going to do to improve rural productivity and they gave some very helpful suggestions implying they could become involved with agriculture. Mr Gibson, who is no laggard in knowing what is going on, tells us a different story. Dr Clark, can you settle the argument as to whether in fact the RDAs are in or out of agriculture? Dr Clark: Yes, we do believe the RDAs can play a role in farming and in other regions they have. I could not comment on what prompted Anthony to say what he said. Q95 Mr Jack: Assuming it is correctly reported, of course. Dr Clark: I am not quite sure what question he was asked either. The point here is that we have to ensure the RDAs have a role in terms of farming and I think they do. There is experience of other regions where they have worked quite closely with the NFU, especially post foot and mouth and during a crisis and our experiences have been fairly good. There is still a lot more that could be done. This opportunity of moving funding over to the RDAs from Defra for social and economic functions hopefully will unlock more work that we can do with RDAs with a direct benefit to farm businesses. Q96 Mr Jack: I think there is a very important role for somebody to pick up in helping rural business and our farmers to maximise the opportunities of the single farm payment. I just want to make certain that the right infrastructure is there to do that for the benefit of the rural economy in the widest sense. You were assuring me, Dr Clark, that for whatever reason Mr Gibson was grossly misquoted. Mr Raymond: Looking back, there have been some mixed experiences with the RDAs. I think it was said by the last group of witnesses that there is a perception within the farming community that some of the RDAs have been very urban based. With this new delivery let us hope that the social and economic issues of those rural areas can be overcome and improved. There is a big challenge there for the RDAs. Mr Opie: I thought it was interesting listening to the RDAs talking about their rural delivery frameworks and how they are going to operate, but one thing that did strike me that maybe does need to be rectified was that they spoke very much in terms of the priority setting being done by the RDAs in conjunction with the deliverers and then the rural affairs forums being there as an advisory group. If this is going to be a genuine partnership document, which Defra believes it to be, at that priority setting stage, which is absolutely crucial in the whole process, they need to involve customers because by doing that not only will they help in terms of targeting and priority setting, they can also use genuine feedback from customers on the ground who are at the receiving end of whatever happens through the RDAs in terms of grant and advice. Q97 Chairman: I would like to try another press article on you. Sir Henry, you used the phrase "it depends what it says on the packet". I have an article here, the article contact is Mr Nick Way, which says, "The Rural Strategy does not do what it says on the tin." Nick, I think you were saying there is a difference between policy and delivery but that "the transfer of key delivery responsibilities away from Defra means that it will be difficult or impossible in practice for the Rural Affairs Department to see its rural policy delivered on the ground". The CLA has always taken a very wide view of the countryside and Sir Henry was talking earlier on about a changing countryside. The rural affairs agenda, is it a bit weak? Mr Way: You would like me to be a bit more specific, would you? Q98 Chairman: Discuss, as they say! Mr Way: We are realising since the Secretary of State's statement in July that this complicated world of delivery is going to rest greatly on the way that different bodies work with each other in future. It is very much a move away from direct linkages between central government through to their agents on the ground. That is a different world and we think there are some risks there. I mentioned the split between the different agencies before. As to Defra's ability to influence the RDAs, because Defra is not ‑ and no one is saying they will be or should be - in control of RDAs, the fact is they will not be, what that means is that it will be incumbent on us as representative organisations and our members and other groups to speak directly to the RDAs in future. The old system of lobbying up through Westminster and then watching it come back down the other side is gone in that sense. If the RDAs are in listening mode, as they said they are and we have found them to be at least at this stage, then the prospect is quite good. There are two or three ways in which we think that the RDAs could be very beneficial if they give sufficient weight to rural concerns and it is difficult for them. The budget that is spent within RDAs in rural areas is often in the region of five per cent of their total budget whereas the rural economy and the population of rural areas is often round about 20 or 25 per cent and we are worried about that. We think there is a risk of disconnection between Defra and the grass‑roots. In a way nothing has changed since the Secretary of State's announcement to make that worse, it is just that with more bodies moving around in future Defra will have to work very hard to keep in touch with what is going on on the ground and with the Countryside Agency no longer having operational responsibility their independent advice will be based on statistics and research and information gathering and they will not have the luxury of seeing what happens in practice as well. So we think that Defra is going to have to compensate for that by working extra hard to inform itself of what is happening. That is a rather prolonged answer to "it doesn't do what it says on the tin". Mr Opie: I wanted to pick up one of the points that Nick made. If we have got some concerns about this devolution, it is the consistency across the regions. How do we ensure that farmers are not going to be disadvantaged because they happen to be in the wrong RDA and also make sure that RDAs are talking to each other, that there are inter‑regional projects, so we do not get duplication and find that one RDA is doing something which another RDA is doing? There is a real issue of co‑ordination through the government offices needed to make sure that this works properly on a national basis. Q99 Mr Jack: I would like to move to paragraph 25 of your evidence to the Committee where you have a pithy little starting paragraph which says "An IT strategy?" and you make an important point when you say, "A fundamental requirement in terms of delivery is to have in place effective IT strategies and support systems". From your two respective organisations' listening posts and knowing of the efforts of Defra to improve and develop its IT strategy, what messages are you getting as to whether they are on course to deliver the strategy that you think underpins this policy? Sir Henry Aubrey-Fletcher: That is an interesting question. There are many elements to an IT strategy, from the platform it is delivered on, that is computers and broadband, to how you deliver on that platform. A very good example is the Iacs-4 (?) which I did this year by computer, I do not know if my colleague here did, but it is a very, very big file which you download. It is fine on a 100 megabit Defra in‑house computer system, it whizzes down, but if you have not got broadband you just go to bed and wake up the next day for it to arrive. People will not put up with that. On broadband it is quicker, obviously, but it is still three cups of tea later that this wretched great big file arrives. It is really thinking about the practicality of how it is going to be seen by the operator out in the sticks, if he has a computer and, if he has, does he have a good connection to that computer, is it quick enough for him to be able to deal with the information and are all the elements easily got at. There will be different sites for the regional RDA and the Integrated Agency and all the other people involved. Where does he go? Ideally there wants to be a single homepage which takes him to whichever site he needs to get the information. So it is about knitting it all together. Q100 Mr Jack: Let me go back to the real nub of it. At the heart of integration and the delivery of rural services from the point of view of the Integrated Agency and of Defra is an IT system which is different from the one that they have got at the moment. My impression is that they are struggling with the RPA system which they are currently working on. I just wondered if you had any insight as to whether they were any further forward in developing the IT infrastructure and the networks that will be required to support the delivery in the way that you just described with all these different players? Sir Henry Aubrey-Fletcher: Not at the moment. The way to see whether a strategy is deliverable is to be on the receiving end and to see if it works. Farmers and land owners are busy people and they will only use this technology, which we all must use, we are well aware of that, if it is practical. I come back to the same point, ie it does what it says on the tin! Dr Clark: I think the first point I want to make about IT strategy is that it is not an alternative to people. They are not going to deliver their strategy through IT. It is one of those things that maybe adds value and it may be able to provide services which you cannot do so easily or might increase the reach, but when it comes down to it we need to have people on the ground helping farmers evolve and develop their farm businesses. Where the common IT structure may have a benefit would be in looking, for example, at the funding streams. We have got 100 funding streams plus, all with different administrative processes and all with different eligibility wings. It would be really nice if there was a common format for all of those which could be appraised or analysed through a common IT system so that it did not matter whether you went to the RDA or English Nature, the Environment Agency or the Integrated Agency, they could all use a common IT strategy and they would have your information so that when you applied you could have your vendor number or whatever it is that you use for your single farm payment. Q101 Mr Jack: What you are describing to me are the characteristics as a customer of what you would like. The point at the heart of my question was whether you had any intelligence to know whether Defra have got, either in development or available, an integrated IT system that was capable of giving you what you wanted. Dr Clark: As I understand it they are trying to work towards that, but you will have to talk to Defra about it. They have got a whole farm approach which is intended to be the beginning of this. They have appointed IBM to provide their IT strategy, but I am sure Defra could provide you with the information you need. Q102 Mr Jack: I noticed this rather bold claim of wanting to reduce the 100 funding streams to a much lower number. Have you had any discussions with Defra about the transition arrangements for those who are currently on the 100 schemes getting to the limited flow of two or three? Dr Clark: There is a difference between the 'in principle' of having three families of funding and what you actually deliver to farmers and other beneficiaries. In our evidence we tried to make this distinction between the 'in principle' of having a thematic approach towards funding whilst still respecting the need for some common integration between the two and the benefits you can have from having a fairly simple and straightforward scheme, ie I will pay you some money to plant a hedge or a wood or a bigger pond or what have you. There are some benefits for the beneficiary of having schemes which are very focused like that. The problem from the administrator's point of view and from a farmer's point of view who wants to do five or six different things is that it means they are going to have to go to five or six different projects. Q103 Mr Jack: This whole process appears to be being delivered on a very short timescale and what concerns me is, as always when you go from 100 to three, the winners and losers, the transitional arrangements, in other words there is a lot of detail to be gone through as to how you get to it. Three may have all the advantages you have talked about. Dr Clark: It would be three very complex schemes. Q104 Mr Jack: They could well be. I think in a way the fact that you have again outlined to me some of the advantages gives me the rather clear impression that there is still a lot of work to be done within Defra to see how it works. Mr Way: There was some discussion with outsiders on this streamlining of the funding streams. We were concerned at the time that any web‑based information system for the new world would need to be backed up with some human beings who could interpret the information for the benefit of potential applicants. It is not clear that that will be provided, but Defra are about to embark on a series of discussions with outside organisations, beginning later this month and the whole modernizing rural delivery list of tasks, so I would expect that to come up amongst many others. I am expecting that to be a pretty intense set of discussions over the coming months. Q105 Chairman: Two final points. We have got the Water Framework Directive, we have got the single farm payment system, CAP reform and we have got a one farm inspection system on the horizon maybe. Who is responsible for bringing all of this together in a brave new world? Who are you going to be talking to about this package of measures? Mr Way: This sounds like a conversation I had with my boss yesterday about how much is going on at the moment. I do not think we are there yet. There are occasionally - and others may be further down the line than our thinking is on this - breaks in the clouds when we think that maybe a simplified system could be possible, where the number of visits to a farm is much reduced and perhaps the participation by the farmer in one of the agri-environment schemes counts toward lower risk assessment, fulfilment of compliance for regulation and Defra are spending quite a lot of time thinking about that themselves and have tried to move the agri-environment schemes in that direction. Chairman: This is a big agenda for change. It is a changing landscape. Are you talking to the new Integrated Agency? Are you talking to the Environment Agency, to the RDAs? Where does the RPA fit in this? I am not sure where the ownership is in this brave new world. Q106 Mr Jack: Who is in charge? Who do you talk to in Defra about it? Mr Way: We talk at different levels because you talk to the people where it is joined up. Q107 Mr Jack: Do you think that there is any one person tasked with responding to the agenda for change which the Chairman has just outlined? Is there 'Mr New World', apart from Sir Brian Bender who has the whole world? Is there somebody in Defra who is managing this enormous agenda for change or is there a group that is doing it? Sir Henry Aubrey-Fletcher: You mean a champion for change? Q108 Mr Jack: Whatever. Dr Clark: No. Sir Henry Aubrey-Fletcher: When there is a lot of political change ‑‑‑ Q109 Mr Jack: Dr Clark has given us the answer, he says no. Dr Clark: Apart from Sir Brian Bender. Q110 Mr Jack: So he has got the whole world in his hands; Sir Brian is the man. Mr Raymond: The lead body has to be Defra and we have to discuss and work in partnership with these other bodies. Let us not under‑estimate the challenges there are for the industry and the concerns within the farming community about all these issues that are taking place at this time. It is very difficult for a lot of the farming community to get their minds round it. Dr Clark: When it comes to a farmer it does need to be integrated and that is why you need to have all these silos coming back to focus at the bottom. Q111 Chairman: You were very positive about RDAs. What about Business Links? Sir Henry Aubrey-Fletcher: Business link is an interesting one because the Business Links have not traditionally really had the expertise necessary to give advice to rural farming businesses and so there is a real issue there in terms of getting them up to speed and getting them properly funded and getting people who understand rural issues and we can play a part in helping them. Mr Raymond: I would agree with that. I think it is important they are resourced well. I think the professionalism of Business Links possibly needs to be improved. I think we have a huge part to play and again we need to build some partnerships work with the industry and I think Business Links can develop and give the right sort of advice which the farming community is looking for at the present time. Mr Opie: Two points. Bringing the old Efbas (?) advisers in from Business Link to the RDAs may give some of them a fresh start and they can learn from the good examples around the country because there was some very good Business Link advisers and some very poor ones and they need to get that consistency. Secondly, we are concerned that there are different streams of advice being set up both under the RDAs and Defra. You have got pollution, you have got conservation advice, you have got CAP reform advice, you have then got the Business Link advice, but somebody needs to join all of this up so that farmers are not faced with four different advisers coming on four different days, for example. That is as fundamental an issue as getting the business advisers right. Q112 Chairman: And giving four different pieces of advice. Sir Henry Aubrey-Fletcher: Yes. Chairman: Thank you for reminding us of the big agenda for change and the customers at the bottom end. If there is there anything you want to add that you have not got in today, please drop us a line. Thank you very much. |