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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 707-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE ENVIRONMENT, FOOD AND RURAL AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
THE DEPARTMENTAL ANNUAL REPORT 2004
Wednesday 16 June 2004 SIR BRIAN BENDER, MR ANDREW BURCHELL and MR LUCIAN HUDSON Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 -114
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee on Wednesday 16 June 2004 Members present Mr Michael Jack, in the Chair Mr Colin Breed David Burnside Patrick Hall Mr Mark Lazarowicz Mr David Lepper Joan Ruddock Alan Simpson David Taylor Mr Bill Wiggin ________________ Witnesses: Sir Brian Bender, Permanent Secretary, Mr Andrew Burchell, Finance Director, and Mr Lucian Hudson, Director of Communications, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, examined. Q1 Chairman: Sir Brian, you are very welcome indeed to the Committee for our annual tour through the Department's annual report and an opportunity to ask you and your colleagues more or less anything we decide to ask. We always look forward to this occasion with keen and eager anticipation. For the record, you are accompanied by Andrew Burchell, the Department's finance director, and Lucian Hudson, the director of communications. Gentlemen, you are all known to the Committee and all are welcome. Can I, on behalf of the Committee, send our thanks to you and your colleagues for the very useful pre-briefing session which we had. I think it enabled us to cover a number of important points about the overall objectives of the Department. That will not stop us revisiting some of the territory again today. One of the topics that we touched on was the efforts that the Department has been making during its still relatively short lifetime to bring together the different cultures of the old MAFF and the Environment Department. Indeed, on page 209 of your report, there is a reference to the Developing Defra Programme. It certainly reads very well in terms of what you are hoping to do. It says, "While our primary focus is to help achieve wider departmental objectives, many will also generate efficiency gains." You talk about some of the things that you are going to get out of it. Perhaps you could give a commentary on how Developing Defra is progressing and whether you really do believe that you are now integrating the different backgrounds and cultures so that you are getting a Defra house style as opposed to almost a silo mentality. Sir Brian Bender: First of all, the purpose of any change programme like Developing Defra is to improve our capacity to deliver. Therefore, one of the measures of whether it is successful, which no doubt the Committee will come on to later this afternoon, is whether we are delivering any better. A second measure is whether the purpose of the organisation is becoming increasingly clear and we have done quite a lot of work on our clarity of purpose. We have done a lot of work too, which is still work in progress, on the nature of the interventions as a government department, the combination of incentives of persuasion, regulation and how we should get those right, do them more smartly and modernise them. Again, there is a reference in the report to the regulation task force that Margaret Beckett has set up. There are then issues about whether we have improved systems to underpin the business, HR systems, finance systems, and whether or not we are getting any better at seeing how the Department is performing overall. We shared with you some of the work we have been doing on a balance scorecard. Then we get into the softer stuff of improved ways of working, skilling people and leadership development. How are we doing? My first answer would be that my personal view is we are doing pretty well considering the circumstances of the creation of the Department. I think this Committee was surprised when in a session the Secretary of State and I had I referred to Defra as an unplanned merger, but it was an unplanned merger. We were not expecting, until the call came from the Cabinet Secretary, that the environment would be part of it and it was created at a time of national crisis when 5,000 people were still working on foot and mouth disease. Three years on, I really do think we have come a long way. The second question is: is the job done. Certainly not. We have come as far as I would have expected and indeed further than I would have expected. We have a further way to go. The next part of the answer is the right people to ask about how we are doing are a combination of the customers we are providing services to, the stakeholders we relate to - which of course, at one level, includes this Committee - and our own staff through staff surveys. That is again another set of measures for how we are doing. If I can turn to the issue of integration, there are two or three replies. First of all, an increasing amount of our work is done on a cross-functional basis crossing the silo organisational boundaries on a programme and project management basis. The whole of our sustainable farming and food strategy, the work that we are doing and will be launching publicly tomorrow on diffuse water pollution, the inter-departmental work on the sustainable energy policy network with DTI to follow up the Energy White Paper - all that is done, if you like, ignoring the functional parts of the organisation, working across the piece. The second measure of integration looks at things like staff movements and, at management board level, I am the only person who was on either the MAFF or DETR board on 8 June 2001. At senior Civil Service level, just over 50 per cent of all senior civil servants in Defra are new to posts at that level since 2001. At director level, which is part way up to senior Civil Service, 15 out of 27 are people who are in new appointments at that level in Defra, six of them from other government departments and five from outside the Civil Service. Again, there is quite a lot of deliberate churn to try and freshen things up. Q2 Chairman: You were talking about this balance scorecard as the way you can perhaps comment on how well you are doing against some of the items in the Developing Defra agenda. You were kind enough to send a document to the Committee on this subject. The indication is that it helps you to measure things. It says, "A framework that at its highest level helps organisations translate their strategy into objectives that can be measured." Then I looked through the document to see if I could find some numbers because that, to me, is what measurement is about. I was struggling to find any numbers. I was struggling in this document which lays out what you might be measuring because you dealt, at our earlier meeting, for example, with the reductions in manpower that you were going to be making. We talked about some of the financial assessments as to how you are doing. Those are measurements by my normal, simple way of doing it but this balance scorecard seems to be a measureless environment. Why is that? Mr Burchell: In terms of the indicators we selected, rather than choose the indicators which you have data on because you collect it routinely, we spent a lot of time identifying the indicators which we believe would support the successful delivery of our objectives. For example, we have indicators around getting the right people with the right skills in the right job. Q3 Chairman: Pick one area. Give me an indicator. Tell me what you are measuring and give us a quick commentary on success. It is all right talking in this management speak but I would like something tangible to get hold of. Mr Burchell: Motivation and satisfaction, people knowledge and culture as informed by our annual staff survey, which is measurable and is also going to be updated on a quarterly, sample basis through electronic staff surveys about people. That is one example. Sir Brian Bender: There would be therefore an indicator of how this compared with previous quarters to measure trends. Q4 Chairman: When did you first set up the base line measure? Sir Brian Bender: We had a staff survey around 2002 for the first Defra one and we have just had one early 2004, so 18 months later. We are now running them on a quarterly basis. Q5 Chairman: You are able to compare 2002 with 2004? Is that right? Mr Burchell: In relation to a core set of questions, yes. Q6 Chairman: What kind of core questions have you been asking the staff? Sir Brian Bender: Are you proud to work for the Department? Do you feel you are in a blame culture? Q7 Chairman: How many of them were proud to work for Defra two years ago and how many are now? Sir Brian Bender: 49 per cent in the most recent one, which is 13 up on the previous survey. Q8 David Taylor: Were they not different groups of people? You just talked about churning so you are comparing cows with sheep. Sir Brian Bender: It is a dipstick into the staff we have. Surely the measure of morale and motivation is the staff we have. Q9 Joan Ruddock: Are the returns anonymous? Sir Brian Bender: Yes. Q10 Chairman: What is the sample of staff who participated in these exercises? Sir Brian Bender: About 60 per cent. Q11 Chairman: In both of them? Sir Brian Bender: We may have hit 70 per cent in the first one and 65 per cent in the second one. Q12 David Taylor: Collected electronically? Sir Brian Bender: Yes. Q13 Chairman: The reason I am asking these questions is that when you go through the voluminous report it is quite difficult to find any of this information. I will put my hand up and say I have not read every single page and I am sorry. I know my more assiduous colleagues have visited every single page so they will be able to tell me where this mystery scorecard scoring is, but is this the kind of thing you think you ought to be putting in your annual report? Sir Brian Bender: It is an interesting question and the Freedom of Information Act may take it away from us but we want a very frank assessment of some of these measures in the scorecard. We want to know if things are getting worse and we want to know how we tackle them. There is an interesting question for any organisation, if you are trying to find out frankly what people think. Is the best thing to do to put that in the public domain and then you end up with a risk of people not telling you the blunt truth? Q14 Chairman: The reason I am probing this is that you put a lot of emphasis on the Developing Defra programme. You, in your own presentation at the beginning, talked about the balance scorecard. I am searching around for something to show me that in X number of measures seven out of ten are better than they were two years ago and I cannot find it. Mr Hudson: Can I pick up on the staff survey? Two things: one, the staff survey is taken seriously by everybody. We have discussions about not only what are the results but what is the thinking behind the results. One reason why we went for quarterly is that we want to be seen to be held to account for the kind of feedback we get from our own staff and for the staff themselves to comment on that as we go on through the year, not just wait to the end of the year. I think the balance scorecard helps influence the mind set of myself and my managers to take into account the things that we should be looking out for, not least stakeholder customer satisfaction. Whether or not we have the measurements in place yet and we can judge what those measurements are, it is influencing how we go about doing our job. Q15 Chairman: You mentioned the word "customer" and customers are in the section in the balance scorecard under the heading "The Classic Quadrant." Are your customers two years on happier or not in the service that Defra is offering? Sir Brian Bender: I have some data on customer satisfaction. All our major delivery bodies do customer satisfaction surveys. The aggregated data is, for what it is worth, 83 per cent. What I do not have is detail of how that relates to a year or two previously. Chairman: I think it would be quite useful because you are a deliverer of services and the report reflects on the things you have been doing. In the classic scorecard, customers are one of the four key areas and the Committee would find it interesting to know in the various ways you deliver services whether you are doing better or worse. Q16 Mr Lepper: Could I clarify something that was said a while ago about data protection and freedom of information? I do not think I quite followed what you were arguing there. The Chairman was asking about providing some of the information that we have just been discussing in the report. You have told us that the returns from staff are anonymous. I do not quite see therefore why there might be some inhibition about using that information. Sir Brian Bender: I was making a slightly different point. Certainly I am very ready to share with the Committee - and maybe we can discuss this with the clerk afterwards - exactly what you would like to have. We can provide information from the staff survey, information from previous tracking of customer attitudes in different parts of the organisation compared with the present. I was making a rather broader point, which is the impact of the Freedom of Information Act on any document produced for an organisation to tell it fairly frankly what it thinks about itself and how it is doing and whether that necessary internal frankness would risk being diluted in a way that may be unhelpful to running the organisation. I was not making a value judgment one way or another. It is a much broader point. Q17 David Burnside: Can you prove over the last 12 months that one of your customers, the farming community, by qualitative and quantitative market research terminology, are getting better delivery from your Department now than they had 12 months ago? Sir Brian Bender: The Rural Payments Agency who have the main relationship with farmers do track customer attitudes. I believe I am right in saying the figures have improved. The other key point about the Rural Payments Agency is that their performance in paying subsidies on time in 2003 was the best they have had. 2003 had excellent payment performance on arable area payments. 96.1 per cent were met within the deadline. I can provide quite a lot of data on that. It was the year before when the situation was bad. 2002 was bad on the bovine schemes. Q18 Chairman: I think what the line of questioning perhaps indicates is that what we lack are, for the laymen - and we are keen observers of your Department's activity - some simple, easy to understand measures, year on year, of how you are doing in the areas which you yourself outline. Page 29 of the annual report deals with the one stop shop pilot project. This box tells me that the project delivers diverse appraisal requirements in a unified way by providing practical support, guidance and assistance to policy divisions. It contributes, it says here, to Defra's commitment to better policy making by improving the quality of policy appraisal. Can you explain what all that means? What has it been doing and has it had any measurable effect? Sir Brian Bender: What it has been trying to do is ensure that the evaluation of a policy proposal before it is put forward properly brings together the different legs of sustainable development, the economic, the social and the environmental. We set up teams as described here, primarily led by economists, to work in each policy area to provide that underpinning support. Over the year described here, they provided advice to 45 policy teams. The evaluation that we have done so far indicates that it was a valued service by the policy maker. The world has moved on slightly because the Cabinet Office has now agreed that the regulatory impact appraisal, which has looked hitherto only at economic costs and benefits, is now going to be broadened to include the other legs of sustainable development, which is important particularly for Defra in spreading sustainable development across Whitehall. This work is now going to be continued in the Department, looking at sustainable development and regulatory impact together in policy areas. Q19 Chairman: You read these little boxes and think it sounds interesting. Can I have a tangible example of the before and after effect of this? All I get is a general description. You have amplified that by telling the Committee that you had economists advising in policy areas and that somehow in sustainability things have improved. I think it would be useful, if you are going to talk about the practical way in which the Department operates, to have some tangible example of what this actually means. Sir Brian Bender: Unless any of my colleagues can give you one now, I am not in a position to do so but I absolutely take the point. Q20 David Taylor: In one of your beloved quadrants, 3.2, we have the effectiveness of IT services. In the body of the report, who wrote the following paragraph or who understands the following paragraph on page 217: "In developing the IT strategy, a system road map, highlighting the key dependencies between the major IT systems over the next few years has been produced to support the prioritisation of IT spending and ongoing planning by the e-Business sub-committee. These plans will need revisiting when the e-nabling preferred supplier is known." Is that Mr Hudson? Sir Brian Bender: It would not have been drafted by him. It would have been drafted by our IT department. Q21 David Taylor: Who understands it then? Sir Brian Bender: Try me. Q22 David Taylor: You may recall that when this Committee was examining an earlier departmental report we were seized by the fact that the report was uneven in its effectiveness. The most woeful section we felt was in the area of IT strategy and lack of it. Can you explain to me why, despite all the accumulating evidence there is about the government's failure to implement in an effective, ordered way major IT systems - and it is true of this government as well as previous governments - you still ploughed on with IT outsourcing, and you are about to announce the results of all that the last few months has contained? Why are you ploughing on down that path when it seems so clear that it is not likely to be all that successful? Sir Brian Bender: I do not accept the premise. One of the criticisms the Committee had, I think it may have been two years ago, was should we go down this road without having developed an IT strategy. We have developed an IT strategy and it is one, above all, based around having common registers across the Department and its associated bodies for customers, for land, spatial, and for livestock. It is based around those three common registers. It is not all but it is the core of our strategy. Coming back to your central question, the experience in government is that IT strategic partnership does help transform an organisation. Q23 David Taylor: Give me an example. Sir Brian Bender: Ignoring the more recent experience, the chairman of the Inland Revenue has said that the Revenue five years ago would not have got to where it has done without the EDS contract. They have helped the combination of efficiency and business transformation. Q24 David Taylor: In delivering tax credits and things like that? Sir Brian Bender: In improving the performance of the organisation, including in that sort of area. Clearly, there were some serious blips in the last 12 months which have been well documented before Parliament. Q25 David Taylor: Can I put to you, Sir Brian, that it seems to me, no pun intended, that your IT strategy as a Department is being developed on the hoof. Not only was there that advice, those observations of two years ago and that criticism that the existence of the strategy should lead on the sorts of decisions you were taking, but it is acknowledged at page 217, paragraph four, that these plans will need revisiting when the e-nabling preferred supplier is known. That organisation must be licking their lips and rubbing their hands at the thought of the resources that they are going to be able to dip their outsourcing ladle into. As the months and years of that contract roll by, I would like to hear what sorts of checks you have to ensure that you are not over a barrel as far as the IT outsourcing is concerned, as was so quite often in the area of local government where I worked for 30 years. Sir Brian Bender: I will be very ready to report back to the Committee whenever on how the contract is going. We hope to sign with the preferred bidder by the end of this month. The more substantive point I would make back is that the process we have been following, our readiness to conclude this contract, manage the risks and run this partnership for the Department's IT, has been through the peer review of the Office of Government Commerce earlier this year, around the turn of the year, and is now currently going through OGC gateway three, which will indicate what this expert peer review thinks of our state of readiness. The interview I had with the team leader suggested he was fairly optimistic about it. Q26 David Taylor: Your existing IT staff are all reasonably happy with what is happening, are they? Sir Brian Bender: First of all, it affects the business and the IT staff. It affects the whole Department. One of the crucial aspects of this is: is the Department itself going to be mature enough to have the right relationship. There are about 300 or 400 staff who will be transferred across into IBM if they are the company we sign the contract with. There have been intensive discussions with the trade union side and with the staff on that. They have mixed feelings about it, but my impression is that the majority of individual staff are now up for it. Q27 Chairman: How many users are involved in the management of this system as opposed to, if you like, designers and builders? Sir Brian Bender: A lot. Every business area uses IT. Q28 Chairman: They are involved in helping to develop the new system? Sir Brian Bender: The whole process of the outsource contract and the evaluation of the bids involved dozens and dozens of different representatives of user areas across the Department. They have been heavily involved and they are certainly heavily involved in the refinement of the IT strategy. Q29 Chairman: If something goes wrong - and I would not necessarily expect you to talk in numbers at this stage, because there are sensitivities - are there penalties for the provider if there is failure? Mr Burchell: Yes. On the earlier question about how we stop being taken over a barrel, for a start, the contract is initially for a seven year term but then subject to further review for three years and onwards in terms of a rolling programme. Therefore, there is that element of contestability as you move through the contract. Q30 David Taylor: If the prime supplier started to come to you at some point during that seven year period, as has happened on other government outsource contracts, and said, "Sorry, we are on the point of collapse. We need more money", you are over a barrel at that point, are you not? Magistrates' courts would be an example. Mr Burchell: No. In the event of failure to perform under the contract, we clearly have rights to secure back the necessary infrastructure and so on from the supplier. We also have open book accounting so therefore we can keep under regular review the rates charged for the work. We have yardstick competition whereby on an annual basis all rates charged by the supplier will be checked against industry benchmarks and therefore adjusted. Therefore, if generally over a period of time rates are coming down in levels, that will be reflected in the contract. Also, there is no automatic exclusivity in the contract for every single piece of IT business that we may wish to do. Therefore, there is a degree of contestability and competitiveness bearing down on the supplier throughout. There are quite a number of checks and balances in there to make sure we are not over a barrel. In terms of whether or not we get the performance we require, as you would expect in any contract of this magnitude, there are a large number of service specifications in there and standards of service and payment are linked to results. Q31 Mr Lepper: I want to move on to some staffing issues. You will be aware that in this Committee's annual report we raise the issue, I think not for the first time, of Defra keeping us informed in advance, where possible, of major appointments. Sir Brian Bender: These are public appointments by ministers rather than Civil Service appointments, I think, in your report. Is that the issue? Mr Lepper: I have a feeling we covered appointments within the Department and the associated bodies. Chairman: We are interested in both. Q32 Mr Lepper: If we look at the list of staff in here, it does look as if there have been a number of significant appointments made over the last year: the director general of land use and rural affairs, chief veterinary officer, chair of the Sustainable Development Commission, chair of the Agricultural Wages Board, chair of the Royal Britannic Gardens at Kew, for instance; and forthcoming vacancies for the chair of English Nature and the chair of the Covent Garden Market Authority. What is your view about that issue of keeping us informed? Can you give us any information about what progress is being made? Sir Brian Bender: I have in front of me the recommendation that was in your annual report which, as drafted, referred to non-departmental public bodies, but if the Committee wishes to expand it to senior appointments in the Department we can obviously consider that. The short and factual answer is that advice on how to respond to this is currently with ministers. Q33 Mr Lepper: Admittedly, we have not had the response to our departmental report yet. Sir Brian Bender: The response to your annual report and this recommendation within it is currently with our ministers. Q34 Mr Lepper: You may feel therefore that you cannot answer my next question which is what your view is of keeping us informed about that sort of information. Let me put it another way. Can you see good reasons why we should not be kept informed? Sir Brian Bender: No, I cannot. I want to be very careful about this because anything that is said to a select committee is supposed to represent departmental policy. Since this is for a ministerial decision on this issue, I need to be rather careful. The issue, to be absolutely frank, gets into the boundary of: would this be before appointments are made and getting into American, congressional style pre-appointment hearings. I am very conscious of what the Liaison Committee has recommended as well as what your own Committee has recommended and asked for. There is advice on this in front of our ministers now. Q35 Mr Lepper: Do you have any intuition about when that will be resolved? Sir Brian Bender: Margaret Beckett is currently in China. I would hope it would be when she is back, pretty soon. There is no barrier to getting a decision on this and I will certainly give it a strong nudge. Q36 Chairman: For the record, let me refresh our memories on what the Committee did say last time on this point: "Once again, this year we have not been specifically informed by Defra in advance or indeed afterwards of any of these appointments to posts in non-departmental public bodies or elsewhere. We recommend, as we did last year, that the Department put in place procedures to inform us in advance of all major appointments pending and/or made in line with the recommendation of the Liaison Committee." I do not think that we set ourselves up as congressional style hearings. That is not what we are talking about. For example, the appointment of the new CVO came literally out of the ether. There was comment in the press about it and we pick up on this long after the event. The reason why it is important to us, a new CVO with new ideas, particularly in the many sensitive areas that we look at, is it would be of interest to the Committee. We might want to find out how they see the landscape so that at some point in the future we could come back and see how they are going on. It could be our balance scorecard, but we do not have that opportunity because we are not told. What is it that ministers are agonising over in this area of keeping us informed about basic information? Sir Brian Bender: They are looking at exactly how to reply to a question that has a recommendation and various kinds of and/ors or brackets in it. Q37 Chairman: Something like, "Dear Chairman, the CVO is retiring next week. A new one is going to be appointed" does not seem to me to be a too taxing decision for a department to make. Sir Brian Bender: The points you are making are being very clearly registered. Q38 Mr Lepper: We are clear that, so far as this Committee is concerned, this issue of congressional style hearings is not what we are about. The very obvious, common sense point is that if someone new is appointed to a post it might be a good idea to know that, as a Committee, so that we are fully informed, but also to have the opportunity once that person is in post at an early date to, if we wish to, ask him or her to come before us and let us know what their views are. Sir Brian Bender: I entirely understand the points being made. There is one development I had not appreciated from your report that has been brought out in this discussion which is that you are also talking, quite understandably, about appointments to the Department, so the response will cover both. Q39 Mr Lepper: On the question of staff diversity, I think it is a question of perhaps some congratulation to the Department that targets that you set yourselves during this year have by and large, I believe, been met, but there are issues about senior Civil Service and grade six posts. Could you comment on your view about the Department's performance in relation to the targets that were set and, in particular, the concerns there might be about those senior Civil Service and grade six posts? Sir Brian Bender: This may be a phrase I use later on when we get on to public service agreement targets as well. The targets are challenging. We have made progress in the last 18 months or so as table 48 bears out and indeed since publication. In October 2002, the proportion of women in the core department was 20 per cent. At the time this document went to press, we used January 2004 data and it was 23 per cent. I have been today informed that at the moment it is 27 per cent. It is moving up. These things will dip around a bit. How do we address problems like this? First of all, we have a number of networks for under-represented groups: a part-timers' network, an ethnic minority network, a lesbian, gay and bisexual network and a disability network. These are support groups of the relevant individuals who also act as lobby groups and can also be sounding boards. We have those four and I engage personally with them as do other parts of the corporate services. Secondly, we have a diversity and equality action plan and that includes how we address issues around recruitment and progression. You need to get them in and then you need to make sure that they progress. In terms of progression, one of the further actions we are setting in hand is something called elevated partnership which the Cabinet Office has been trialling, which is a mentoring programme for middle management women. If that works, we will try and introduce it for other under-represented groups as well. Q40 Mr Lepper: Is that a programme that exists across the public services? Sir Brian Bender: I do not know. We are now introducing it within Defra. We have also had some brain storming discussions among people at head of division level, the lowest rank of the senior Civil Service, about what are the barriers to advancement of people. To what extent are we selecting people in our own image? If we are fundamentally a white, male image in the senior Civil Service, are we looking for like people? To what extent are we encouraging things like flexible working, having the right role models and so on? There is a lot of work underway on it but I end where I began. These things are quite difficult and, while the trends are encouraging on women, they are not encouraging on people with disabilities at the moment and the numbers are so small on people in ethnic minorities that bringing one person in can make the numbers jump a bit. Q41 Mr Lepper: Is there one example you could give us of a change in procedures, for instance, with regard to recruitment over the last year or so that you feel has been helpful in encouraging diversity? Sir Brian Bender: One of the issues is where we advertise. One does not just advertise in The Standard; we might advertise in The Voice and other organs that are read by particular communities. Q42 Mr Lepper: I have a feeling if the maths are correct that there might be a discrepancy between the figures given on page 226 in the report and those on page 364. I do not think that is picked up in the note that we had helpfully about some errors in the departmental report. Sir Brian Bender: The clerk forewarned me of this, so I can answer it. It is not an error; it is a confusion. The confusion is that the second table, the one at the end, includes all the executive agencies as well as the core department. I think there is only one female, senior civil servant across the Rural Payments Agency and the other, larger ones. Both tables are correct but I apologise for the fact that they are confusing. Q43 Chairman: Could you refresh my memory and that of the Committee? The government has identified what appears to be a two stage reduction in the number of civil servants globally. How will your Department be affected and how are you going to deal with the staff morale issues that are associated with it? Sir Brian Bender: I need to be fairly cautious in what I say this side of the announcement of the results of the spending review. I will not be precise because we do not know the precise spending review settlement and the spending review settlement will include how the Department should respond to the efficiency review. I will try and answer your question within that caveat. Most of what Defra has been offering as part of the contribution to the efficiency review is built on existing programmes and projects. If you take something like the Rural Payments Agency change programme, which still foresees a reduction in staff numbers of about 1,000 people from the present numbers, as part of the programme that was initially announced in 2000 and includes closure at Crewe and Nottingham sites, that is part of it and that will be added to by roughly an additional 500 staff who will be released because of the simplicity once we have got over the hump of introducing the single farm payment. There will be staff reductions from how of about 1,500 in the Rural Payments Agency. That is one area. Another area in our efficiency review is the IT programme to make the England rural development programme operate more smartly. Most of that is going to go into improved effectiveness and productivity. Some will go into staff savings. Other areas where we are looking for efficiency savings are in Andrew Burchell's own finance function and in the HR function, where the costs of individual transactions with the overhead, say, of HR staff per member of staff in the Department, are inefficient at the moment. We have begun a programme to improve the efficiencies there and that will be backed up by an EHR system and between these two that will produce another 200 to 300 on finance and HR savings. There is a series of programmes in hand to add up to the overall efficiency saving. How will we keep up morale? Some of the basic rules, I guess, of first of all ensuring clarity from the beginning about what is involved, repeating the message to people so that staff are not left in the dark, showing that we value those who are or may be leaving as well as those who are staying. Coming back to Mr Taylor's earlier question about how staff involved in the IT outsource are feeling, the fact that the Department did some stress survey work with them and the fact that the Department has been having an HR strategy towards them has at least helped in some of those problems. That is the sort of issue. This is clearly something that is going to apply across the Civil Service. Q44 Joan Ruddock: I was involved in the environment sections of our first manifesto in 1997 where we promised to put the environment at the heart of government. This has been translated in the annual report as embedding sustainable development across government, Defra working with other departments to integrate sustainable development into decision making. The comment you make is, "There is abundant evidence that this is working." I want to put it to you that there is abundant evidence that this is not working. If we take the examples of the planned increase in fuel prices for September and the panic statements that came on 4 June from both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor that this now had to be reviewed in the light of oil price rises, this is a reaction that does not sit well with the notion that sustainable development has been embedded into the Treasury when it comes to looking at fuel price rises. Equally, the Environment Audit Committee, when it looked at the Aviation White Paper, concluded that the policies that were put forward there would actively promote a huge growth in air travel, again which was inconsistent with having accepted sustainable development. How effective do you think the Department has been in embedding sustainable development across government? Sir Brian Bender: Can I begin with what is not intended to sound a nit-picking point? I think there is quite a difference between putting environment at the heart and embedding sustainable development. Embedding sustainable development means getting the right win win decisions, balancing and looking across economic, social and environmental. Q45 Joan Ruddock: I simply make the comment that there is a long history to this. It is not as though Defra, the new Department, has had to seize sustainable development and try to spread it around. This has been the policy of our party prior to taking government in 1997. Sir Brian Bender: I do understand that point. There are a number of areas where we feel we have made a significant impact. The work on the follow-up to the Johannesburg summit, which I think you yourself were involved in, where the Department has led the way in publishing delivery plans on how we are going to implement those commitments and the work we are doing across government on that. The work we are doing with the Department of Health on health inequalities and public work. Some of the work we are doing with the Home Office. If you take the area of transport, the issue is how we reconcile the greenhouse gas emissions government objective with other government objectives to do with transport. There is good joint working with the Department of Transport and good progress, although the Committee may want to come back to where there is not progress, on air quality, again, an important environmental public health issue. On aviation, the issue was how to balance the economic growth with the potential environmental degradation. The White Paper identified some areas where there would be work proceeding on things like getting aviation into an emissions trading scheme and actions to control greenhouse gas emissions. Getting the absolute right decisions on each of these is a matter of judgment for the government on any one issue and Defra seeks to influence them. Ministers are part of the collective decision making process on that. Q46 Joan Ruddock: Surely, if there had been real influence, if the Department had been really listened to, if sustainable development had been really understood, an announcement because of oil price rises, for example, that we have to review the whole policy at that point would not have happened, if the Department had been successful in its mission? Sir Brian Bender: On the issue of the current concerns about fuel prices, this is so political, I think it would be unwise to express a view. Elliot Morley, as you know, did express a view and did issue a press release, making some of these points. Mr Hudson: When Mr Morley appeared with Stephen Tindale and others and Stephen Tindale really probed on this on that Friday, the day before the Chancellor had spoken, Mr Morley did not short change him in an answer and really spelled out what he thought was the other side of the agenda. I think he was so concerned that that message got across that it did not just get across to the people present, who obviously were very interested and would put it up on their website. He wanted it to get across to everybody. A news release was put out and that hit all our journalists. It has not gone away and Mr Morley has insisted that this is something he has strong views on. As you know, his predecessor in that post picked up on that in The Independent on Sunday and said, "Well done, Mr Morley. Well done, Defra." Q47 Joan Ruddock: The fact that you have a courageous minister who comes out with the right message is something that I and I imagine others on this Committee would very much applaud, but it does not get to the heart of the matter, does it? What we would be looking for is that such a statement was not made by the Treasury in the first place. Such a panic response to public pressure would not be made because there would be a real understanding that there has to be some restraint in terms of response to a pressure which could be and is entirely contrary to the demands of sustainable development. Sir Brian Bender: Can I broaden this slightly beyond fuel prices? The Treasury has been constructive in using other economic instruments to deal with environmental issues, the landfill tax, the 215 million they allocated to Defra for the emissions trading scheme and indeed the sense in Whitehall that one of the cross cutting themes of this spending review should be and is sustainable development. I look forward, like you, to seeing how that is reflected in the end game. Joan Ruddock: I think the Treasury has made great progress. Green taxation is something again that we are all very much committed to. There is progress being made, but it is the hard case, is it not, that tests your success and that is why I probed you on those two very important issues. Q48 Chairman: I want to come to something perhaps slightly less sensitive, particularly bearing in mind the content of page 25 in which it enunciates your being at the heart of sustainable development. I want to take you to the subject of nappies. One of the things that an organisation called The Nappy Alliance, who wrote to me, have said is you have, on the one hand the National Health Service in bounty packs to new mothers, busy giving them disposable nappies. On the other hand, you have people who are in the waste disposal industry telling us that one of the biggest, bulkiest, nastiest chunks of rubbish they have to deal with are the disposed of nappies. You have the third strand, these people in The Nappy Alliance, who are looking for sustainable products. How is government wired together to respond to that kind of message? For example, our Committee had the question of the disposal of nappies drawn to its attention when we were looking at matters connected with the Landfill Directive. The Department of Health is busy spending large sums of money in buying all these nappies. I think it spent something like £1.5 million purchasing 12 million disposable nappies. It is a big problem. How do you respond to that? Do you get any feedback on it and, if so, how do you say to Health, "Is this really compatible with sustainable development?"? Sir Brian Bender: On issues like this, the onus is on us to knock on their door. They have their task and unless we knock on their door the risk is they will not notice it. We have been knocking on their door on things like local food procurement with the health service, with the education system and so on. I suspect the answer on nappies, despite the action that successive Environment Ministers have taken in Defra - male, I should say, in each case - in promoting nappy awareness issues, is that I am not sure it is something that the Department has been pursuing actively enough with the Department of Health and the NHS. Q49 Chairman: This is about minimising the flows of waste that have to be disposed of. I pick on that particular example because the Nappy Alliance were kind enough to write and say, "Here is an issue" but for that read goodness knows what else. If you are talking about your Department, as you do on page 25, being at the heart of the Government's agenda on sustainable development, here is I think quite a big, bulky item in the waste chain which, with no disrespect, you have not addressed. One does wonder just how well this sort of sustainability argument is working. Sir Brian Bender: What we have done, working with the Office of Government and Commerce, is to get some guidance out on sustainable procurement more broadly and some quick wins that can be done. This is on the OGC website. At a general level on sustainable development and sustainable procurement we have been very active across government and using the OGC to do it. On the nappies issue there is clearly more for us to do. Q50 Mr Lepper: Chairman, I think to some extent you underestimate what Defra has done. For instance, in my local authority area last year, if not this year, there is an officer partly funded by Defra, I think through some funding scheme, to help promote the use of reusable nappies and working with the local health trusts on that. That is at the very local level. On the other hand, as the Chairman says, at a national level here is another department of government, the Department of Health, encouraging these bounty packs and therefore getting new mothers, new families, into the habit of continuing to use disposable nappies. You have some good achievements to boast about. You need to make sure they feed through all the way at a high level. Sir Brian Bender: One of the challenges is to make the connections between local, regional and national in just the way you are describing, Mr Lepper. Q51 Patrick Hall: Still on this theme, given what has just been said, Sir Brian, would you say on balance in practical terms Defra's role with regard to embedding sustainable development across the piece is about achieving common policies for sustainable development rather than in practice being able to challenge and test the outcome of decisions on the ground, or are you going to say that you want to do both? If you want to do both, have you got the resources to do both? Sir Brian Bender: There are a number of answers to that. First of all, we operate in tandem with Jonathan Porritt's Sustainable Development Commission and we are just reviewing the relative responsibilities of the Department and his commission, which certainly operates a challenged process with departments. The first challenge has to be, whether it is by Defra or the STC, to try and ensure that the policies are sustainable policies. The second stage of the work comes down to the implementation. Somewhere in the report there is a reference to a taskforce on sustainable development that Margaret Beckett chairs, which has been looking, among other things, at what is happening at regional and local level with delivery of sustainable development, or delivery of policies and services sustainably, at a local and regional level, so there is a bit of both. If we get this right, it should not be Defra resources; it can be local government resources, government office resources and pressing the right button in government departments. If we get it wrong, then it is a few Defra staff trying to push water up-hill. Q52 Patrick Hall: Would you say that you are achieving the first? Even if people adopt excellent policies, they may not implement them, we all know that, but would you say that you are achieving the first? Sir Brian Bender: I think we make progress in some areas and less in others. In some of the work on local communities at national level from the Home Office, some of the work on health inequalities with the Department of Health and public health work, I think we are making real progress. Q53 Patrick Hall: With regard to the example raised by the Chairman about the NHS ordering nappies, is that something that conflicts with that Department's own policies? Sir Brian Bender: That is an interesting question. I do not know the answer to it. They will have one set of policies around value for money on procurement. The way we have managed to turn that trick on food procurement is to point out that it need not be more expensive to buy locally-sourced foods, and that is the argument we need to have as to whether, in any one of these areas, there is a conflict between the cost and the sustainability. If there is, then it is a more difficult argument to make. On local food procurement for schools with the health services and others, we are managing to demonstrate that that is not necessarily the case. Q54 Patrick Hall: If Defra is the champion of testing the embedding of sustainable development policies across government departments, surely you should know whether or not the Department of Health has adequate policies and then others can conclude whether or not you are implementing those? You have said that part of your job is to see whether they are implementing them, but on the first part, surely you can say, or should be able to say, whether or not that department has had a look at sustainable development policies? Sir Brian Bender: One of the things that we are looking at, both with the review of the Department and the Sustainable Development Commission and secondly the review of the Sustainable Development Strategy, is how scattergun we should be and how focused we should be. My concern up to now is that the Department has risked being too scattergun and it would be much better if we focused our attention on sustainable development in government on a smaller number of policy areas and made sure we got those right rather than, as we do at the moment, spending too much of our time compiling reports on what other departments are doing and actually, as I think the Chairman said earlier, necessarily challenging them but choosing the right areas for the challenge and getting the analysis and evidence right. That is why I think for Defra and indeed the Sustainable Development Commission the challenge lies in the period ahead. That is part of the purpose of the review of the Sustainable Development Strategy. Q55 Mr Wiggin: I am not sure how responsible you are supposed to be by insisting that the nanny state changes the type of nappy babies are supposed to wear. Is that not supposed to be a government policy? They have not actually got that policy so why is it your fault? Sir Brian Bender: I picked up the gauntlet thrown down by the Chairman. I think our responsibility in this area would be to question whether what the Department of Health is doing, or the NHS in this case, is sustainable and covers the waterfront of government policies. If the answer is that there is a conflict, then how is that conflict reconciled and where is the value for money? The role of the Department is not to ensure that the NHS and the Department of Health pursues a nanny state but to see whether there is policy inconsistency and whether that can be reconciled. Q56 Mr Wiggin: One of the alarming things I think you said earlier was that 49 per cent of the 60 per cent of the staff that filled out the form were proud to work for Defra. Perhaps that is why they are frustrated. Is that not likely to be the case? Sir Brian Bender: I think there is quite a strong sense of job satisfaction and pride in the Department, especially when you consider how people must have felt about three years ago when the Department first --- Q57 Mr Wiggin: What is the sort of equivalent for your customers in terms of how many of them are proud to be served by Defra? Sir Brian Bender: I do not know that answer. I gave an answer on how many felt they were getting satisfaction; that was about 80-85 per cent. Mr Hudson: I want to pick up on your earlier point on sustainable development and what we think we are achieving. One issue on which I have wrestled with Jonathan Porritt is: how do we communicate effectively what sustainable development is? There is a concept and then there are the practicalities of it. It is quite clear that where we think we could make progress on any issue is by making sure that in any decision that government takes everyone is weighing up the economic, environment and social aspects and that they are striking a balance between all those three. Just to get people to go through those thought processes is obviously something on which we are trying to work. Sir Brian Bender: That is one of the purposes of this one-stop shop that you were asking about earlier. How can we evaluate the economic and sustainable development aspects of policy decisions? That is what it is trying to do. Q58 Joan Ruddock: One of the ways where it is helpful I think and where there is opportunity for sustainable development thinking to be introduced into departments is by the exchange of personnel. I wonder how many people are actually in the Treasury, in DTI, in Transport, who have a real understanding and who are seconded by Defra and whether you have exchanges with people from those departments coming to work in Defra. Sir Brian Bender: I cannot give you the numbers at the moment. We certainly have some people in the Treasury from among our own people. The Permanent Secretary of the DTI and I have agreed that we need to set up what he and I call some strategic secondments between the departments. The total number of secondments in or out of Defra is 173 below the senior civil service and then at senior civil service level 30 members of the senior civil service are outside the department and 10 are in it. The basic point you are making, which is that you can influence and learn about other organisations by working in them is absolutely well made and well taken in the Department. One of the things we want to do more of is interchange including much more short-time shadowing of that sort. We do want to increase the scale. Q59 Joan Ruddock: That is good. My final point again comes from the Annual Report which reports that progress against the PSA target, which is on promoting sustainable development across government, has not yet been assessed and it says that a revised delivery plan is promised for spring 2004. I think we have just hit the summer. I wonder where the report is. What has happened to it? Is there a new delivery plan? Is it lurking somewhere? Sir Brian Bender: In part I think it is overtaken by the Review on Sustainable Development that is underway. The better delivery plan will be one based on the results of the Review of the Sustainable Development Strategy, which will take us a year from now into spring of 2005. What I am not sure about is where we are. We have a delivery plan for the current target but the current target is essentially one of promotion; it is not very tangible. The new target needs to focus on the new Sustainable Development Strategy, which needs to be, as I was trying to say earlier, a little more granular and to identify where we need to make the most impact. The more meaningful delivery plan would be one based on that. Q60 Joan Ruddock: Exactly when might that be? Sir Brian Bender: That one would be spring 2005. What I am not sure about is exactly where things stand on the availability of our delivery plan for the present. I can check and provide the Committee with a note on that. Q61 Joan Ruddock: If we are not expecting any kind of assessment, then we will not able to see any judgments about this until spring of next year, and that would be rather alarming, would it not? Sir Brian Bender: I will come back to the Committee on that. Q62 Chairman: Can we probe you a bit about page 258, Appendix 4, PSA Target 2 on the subject of carbon dioxide emissions? Sir Brian Bender: What would you like me to say? Would you like me to say how we are doing? Q63 Chairman: I would like you to explain why you are not doing what you said you were going to do. Why have you found it difficult to keep on track towards the original PSA target? Sir Brian Bender: There is a two-part target, as you will appreciate. We are on track for part one, which is to meet the Kyoto target to reduce emissions of the basket of greenhouse gases by 12.5 per cent below 1990 levels. We are on track for that and indeed the emissions of that basket of gases fell by 15.3 per cent between the base year and 2002. The second part of the target is moving towards reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide by 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2010. On that one we have reported a slippage because on current or most recent forecasts from the DTI on emissions projections we think that we are heading at the moment to between 12 and 14 per cent on current policies for CO2 reductions by 2010. Q64 Chairman: What has gone wrong? Sir Brian Bender: What has changed is that increased emissions from coal-fired generation is higher than previously expected and higher than previously expected GB growth and shortfalls from carbon savings from transport. We are trying to put two things right. First, the national allocation plan for the EU emissions trading scheme that we put in would increase that figure and be consistent with a 15.2 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions. Secondly, as I mentioned when the informal session in the Department happened last week, the climate change programme is being reviewed by the end of this year and we will need to look at and reach collective agreement in government about what needs to be done to be more confident in saying we are moving towards it. Q65 Chairman: Can I be absolutely clear in the context of this review: are you as a department in charge of it? Sir Brian Bender: We are leading it. Q66 Chairman: The question I ask is: who is in charge of it? Who is going to be the Minister who says that this is the Government's policy? Would it be Margaret Beckett? Sir Brian Bender: I would be very surprised if it was not. I would assume it was but it is still collective. It still has to have buy-in from DTI, Transport and Treasury. Q67 Chairman: Somebody has to be in charge because, going back to the previous line of questioning about sustainability, it is all right having the class monitor but it is a question of who is the head, who is in charge? Who is actually going to crack the whip about saying: what is the content of the policy? The sense I get from you is that, whilst you would be surprised if it was not your Secretary of State, there is still an element of doubt as to who is driving this thing. Sir Brian Bender: I have no doubt she is driving it. I am certain of that. What I am not clear about is what you might say the Government's arrangements are going to be. The target itself, as you will appreciate, is a shared one between Defra and DTI. It is not currently shared with Transport. That is a subject that is, as we speak, under discussion in government. There will have to be some process of getting collective decisions at the end of it, as you well appreciate, but I have no doubt that, in terms of who is driving it, Margaret Beckett will consider that she is driving it. Mr Hudson: May I say on climate change that it is quite clear that the Prime Minister takes this very seriously and has given his leadership internationally and nationally. Our own Secretary of State is always keen to impress that. Q68 Chairman: As this Committee has highlighted, for example in the context of the many debates we have had on bio-fuels, we have your department being an enthusiastic promoter of it; we have your department publishing glossy leaflets telling us what a wonderful impact it is going to have on the rural economy and rural employment. Then, on the other hand, we have the Treasury under attack for not providing sufficient inducement to get an industry based on UK oilseed rape oil as a source for the bio-fuel under way; we have no bio-ethanol industry to speak of; we have no connection between any of this and the Department of Transport; and we have the DTI wired into a increase in hydrocarbon-based energy policy for the United Kingdom. This does not smack of a policy that is being properly co-ordinated with one department clearly in charge setting a sustainable agenda. Sir Brian Bender: As I say, I do not know what the Government's arrangements will be. I have no doubt Margaret Beckett will be driving it. I have no doubt that the DTI will be co-owners of the public service agreement target for the period ahead and therefore they will have a public stake. There is a matter of debate going on as to whether the Department of Transport should also be co-owners of this target. Chairman: I think the Committee looks forward to conducting an inquiry towards the end of the year into this area when we can return to it in more detail. We very much hope that both the driver and the road map might form part of our evidence. Q69 David Burnside: Can I turn to communications and the Department in a wider sense? Perhaps you could let us know what you regard as your greatest communications success over the last 12 months and your greatest failure and why on both? Mr Hudson: I can certainly address the former. The latter I will have to think about. I think for me the biggest single success, and obviously the Permanent Secretary pays a very close interest in communications and will take a view, was GM. It was a highly contentious issue where I think 18 months ago the view was that the Prime Minister had made up his mind and that we, the government and civil service, were not talking to anyone. I think what has emerged 18 months later is that we have put more research into the public realm than possibly any other government; we have been open and transparent, not least with the GM public debate process, in which this Committee took a close interest and where we very much agreed that there were lots of lessons to be learnt. To get a policy announced which showed that we were basing our decision on sound science whilst at the same time acknowledging public concerns and reflecting what the regulatory structure was I think was quite a communications achievement, given the degree of scepticism, given the degree of hostility. It was a tricky, contentious issue, on which nonetheless I think we did a lot to show that we were engaging people, that we were listening, and yet taking a decision, in my view. Q70 David Burnside: And failures? Mr Hudson: There are various things that I am working on and I do not want to sound as if there is a lot to work on. I would not pick out a single failure as such. Can I address it this way? If you ask about things on which we are working, I think it is this whole area about how we are more effective at influencing public behaviour on climate change and waste and the area of how we can communicate more effectively with farmers, even though obviously we have picked up that we are improving our communications. Q71 David Burnside: Can I just continue with that? All right, there has been no major failure over the last 12 months. There is some sign recently, frighteningly, about a new brain disease in cattle - The Guardian story - which hopefully will never take place and hopefully we are not going to into another BSE or whatever it is called. There is some criticism not only from The Guardian but from The Times on the way you handled that in public relations terms. I cannot predict what is going to happen but you were criticised and not just from the source of the original story. Have you learned any lessons from that? Sir Brian Bender: May I respond? When a case like this arises, and what happened was that an animal that died on a farm in Cumbria last September was found at post mortem to have a particular apparent infection, it is sent to one of our LA laboratories for testing. They then looked back at previous cases they had had and they identified that over the last 10 years there were 21 similar cases - 20 in sheep, one in cattle. They then did two things in parallel: they prepared a letter to go to the Veterinary Record for publication and they set up a meeting of an inter-departmental group called the UK Zoonoses Group chaired by the Chief Medical Officer. That met in April and its remit is to look at new, emerging or potential animal diseases from a public health perspective. What then happened was that a summary of the results of that meeting was placed on the Department of Health website and on the Defra website. With hindsight, it was an impartial summary because it said simply that members had been informed of this possible new and emerging disease in cattle but it did not go on to say that the Health Protection Agency had been asked to lead a precautionary assessment on an urgent basis as to what the public health risk might be, and it did not go on to say that a publication is being prepared for the Veterinary Record, which has now appeared. Are there lessons to be learned? Yes. I do not think it was put into the public domain as smartly as it might have been or as fully as it might have been. I think that is something we need to look at with the Department of Health. Q72 David Burnside: Staying on communications, you spend a considerable and significant amount of money on publicity campaigns, both above the line and below the line, on waste reduction, whether it is recycling or reduction. Can you give us some sort of feel for the success of these campaigns? How do you judge the marketing, advertising and public relations activities, which I believe have massively increased, against the end result on recycling and waste reduction? Can you give us some judgment on another great success within your Department? Mr Hudson: I said there was work to be done on waste. As a general point on campaigns, I would say that we are a department that thinks quite carefully about where we should spend money. We are well aware that there are some public information campaigns where the information you convey is something that people want to hear and they want to follow up. The kinds of campaigns we are going to attempt to become involved in will tend to take people out of their comfort zones. We are very conscious as a department that often marketing alone will not do the job. We have certainly had research carried out by Green Alliance and DEMOS to suggest that we have to be very careful not to assume that information leads to awareness or that awareness leads to action. That is research we commissioned, which is very much helping to shape how we think about campaigns. Q73 David Burnside: If that is information that does not lead to awareness and does not lead to action, what are you carrying out the campaigns for? Mr Hudson: If there is a connection, then fine. An example of an effective campaign is Think about drink driving which has a powerful communications message and a powerful campaign around it but it is also linked with strict law enforcement. Q74 David Burnside: The police will prosecute for that. Mr Hudson: Yes. We take this very seriously in government and in our communications thinking in Defra and we need to evaluate just how effective these campaigns are. We need to know that the money, if it was spent, would have the right effect. On waste, it so happens that we are putting money towards it. We are planning a local campaign and a national campaign. We have assigned £10 million for a national campaign; the remainder will support local authority campaigns. The public awareness campaign will consist of two interlocking initiatives. On the local side the "how to" of waste minimisation will be aimed at local authorities and their communities, which we will roll out later this year. The national campaign will be the "why" of waste minimisation. We have already assigned a budget for the national campaign that covers television advertising, the press and awareness-raising events. As a general principle, since you are digging at that, you can spend £100,000 well on, say, "five a day", the campaign about eating fruit and vegetables, because you have a really strong network and that network is working with others to get the message across, or you can spend in the order of £2/3 million on an effective television campaign. Invariably those campaigns could cost as much as £7/8 million. Working Family Tax Credit cost about £16 million. There are different ways in which to do this. We are well aware that it is not just down to money; it is also to do with the networks you work with and the interests of the media. I am very aware, partly because of my background, of the degree to which television now can deal with serious issues and yet link those with entertainment. It could well be, particularly when we are targeting young people who are very important in a lot of the issues we want to communicate, that we will have to work more with the media which are doing programmes on this and link into what they are doing and think about how we respond to that and how we provide information around it. Q75 David Burnside: Why can you not get Zak Goldsmith and the environmental lobby and the organic lobby on-side? They are very sceptical of your Department and its performance in relation to the future of farming in this country. Mr Hudson: I think there was scepticism, not least for the reasons that Sir Brian gave about when we started as a department. Increasingly, thanks to the involvement of others at summits and so on, people have seen that our own Secretary of State is someone who gets the business done, is on top of the brief and gets results, not least at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg and on CAP reform in Luxembourg, which all had a very important environmental dimension to them. I think we are winning a lot of respect. We do see these groups perfectly understandably as challenging us, keeping us on our toes. We cannot always see eye-to-eye with them. Obviously their job is different from ours. I do not know if I want them so much on-side that they are silent. I think they perform a vital role. Equally, we have to be seen to manage those expectations and put what they say in some context. Sir Brian Bender: I am not sure if it is the goal of a pressure group to be satisfied with what we are doing. Q76 Joan Ruddock: Chairman, I am bound to make a comment I think about the success of the GM strategy. I can actually understand the claim you make. As a technical process dealing with a very difficult situation, I can well understand your self-congratulation and can approve of that but it was a huge democratic failure and it needs to be recognised by the Department at every point. Whether it was the public debate, the science report, the economic report or the farm-scale trials, the whole lot, there was no debate in Parliament. I know that is not a matter for civil servants but it was huge democratic failure in that sense. I am not asking for a response. I do want to ask about the communications strategy and take you back to the fuel price rises. That caused the greatest crisis that this Government has had and there were demonstrations. We could have predicted that at another time of difficulty, and again you could have predicted that because of the Iraq war, this issue would surface again. There was a huge need for public education between those two points. I just wonder the extent to which you feel you have done anything in that field and why there has not been a budget for television advertising that links sustainability of this behaviour - waste, transport and other things - to climate change. People do feel strongly about climate change but there has not seemingly been a way of connecting the behaviour of people with government aims, for which Government can take a lot of credit and that is indeed very positive. Is there a bid in the CSR? Are we going to get more money? Can we do more in this field? Do we want to do more? Sir Brian Bender: I do not think I am going to predict what the results of the Spending Review are. We have been spending a total of about £13 million on climate-related communications, mainly looking at areas like energy efficiency and renewables. We are also doing some work as part of the national curriculum in science and geography and so we are looking at younger people. We are also doing some work with DTI, Carbon Trust, Energy Saving Trust, on public attitudes towards climate change in the period ahead. The point you are making is one we are looking at and trying to work on more. I am not sure whether television advertising is the answer but we are doing some work on how we do improve public opinion on these issues, and that links in to the whole sustainable consumption and production agenda and how you encourage people to consume sustainably. Q77 Joan Ruddock: You cannot tell us whether you have made a bid for more? Sir Brian Bender: I can tell you that Margaret Beckett wishes to spend more money in the years ahead in areas around climate change, energy efficiency, fuel poverty and so on. What I cannot say at the moment is what the cake may look like and how it will be allocated. Mr Hudson: It will definitely have a communications dimension. We have already started talking, not just with officials but with stakeholders. We have commissioned some study by COI to help us form our view on that. Rest assured that on climate change communications there is that work going on but, as Brian says, we cannot quantify that at the moment. Q78 Alan Simpson: I want to move on to quality issues, but you must just allow me to follow Joan Ruddock on the GM issue. As a communications success, I just want to congratulate the Department on communicating a complete volte face in its position as a consistent policy initiative. For the record, I think this Committee needs to remind the Department that it was seen as taking a remarkably laissez faire view of GM crops in relation to their impact on agriculture and the environment and that the Department and its Ministers have had to be dragged kicking and screaming to an acknowledgment that you could not give the technology away to consumers, let alone sell it. If that is a success, you deserve all credit. I will leave it there. In terms of the targets and air quality, one of the Committee's criticisms of the Department over the years has been that whenever there have been targets the Department's first move has been to try and lower the bar. I just want to pick up on a couple of specifics in relation to air quality. On page 50 of your report, you look at the problems about emissions and particularly the problems about nitrogen dioxide and particles, or particulates. It states: "....although the vast majority of the country will meet those objectives, there will be some areas (mostly urban and roadside locations) where, with present policies and technologies, it is questionable whether the targets will be achieved by the relevant dates." I found that astonishing because it is like saying: we are meeting our air quality targets where there are no vehicles but wherever there are vehicles we might not hit the targets. I would like you to tell me: given that this is the area where we are likely to see the generation of most nitrogen dioxide and where particles are likely to occur in greater densities, what are you doing to ensure that those are precisely the targets that we hit? Sir Brian Bender: May I pick up part of your point which you slightly threw away? We are on course for the majority of the individual components of the air quality targets. It is the two or three you identified where there is a problem. In most cases, although in ozone there is also a problem in some rural areas, as the report says and as you quoted, the problem is at roadside. Point one, as I think the report says, is that we need to do more to achieve the nitrogen dioxide, ozone and particles targets. What are we doing? The first thing is that local authorities have been asked to develop air quality action plans for local air quality hot spots. There is a dialogue between the Department and local authorities about that. Local traffic management plans can play a powerful role and in London there is obviously the Mayor's own plan. Secondly, the Department of Transport are looking again over the summer at a 10-year plan and air quality will have its role in that. There is a discussion to be had and it is being had with the Department of Transport about that. This is a target that they jointly own. Thirdly, at European level there are issues around reduction of vehicle emissions with future design and indeed combustion plan emissions, which is of course separate from traffic. There is a series of actions. We do have to do more. I do not see any sign of anyone looking to relax the targets. Q79 Alan Simpson: May I follow that up specifically? Of the 63 local authorities that have action plans and 120 that have defined their own air quality management areas, can the Committee just be quite clear that your guidance notes are about meeting the targets and not getting close or redefining the targets? Sir Brian Bender: I think I had better come back to you on that. You are asking a very precise question that I am not able to answer, but I will. Q80 Alan Simpson: I am grateful that you have been as open about that as you have. Can I move on to the last of those points to which you made reference, which is in relation to the broader discussions? On page 51 you do make the point about your duties. May I ask whether you are saying to the other government ministers and departments that there is not a case for ducking the stand in relation to fuel duties? Can you tell me whether you are making the case to the Department of Transport that aviation fuel duties cannot be exempt from those discussions and are they returning your calls? Sir Brian Bender: I think I prefer not to get into the first part of your question on fuel duty increases and what discussion may or may not be taking place within Government. On the second part of the question, it is government policy, first of all, as I said earlier, to have aviation emissions covered in the next stage of the European Emissions Trading Scheme. That is something that is collectively agreed and will be pursued in Government. There is discussion going on in Government at the moment about the whole issue of taxation of aviation fuel, but the general feeling on that across Government is that this is a multilateral issue not just an EU issue. Q81 Alan Simpson: Chairman, you wanted me to try and link this with my second question which is about fuel poverty. It does link in. Joan Ruddock, in an earlier question, linked this in terms of carbon emissions to the fuel poverty strategy. She asked about the budget for this. Your reply, Sir Brian, was to say that you could not say at this stage how the cake would be cut. Can I just come back to that specifically and ask you whether you have put a bid in as a department for the 50 per cent increase in spending that the Fuel Poverty Advisor Group had told the Government is needed for the warm front budget if their legal commitments to eradicate fuel poverty are going to be met? Sir Brian Bender: First of all, we entirely accept the commitment is there for 2010 for vulnerable households. Secondly, I do not believe Government accepts the 50 per cent figure, but it does accept there needs to be a budget increase. I think there is a debate to be had with the Fuel Policy Advisory Group about the quantum. They produced their views and those are valuable. Thirdly, is this an area where the Department is seeking, in the Spending Review, to allocate additional resources? Yes. Q82 Alan Simpson: Do you think that is adequately reflected in your PSA requirements targets? Sir Brian Bender: No. We certainly discussed it last week and I suspect we discussed a year ago before this Committee that our PSA target is the wrong target. We have achieved it, which is great because we have treated the relevant number of households. I imagine therefore that their fuel efficiency has improved as a result. We do not know how many of those it will have been taken out of fuel poverty. There has been an improvement, and so in the most recent data, in 2002, the number of fuel-poor households is 1.4 million but the target is meaningless. Therefore what we are looking for, quite apart from the budget and the Spending Review - and I do not think there is any difficulty in agreeing this with the Treasury - is a target that addresses the requirement as you described it a while ago: moving towards removing fuel-poor, vulnerable households by the years 2010, something like that. Q83 Alan Simpson: You would accept that this numbers game that we have been playing in terms of meeting the target is only relevant as long as you accept that the word "reduce" in your PSA agreement rather than the actual commitment or supposed agreement, which is the ending of fuel poverty. Sir Brian Bender: The aim is to eliminate fuel poverty. There happens to be a legal commitment as well, which matters just a bit, and that is what the policy should be about. The current target of treating 600,000 households is useful but it is not actually directly linked to and measuring progress towards that target. It is bound it have some impact on it but it is the wrong target. Q84 Alan Simpson: Again, just to be clear, it is useful but only in the sense of saying that you can meet those targets by giving each household a couple of low-energy light bulbs and it actually says nothing about whether they are removed from fuel poverty, other than that under current rules they are not even going to get a second bite of the cherry. Can we just have as a committee an assurance from you that the targets you will be working to in your PSA agreement for the coming year are going to move away from the nonsense of a target that could be met with two low-energy light bulbs? Sir Brian Bender: There are two answers. First of all, I fervently hope that when the outcome of the Spending Review is announced and published with the new PSA, which actually only bites in April next year, that PSA will be a meaningful target of the sort that you are describing. That is a matter for discussion between the Department and the Treasury but I hope and believe we will get a meaningful target. The second thing is that we still need to publish, and will do I think in the not too distant future and in the light of the Spending Review outcome, the fuel poverty implementation plan. Again, that will need to address never mind the current PSA targets but the elimination of fuel poverty. I do not think there is any disagreement between what I am trying to say and your line of questioning. Q85 Alan Simpson: Under the Farm Energy Conservation Act, the Department was under a duty to publish progress reports in terms of the data, not just warm words. As I understand it, the Seventh Progress Report under Haskins should now be complete. I would like to know when you anticipate being able to produce the data relating to that? Sir Brian Bender: Perhaps I can come back to the Committee on that point? Q86 Mr Lepper: I have some quick questions on a couple of the indicators that are used under PSA Target 3 on natural heritage. This Committee will be publishing a report quite soon on sites of special scientific interests and so I will not dwell on that too much this afternoon. The target remains at bringing 95 per cent of SSSIs into favourable condition by 2010. From what you say in the departmental report, you are pretty optimistic that that target will be met. That is so, is it not? There is no doubt about that? Sir Brian Bender: What page are you looking at? Q87 Mr Lepper: It is page 258, Appendix 4. Sir Brian Bender: We have made a good start. The current figure, as you will probably know from your inquiry, is 62.9 per cent on target. The aim for next spring, which we and English Nature are committed to, is 67 per cent. We have not yet done the analysis of what we call the trajectories to get from 67 per cent to the 95 per cent. Like many, this is a challenging target. Good progress is being made. There is very good joint working with English Nature. There is a much better understanding than there was a year ago about the different factors that affect the conditions of AAA sites, and so we are much more on the case than we were this time last year. I hope your report will at least reflect that. This is a challenging target. Q88 Mr Lepper: The Minister seemed quite confident when he appeared before us. I am sure that confidence will feed its way throughout the Department. Obviously the Government will reply to our report when it is published. Sir Brian Bender: On the point I made about our ability to assess progress, we are expecting to be in a position to do that for the autumn performance report. At the moment, we have the target; we know the measures we are putting in place; we know the work we are doing; we know the progress we have made. Getting from there to the 95 per cent with the mix of measures and the trajectory of the assessment of progress should be available when we publish our autumn performance report. Q89 Chairman: Just to probe you about the use of the language in this thing, it says here: "It is only in light of this figure that we are able to set a trajectory for increasing the area in favourable condition...." I did a bit of calculating on this and all I saw was a straight linear progression at 6 per cent a year. The idea of a trajectory to me when you are talking about a shell is that it goes up and comes down, and yet you have already seemingly worked out the rate at which improvements are going to be achieved. I do not understand why you say here that you are working to establish this pathway, trajectory, against which progress will be achieved when in actual fact you have defined it because you have said it is going to be 56.9 in 2003 to 95 per cent in 2010. Sir Brian Bender: The terminology of trajectory in terms of delivering against PSAs actually means looking at the different mix of policy instruments. We were talking earlier about the different instruments on waste; here we are talking about the different instruments on CAP reform. Q90 Chairman: Why do you not say that instead of using this mystical language about trajectory, which is more at home in the Ministry of Defence's commentary on how shells go up and down than it is in terms of how you are moving towards meeting an important target? Sir Brian Bender: I am afraid it is terminology that is used in government at the moment on PSA. Q91 Chairman: This report is for people who are not part of government but who want to read what you are doing. This is a classic piece of gobbledegook. Sir Brian Bender: We will plain English proof it next year, Chairman. Q92 Mr Lepper: I will make a brief comment on the other indicator I was interested in. SSSI is one and farmland birds is another where again I think there is an air of confidence which I hope is well founded in the Department's report. The fact remains that the number of farmland species is still only at 60 per cent of its 1970 levels. Looking at the weekly lines on graphs here - and I will not call them trajectories - there does seem to be a lot of upping and downing on the graphs from one year to another. There is a confidence there still that targets will be met. Sir Brian Bender: This is a long-term target, as you will appreciate. We are talking here about 2020. The first milestone is to stabilise the index by 2009 and then get it moving upwards. We believe, from the data we have, that the decline is slowing. What we do not know yet is whether that is a long-term trend and therefore, taking the reverse of the shell, whether the trajectory will start moving upwards. Q93 David Taylor: The word trajectory is a useful one, is it not? PSA 3 in 2000, and I am now talking about the recycling and composting of household waste, had a target, did it not, of 17 per cent of such waste being recycled by now? You are reasonably confident in your report that because the figures by the end of 2002-03 were 14.9 per cent that 17 per cent would probably be achieved. I will not dissent from that particularly. Is not your use of the phrase "on course" for the PSA 6 in 2002 to be recycling 25 per cent of household waste by 31 March 2006 perhaps a tad overoptimistic? That phrase has not been chosen because it is useful when you are debating your CSR bids to have something on target by some trajectory that has never ever been experienced or evidenced in past statistical trends. Sir Brian Bender: I think it was last year before the Committee one of the members said, "This target is impossible". I said, "It is very challenging". The member of the Committee said "Quite". Since then, we have recorded a 2 percentage point increase and so there is, and I am choosing my words carefully and trying to speak plain English, an acceleration in the improvement here. Having started at around 7.5 per cent in 1996/97, we are now at 14.5 per cent with 2 percentage points in 2002/03. David Taylor: I am not disputing the 17 per cent figure. I think you are probably right. The fact remains that we have to increase by 50 per cent the amount being recycled at the moment within less than two years. Sir Brian Bender: We have a series of different measures: the Waste Improvement Programme, the statutory targets, the increase in Landfill Tax, the onset soon of the Landfill Allowance Trading Scheme. If the Chairman will forgive me, the recent work we have been doing on the impact of these measures on the trajectory makes us believe this is achievable. Using the language we are allowed to use, "on course" and "on course?" and so on, I would not say at the moment that we had slipped on this. I would say it is achievable and therefore we are saying it is on course, but it is a challenging target. Q94 David Taylor: In the scales of the senior civil service, how would you describe "challenging"? Sir Brian Bender: Difficult. I am sorry; I do not know if this is all senior civil servants or just myself. When Defra was created and I looked at the PSAs we had inherited, I thought this was the most difficult. I believe now that it is achievable. That does not mean we will achieve it. Q95 David Taylor: Is it not the case that for some local authorities, like my own in North-West Leicestershire that are very cash strapped, the actual operation of recycling and composting is rather more expensive than the traditional methods of waste disposal and they are really struggling to drive their percentage levels higher because they lack the financial resources to improve the systems to the necessary extent? Is that not an experience shared by other local authorities? Sir Brian Bender: It is and what we have got better at in the last year, working with the Local Government Association and now working with IDEA, is actually working out what does drive up local authority improvements and what does not and sharing best practice. I hear we are going to identify some peer review work and Elliot Morley announced at the beginning of the calendar year that another £20 million will be made available as a one-off, targeted grant to ease spending pressures on waste. There are obviously PFI opportunities as well. What we are trying to do is identify a much more target-specific approach and a mixture of sticks and carrots for each local authority so that the ones that are not performing well will get special treatment. Q96 David Taylor: I heard your answers to David Burnside. I strongly endorse the promotion of the work you are doing in relation to the importance of minimising waste and all that goes with that. I think that is fine and I applaud it. Sir Brian Bender: The other thing we are doing on waste minimisation, and which WRAP are doing on our behalf, is working with the retailers who are much better placed than Government to actually understand what consumers might or might want and influence them by reducing the amount of packaging. That work is progressing fairly well according to WRAP. David Taylor: I counsel caution on any PFI project because, to use your word, their trajectory of cost might well suggest cost effectiveness in the early years of any contract but that may well balloon to unaffordable levels rather later down the line. Q97 Joan Ruddock: I want to follow that up by looking at the Landfill Directive on biodegradable waste and perhaps look at the first target of running down by 2010 to 75 per cent of 1995 levels. Are we on course? A lot of people do not think we are. Sir Brian Bender: I am reading what my brief says on this. I will choose my words carefully: Achievement of the 2005/06 standards will contribute to the diversion of biodegradable waste from landfill and put us well on the way to meeting the landfill obligations. Q98 Joan Ruddock: Do you have a review of those targets under way? Sir Brian Bender: The first review that is under way is the current discussions with the Treasury both on resourcing and on the public service agreement target. For a spending review that spans into 2007/08, clearly the 25 per cent biodegradables target by 2005/06 is not relevant. The question is therefore whether the new PSA target should refer to the Landfill Directive objective, but we have said we would review this year the national recycling targets. The review will be at around the end of the year because we need first of all to have the Audit Commission's initial, unaudited results for the 2003/04 performance of local government, which we expect before the summer break, and, secondly, we need to have finalised the work on the resourcing and new PSA target. We would plan to have reviewed the statutory recycling targets by the end of the calendar year. Q99 Joan Ruddock: Then what might you have to do, given that you are clearly not certain that you can meet your 2010 Landfill Directive targets? Sir Brian Bender: I am going to start using the word trajectory again if I am not careful and get into trouble with the Chairman. What we will need to do is look at the mix of effective landfill tax, what the effect of the Landfill Allowance Trading Scheme is likely to be, and of course it will not be in yet, and how we might do more to prepare local government to use it effectively and other measures in the waste improvement programme that I was describing earlier in response to Mr Taylor. We will be looking at the mix of measures and what part expenditure might play, what part sharing best practice with local government might play. There are a number of PFI projects that are in the pipeline which may help on these issues, but beyond that I do not want to be drawn as to where we might be by the end of this calendar year. Q100 Joan Ruddock: Is there any sense of urgency, though? Sir Brian Bender: Absolutely. Mr Burnside was asking about communications successes and I think the way in which the Department has got a better handle on what is going on with waste in the last 18 months is something I am quite proud of, the way we have actually got our act together and are understanding much better what is going on and the way the different levers can be used. There is absolutely a sense of urgency but, using the mandarin words I was not allowed to use earlier, this is a very challenging time. Q101 Chairman: Would you apply the same optimistic view to the disposal of hazardous waste? Sir Brian Bender: I do not believe everything I hear in the media at the moment on this. We have been having intensive discussions with the Environment Agency about it. There is a short-term issue on the ending of co-disposal in the middle of next month; that will lead to a reduction in the number of landfill sites that are taking hazardous waste. As Elliot Morley said on Newsnight last night, about 60 per cent of such waste at the moment is contaminated soil and asbestos, which need not and should not go to landfill. The chemical sector, again as he said last night on Newsnight, believes that the changes should not have any problems in their sector. No, we are not complacent about this issue. We are working closely with the industry and with the Environment Agency on how to manage what will be happening in a regulatory sense in the middle of July. Q102 Chairman: Does that mean in layman's speak that we will have enough licensed sites? Sir Brian Bender: Taking everything together, we think there is going to be a projected capacity of over one million tonnes a year, which is less than there has been in previous years. On the other hand, we do not expect future arisings to be as high as in the past from the point of view of PSA. This is something that we are discussing, as the French would say, incessantly with both the Environment Agency and the industry. Q103 Chairman: Given, as you know, that the Committee produced a detailed report on that and questions of definition and licensing were part of our findings, I think we would find it helpful to have an update as to exactly where we are, the relationship between the demand facilities and the availability of those with some indication of timescale to see whether in fact we are on track. Sir Brian Bender: That is understood. Q104 Mr Breed: On rural policy, and this revolves around PSA Target 4, may I say that I think for very many people, and particularly those of us who represent largely rural areas, this particular target is probably one of the most important we would look at both in terms of the economy and trying to get the productivity up and also the accessibility to services. I think the five key services you have identified are exactly right as such. We get back to the whole idea of being challenging and it is difficult. There is no doubt that the difficulty must be matched, if you like, with its importance because those particular aspects of the economy and accessibility are absolutely vital to rural areas. Can you expand a little bit as to why it is difficult and challenging? Is it to do with the timescales that you have got to do it in? Is it to do with the general economy of the country? Is it to do with a lack of resources or insufficient resources actually to meet that sort of target quickly? What are the component bits which make the thing difficult? Sir Brian Bender: The first thing to say is, when Defra was created, which is only three years ago, for the first time we were bringing together the various bits of government dealing with rural policy, and one of the first things we worked out was that actually we did not have a very good evidence base. You may find that, representing a rural constituency, a strange remark but actually the national evidence base of what the position and issues are in rural areas was pretty weak, and therefore one of the first tasks was to get the right evidence base, to identify the right sort of interactions. The second issue on something like this, and the Committee I know has looked into this in a number of areas like rural schools and also broadband, is that the effectiveness of our actions depends, rather like on sustainable development, on influencing others. Of course, there are some things which are within our own gift and we can do them more or less effectively, but the extent to which we can persuade the Department for Education and Skills to do the right sort of things on Sure Start or on rural schooling, persuade the Department of Transport do the right sort of things on rural transport, and so on, is what it is about. Therefore it is a combination of the power of persuasion and having the right evidence to go to them. One of the most significant gains we have made in the last few months on this is actually getting it agreed that other departments will now report their performance with what is called the geographical marker, so that performance in rural areas will be identified. Otherwise, one could have a situation where Department X can achieve its targets nationally and be on track by getting it 95 per cent right in urban areas but only 60 per cent right in rural areas. This persuasion of other departments that there should be this geographical marker is another thing we have achieved. It is taking a while. I have a brief which gives lots of examples, but you will know better than I where there is genuine progress being made. Q105 Mr Breed: We have about two years to go before it is supposed to be met, and it indicates we have not made a preliminary assessment as to how far along the trajectory we are. When do you expect to make some sort of preliminary assessment of how close we are? Sir Brian Bender: In the course of calendar 04. We have been using the first year to actually get the information data, the evidence, together and refine the delivery plans. I am glad I am getting other members of the Committee to use this word "trajectory". We will aim to have the necessary delivery plans and trajectories refined during the year. I do not know exactly what is going to emerge from the spending review on the new PSA on rural policy but I would be surprised if it was radically different, there is bound to be a PSA which mirrors some element of services and productivities. Q106 Mr Breed: We recognise you are going to involve departments to assist in that --- Sir Brian Bender: Yes. Q107 Mr Breed: --- but there are some aspects of that which are contained solely within your control, and you dedicate monies to various organisations and bodies to ensure you meet your targets and objectives. What sort of activities do you undertake to ensure that these monies when they are provided to other organisations and bodies are being used to achieve these targets? Sir Brian Bender: Mr Burchell may want to say a bit more about this in a moment, and I give him that 30-second warning. One of the answers to that was announced by Margaret Beckett last November when the Haskins Report on Rural Delivery was published, and she wanted us to do a review about rural funding streams. So there is a plethora of different funding streams provided by Defra, which the Haskins analysis compellingly said - I cannot remember the exact words - was pretty confusing for the business or individual in a rural area, needed to be simplified, and needed to be simplified from the point of view of the customer. So there was a sort of initial evaluation, if you like, at that stage which said, "It is too complicated", and one of the pieces of work which is underway is this review of rural funding streams. I do not know if there is anything more you want to say about evaluating what the Countryside Agency and others do with the money? Mr Burchell: We have had the mid-term review of the England Rural Development Programme, which includes some socio-economic schemes within the portfolio - it is not just the agri-environment - and also we had the review of the Rural White paper last year, published earlier this year, which was trying to look at the effectiveness of policies in relation to the White Paper which was published several years ago. I know the Countryside Agency do evaluations of their schemes but I do not know whether you have had the data on that, but effectively there is a portfolio of evaluations around things like the ERDP, the Rural White Paper and so on, which inform and supplement the review of rural funding which Sir Brian has already mentioned. Q108 Mr Breed: Bearing in mind the all-encompassing nature of the target, which is enormous, the whole of the economy of the rural areas, totally dependent on the co-operation of loads of other departments, is it actually realistic? However much I very much support the aim, is it actually a realistic target to set when so much of it is dependent upon other people and other things happening which are beyond your control? If it is not really in your ability to control it, is it a sensible target for you to have? Sir Brian Bender: This comes back in a different way to the line of questioning earlier about who is going to be driving the review of climate change. There is very little in government which is solely in the control of one department. This area is one where clearly the levers we have are very rubbery indeed and involve lots of people. On the other hand, if you do have a department with "rural affairs" in its title, it seems to me a fair cop that that department is held accountable to this Committee and more widely on whether it is doing anything on the economic performance in rural areas and on service delivery in rural areas, even if the doing anything means persuading other people to do so. It is our responsibility to try and ensure this happens at national level. Also, a key part of this is working with local government, RDAs and others at regional level, because that is where a lot of the real difference is going to be made. Q109 Mr Breed: I wondered whether you thought it ought to be broken down a bit more, into more focused targets which will produce the aims but be more focused to achieve a certain target rather than this all-encompassing one? Sir Brian Bender: We have thought about, and are in discussion with other departments, on whether we have specific pacts with them about whether or not to publish a target; "What this will mean in this area is DfES and we will jointly work for this" and so on. So that is something which is under discussion, but I do not think it will be published as part of a PSA this summer. Q110 Chairman: I would just like to bring our proceedings to a conclusion with one or two questions about BSE. Just on a point of record, on page 115, Figure 23, "allocated cost of BSE eradication", the Science Directorate figure for 2003-04 is shown at £5.4 million, it leaps up by a huge amount to £54 million ---- Sir Brian Bender: It is an error and I apologise. It should indeed be £5.4 across the lines and I apologise. There was a tiny handful of errors but this is rather a stark one. Q111 Chairman: On the next line down from that, the Over Thirty Months Scheme, we did probe you informally about that but could you be accused of counting your chickens before they are hatched, because you seem to be factoring in the reduction in OTMS here in rather a big way? Mr Burchell: The Spending Resettlement 2002 made an assumption that over the period of that review up to 2005-06 the rule was likely to be relaxed on the back of the FSA review of the OTM rule, and that was factored into our baseline for the SR02 period. Given that we used the figures from the Treasury data base which have to be consistent with the settlement, that is why you have this declining run of figures in 2005-06. Clearly, the review of the OTM rule has not yet concluded and, until it is, these numbers are just indicative numbers for future years if the rule was relaxed. Q112 Chairman: We have touched briefly on the emergence of a new cattle disease and your Department has received representations from those whose lives are being tragically blighted by new variant CJD and deaths in their families as to whether in the light of the emergence of this new disease there is a need to reconsider the removal of the OTMS. We are in an area where science continues to develop. Let us say hypothetically that somebody says, "I suppose we had better carry on being cautious in this area because there are new pieces of emerging science", is there scope to revise those numbers should a decision be taken not to eliminate the OTMS? Sir Brian Bender: Can I first of all say what is happening on the analysis of the situation? The new disease is not considered at this stage to be a relevant factor but the data on tonsils and appendices is an arguably relevant factor. The Spongiform Advisory Committee is meeting later this month to have a second look and give its opinion on what their interpretation of that data may mean for the cases of variant CJD. The Food Standards Agency will then be meeting early next month to review its earlier advice, bearing in mind of course that what is under discussion is not actually necessarily the complete removal of the Over Thirty Months Scheme, but the removal of animals born after 1996. Coming to your direct question, what is going to happen if the scheme does not go, the taxpayer is going to need to find the gap between the cost of testing which will have to be done in the event the OTMS is got rid of, and the cost of continuing with the scheme. The £91 million figure for 2005-06 represents the cost of testing, the £318 million is about the cost of the OTMS, so we are talking about a gap of about £200 million over a full year. There are current discussions going on between us, the Treasury and the Department of Health, in that hypothetical situation about where that money might be found. Q113 Chairman: If OTMS goes, on the record, I presume you have to remit that money back to the Treasury in the light of these figures? Sir Brian Bender: No. What the Treasury did in the 02 Spending Review was move the categorisation of the OTMS from annually managed expenditure to departmental expenditure limit, and therefore if we make a saving we keep it. Also, as Mr Burchell indicated a while ago, we have cut our baseline to assume there would be some saving, but what it does mean - the silver lining in all this - is if we do make the savings, Defra retains the money. Q114 Chairman: We have had a very good session of over two hours and we are grateful to you for this as well as our previous exchanges. There are one or two questions which the Clerk may wish to write to you about which we have not touched on but can we, as always, thank you and your colleagues for your answers and indeed in certain places the candour with which you have responded to our probing. Thank you very much. Sir Brian Bender: I worry, Chairman, when I am thanked for my candour! Chairman: As an avid reader of all additional material, the Clerk looks forward, as I do, to the further material you send us. Thank you very much indeed. |