Examination of Witnesses (Questions 74
- 79)
MONDAY 10 NOVEMBER 2003
MR RICHARD
SHARLAND, MR
GRAHAM PARRY,
MR DAVID
KNIGHT, MR
IAN SMITH
AND DR
IAN ROXBURGH
Q74 Chairman: Thank you for coming
and I apologise for the problems we are having with divisions
today. Perhaps, for the purpose of the record, you could introduce
yourselves.
Mr Knight: I am David Knight;
I am the Urban Adviser with English Nature.
Mr Smith: I am Ian Smith; I am
Head of Development and Regional Policy at English Nature.
Dr Roxburgh: I am Ian Roxburgh;
I am Chief Executive of the Coal Authority.
Mr Sharland: I am Richard Sharland;
I am Director of Development, Groundwork UK.
Mr Parry: I am Graham Parry; I
am Chief Executive of EnProve, a social enterprise owned by Groundwork.
Q75 Chairman: Does anyone want to
make an initial statement before we go into questions?
Mr Smith: English Nature is committed
to securing benefits of a high quality natural environment for
people in all parts of the country including the coalfields. We
believe that access to natural green space can and should play
an important part in people's lives contributing to their physical
and mental health, social interaction and local economies. We
believe that regeneration needs to be about recreating attractive
places where people want to live as well as about economic regeneration
and creating opportunities and jobs. As providing economic regeneration
without addressing the quality of local environments is less likely
to long-term sustainable communities, people are more likely to
just move elsewhere as their economic circumstances improve. We
have developed accessible natural green space standards to try
and promote the idea that everyone, including those who live in
the coalfields, should have easy access to wildlife and wild places.
Finally, we believe that the regional development agencies and
the subregional partnerships have a role to play and we would
like to see more funding and a more flexible approach to be applied
to local environmental regeneration and that includes things like
investing in environmental skills as well as valuing the environment
for the economic and social benefits which we believe it can bring.
Q76 Chris Mole: There seems to have
been substantial progress in tackling the environmental problems
that were caused by coalfield closures; how much more needs to
be done? That question is directed to all of you in turn.
Dr Roxburgh: We recognise the
underlying point behind your question and that is that we need
to speed up what we are doing, not necessarily to do any more
but to increase the rate at which we achieve it. The impact of
that on the Coal Authority is primarily in connection with minewater
discharges which bring a lot of iron to the surface and can cause
gross pollution of surface waters and underground waters. Two
years ago, we were doing four schemes a year; last year we persuaded
the DTI to put us in funds to do six; and, from this year on,
we will be doing eight a year and spending approximately £13.5
million a year. So, we have heard the call, our funders have recognised
the need and we are pressing on quite vigorously in that regard.
The other big area where we are trying to react is in restoring
confidence in the coalfield areas where there are old coal voids
present. We know of, for example, 168,000 individual mine entries,
shafts and drifts. In some parts of the country, it is almost
as if they do not exist; they do not affect the housing market
at all. In other parts of the country, the presence of mine entries
and shallow voids does affect the market and can cause blight.
We have instituted two initiatives to try and counteract that.
The first is that we are changing the type of mining report we
produce. We produce 2,000 mining reports a day, 540,000 a year.
Up to now, those mining reports have been general in nature, they
simply tell you which entries are present, what coal seams are
present, what has happened in the past, what is happening now
and what may happen in the future insofar as we can ascertain
it. What we have now introduced, as of the last day of September
this year, is what we call an interpretive report where we will
tell you in a very definitive way, yes or no, as stark as that,
whether, if that shaft collapses, it will affect the integrity
of your building. It is quite unusual for a public body to get
off the fence like that and we are hoping that that information
will greatly assist the land conveyance market. The other product
that we have introduced is an insurance product. The database
upon which we base these mining reports is extensive. It has,
at its roots, just over 100,000 abandoned mine plans, but we update
that collection daily as new information comes to light. So, if
you were a homeowner who brought a property, say, five years ago
and you asked us for a mining report which said that there were
no mine entries which affected this property and now you come
to sell and your buyer seeks and obtains a new mining report which
suddenly shows a new mining entry that was not known before, that
might affect the price of your property and we have a new insurance
product which attaches to all of our standard mining reports which
insures that property for up to £20,000 in the event that
that type of incident arises. So, in that way, we are trying to
address real concerns in the market.
Q77 Chris Mole: Can I ask English
Nature and Groundwork what they see as the major environmental
problems that are outstanding.
Mr Sharland: There is a great
deal being done in the coalfields and, as a previous person on
the panel indicated to you, we only have anecdotal evidence to
indicate what the environmental improvements are. We would say
to you that there have been substantial improvements, but we do
not have a data set for the coalfields as an organisation and
there is no comprehensive data set right across the piece to assess
the quality of all the environments in coalfields. What has been
done clearly needs to be built upon and, echoing some of the other
evidence you have had, we would urge you to recognise the long-term
turnaround of an environment that is as damaged as much as the
coalfield environment has been. There is a lot that has been done
on larger sites in the English Partnerships portfolio but we need
to remember that there is a whole raft of smaller, what are called
legacy sites that are not damaged enough to feature on either
English Partnerships's or the Environment Agency's register, but
the impact those are having on the quality of life in terms of
social and economic quality of life for communities is substantial.
We wonder also whether there is a need for a clearer long-term
landscape vision for the coalfields. The economic regeneration
that is going on that is really very important we believe will
not resolve the issues in the physical landscape on their own,
but investment into a long-term vision could help to realise asset
value of land over a long term in the future enabling us to build
a much stronger platform for the social enterprise, the regeneration
that other evidence has given. So, we need to build upon the last
ten years of work, we need more work to have clearer environmental
data in order that we can measure change in these landscapes and
we need to develop a clearer vision for the long-term future.
Q78 Chris Mole: Do English Nature
agree with that answer?
Mr Knight: Yes, I certainly agree
with the point that we do not have a statistical overview and
have many anecdotal information, I think that is quite telling.
The other thing which does work to our advantage at the moment
is the pursuit of open space strategies by local authorities in
line with government guidance on open space planning and a key
component of that is actually perception studies, finding out
what people feel their environment is like and what it means to
them. We feel that there are some very good examples under way
in places like Wakefield and there has been a very good study
completed in Doncaster which have actually picked up that, to
a lot of people, it is their immediate environment which is of
the greatest importance and that the quality of that environment
is important from a number of different perspectives and we are
very pleased to see that the natural environment figures very
highly in that and it probably relates quite closely to children's
play and the use of the environment by both younger and older
parts of the community.
Q79 Chris Mole: So, you would feel
that a lot of projects that have been mentioned in your submissions
have transformed some of the local areas? Can this approach be
encouraged elsewhere?
Mr Knight: We are very keen to
encourage this approach elsewhere. I think one of the things this
Committee has done is to encourage us; it has been a catalyst
for us to pull that information together and we can now disseminate
that more widely amongst our area teams. We are also keen to disseminate
it more widely in terms of broader regeneration as well because
the approaches of an ecologically community-based approach with
a number of different players using money from various public
and private sector pots is a good model to be used elsewhere.
Mr Sharland: Our network does
not just work in the coalfields, we work in other areas, and we
and many of our partner organisations produce toolkits, we share
case studies and we disseminate practice and, as with English
Nature, your focus has led us to reflect a little on where the
priorities lie. There is no absence of knowledge, there is no
absence of case studies and there may even be too much of that,
but perhaps what we need is a much stronger and clearer coordination
of the skills and knowledge and particularly to find ways of incorporating
this knowledge into learning and into learning in a variety of
settings. Obviously learning in the coalfields themselves in communities
and intermediate labour markets, those kinds of programmes, but
also into professional learning and, if you look at the Toyne
Report produced quite a number of years ago about the ways in
which sustainable development practice could be incorporated into
tertiary education, one can see how little, as a society, we have
done to really pursue that. So, I think our view is that we do
share knowledge, not perfectly, and there is a lot of networking
and there is a lot of case studies, but perhaps the area of need
for us nationally is better coordination and seeing how we transmit
this into learning and training in order that it can be embedded.
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