Memorandum submitted by the Centre for Rural Economy,[1]
University of Newcastle upon Tyne (V08)
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 The Government's Rural Strategy is the
result of a prolonged process of evidence-gathering, analysis
and deliberation, which began with the commencement of the Haskins
Review of Rural Delivery in November 2002. It is the first major
review relating to rural policy since the Government's Rural White
Paper, published in November 2000. In agreeing the new Rural Strategy
the Government has taken several difficult decisions and this
partly explains the extended timetable for the Strategy's production.
In fact, the process has echoes of the prolonged preparation of
the Rural White Paper, which began with the Performance and Innovation
Unit's review of rural policies and government objectives in December
1998 and was not concluded, with publication of the White Paper,
until two years later. The Government's difficulties in developing
new strategic approaches to rural policies and their delivery
reflect the complexity of institutional arrangements and the intractability
of some of the key issues. The arrival of the Rural Strategy is
therefore to be welcomed. It is ambitious in its intentions to
reform institutions and delivery structures. However, the Strategy
contains a set of unresolved dilemmas and some major gaps that
will still need to be addressed if its intentions are to be successfully
realised.
2. THE HASKINS
REVIEW
2.1 Running through the Haskins report were
several ambiguities, and it is instructive to assess how these
have been dealt with in the Rural Strategy.
2.2 First, the central preoccupations
of the Haskins Review were with agriculture and the rural environment,
although the Haskins report referred constantly to rural policy
and rural delivery. In most instances, though, the word "farming"
could be substituted for the word "rural" in the report
without any loss of meaning. This farm-centred view of the rural
world put the clock back to the time before the Rural White Paper
and before the establishment of Defra. The promise of Defra was
that farming would be integrated within a wider rural development
perspective, and that Defra would become the champion of a more
rounded rural policy which would complement urban policy. However,
Haskins's report showed antipathy towards the wider rural policy
agenda. For example, Defra's rural Public Service Agreement target,
agreed with the Treasury—to improve the relative productivity
of poorly performing rural areas and improve the accessibility
of services for rural people—was dismissed as "aspirational
and woolly" and impractical (page 35) by Lord Haskins. We
would argue that the Rural Strategy's response to the Haskins
Review is, likewise, more coherent in its treatment of farming
and land management than of the socio-economic dimensions to rural
policy and rural development. The Rural Strategy document stands
more strongly as a strategy for the administration of farming
and land management than any broader "rural" policy/delivery
framework.
2.3 Second, Lord Haskins argued for
rural social and economic programmes to be devolved to the regional
and local levels: "This", he commented, "is where
services can most effectively address public need and where deliverers
can be held more clearly to account" (page 8). Local partnerships,
local authorities and voluntary organisations would assume "the
main responsibility for the delivery of schemes and services to
rural communities" (page 57). Most rural delivery already
takes place at the local and sub-regional levels, and any proper
review of rural delivery would want to consider the critical strengths
and weaknesses at these levels. There is as much confusion here
and overlap of roles and responsibilities as at the national level,
as well as major weaknesses in capacity. Lord Haskins himself
conceded that "The complexity at a national level in the
delivery of rural targets further increases at the regional and
local level" (page 23). However, the preoccupation of the
review with national agencies and Whitehall structures meant a
lack of critical attention to the regional and local level. We
would argue that the Rural Strategy is also weakest in its treatment
of decentralisation. There is no clear vision, very little in
the way of specific decentralising reforms, and many platitudes
about decentralisation and public involvement that do not instil
confidence.
2.4 Third, the Haskins Review made
great play of the need to separate policy from delivery. However,
treating policy and delivery as distinct and separable is a simplification.
The Haskins analysis risked suggesting that policy development
gets "done" at the centre, while delivery is the realm
of the region and local level. Our work with rural bodies in the
north of England suggests a more complex continuum, involving
experimentation & policy advice; policy-making; strategic
planning; programme administration; client advice & facilitation;
and project delivery.[2]
There is also a strong appetite for greater discretion in developing
new and distinctive policies in the regions, rather than in just
delivering policies decided elsewhere. Yet, in the aftermath of
the Haskins Review and the publishing of the Rural Strategy, we
still lack clear models of local delivery—ie what works
best where. This silence, and the rash of institutional change
at the centre, is symptomatic of a process that has been dominated
by the perspective of the centre, with insufficient interest in
what works locally, on the ground.
2.5 There is also a disappointing lack of
curiosity in the debates around the Haskins Review and the Modernising
Delivery Review about the ingredients of good practice in rural
delivery in other countries (although Lord Haskins did visit other
countries). The Rural Strategy is surprisingly parochial, when
the European Union has such an important bearing on many of our
policy frameworks relating to the countryside, farming, environment
and rural development.
3. THE RURAL
STRATEGY
3.1 Under the Rural Strategy's new policy
delivery arrangements, responsibility for economic regeneration
in rural areas will devolve to the Regional Development Agencies
(RDAs). The present myriad of funding streams will be streamlined
into a new Agriculture and Food Industry Regeneration Programme
operating alongside a Rural Regeneration Funding Programme. Defra's
role will be to set broad outcomes and targets and hold delivery
agencies to account. There is an expectation that tangible progress
will be made towards achieving the Government's objectives set
out in the Sustainable Food and Farming Strategy (SFFS) and that
economic productivity in the least well-performing quartile of
rural districts will be demonstrably improved.
3.2 The new Integrated Agency is to be created
which will assume responsibility for the management of environmental
assets. The present range of agri-environment programmes will
also be rationalised into a single scheme for Natural Resource
Protection. There will be an entry level and a higher level scheme
for farmers, the latter to be flexible and delivered locally.
Countryside access and recreation will also become the responsibility
of the new Agency, but strategies for the promotion of tourism
will reside with the RDAs. It will be crucial for the new Integrated
Agency to work effectively with the Environment Agency (EA). The
characterisation of one as primarily a regulatory body and the
other as handling incentives for environmental enhancement has
always been an over-simplification. For the EA to effectively
address water management problems, for example, it will need to
increasingly engage in debates about incentive schemes for environmentally
beneficial land management.
3.3 Under these new arrangements, at the
regional level the responsibilities for primary economic and environmental
policy delivery in rural areas will be vested with separate organisations.
Partnership working within a sustainable development framework,
brokered by Government Offices and co-ordinated via strengthened
Regional Rural Affairs Forums, is expected to provide the necessary
co-ordination.
3.4 At the regional level, there appears
little sense of simplification and rationalisation. From the perspective
of sustainable development (economy, environment, social/community),
there will be different agencies responsible for different pillars.
4. ANALYSIS
4.1 The Death of "Rural England":
Conceptually, the Strategy is a step forward in killing off the
idea of the entity "rural England". In emphasising that
"there is no homogenous rural England" (page 5) the
Strategy is helping to re-establish rural policy as a sub-category
of regional policy. Rural social and economic problems are to
be understood and handled as sub-regional problems, rather than
as expressions of some national rural condition.
4.2 Confused Decentralisation: We
are not convinced by the Strategy's repeated exhortations that
delivery will be more decentralised. Local government is a logical
place for decentralised delivery, but we urge the Committee to
reflect on Footnote 7 on page 20 of the Strategy, which speaks
volumes. "In the event that any new burdens for local authorities
were to emerge in due course, these would be reflected in a budgetary
transfer in the normal way". In other words, nothing specific
or different is currently expected of local authorities, and should
anything crop up, the Government will think then about how to
accommodate it.
4.3 Confused Rationalisation: It
is not entirely clear from the Strategy whether there are to be
three funding streams or four. On page 48, in the summary of delivery
reforms, it is proposed that Defra will reduce the current 100
or so rural funding streams to three major programmes: Rural Regeneration;
Agriculture and Food Industry Regeneration; and Natural Resource
Protection. However, on p 32, the Strategy also discusses bringing
together social and community programmes together into a single
funding programme, which will be administered through the Government
Offices.
4.4 Public Engagement and Accountability:
The Strategy places blind faith in the role of Regional Rural
Affairs Forums (RRAFs), while quietly letting the Rural Affairs
Forum for England (RAFE) fade away. However, for RRAFs to help
deliver accountability and meaningful public and stakeholder engagement
in the regions, their current roles, functions and ways of working
will need careful consideration. To date, RAFFs have generally
been rather ineffective "talking shops" and are sometimes
not as open and inclusive as they should be.
4.5 Simplification: Overall, we remain
unconvinced that the Rural Strategy represents a marked simplification
when schemes, programmes and institutions are looked at in the
round. While the numbers of schemes and funding streams may be
simplified for the "customer" it is likely that there
will be continue to be complex rules of reporting and accountability
within government. This will stem from the need to hold ever more
complex configurations of agencies charged with local and regional
delivery to account, combined with the need to respond to national
and European reforms to accounting and reporting arrangements.
4.6 Institutions and Strategies:
Among rural development bodies, a great deal of energy is now
being diverted into coping with institutional change. This is
at a time of major strategic challenges. These challenges include:
the need to implement the new arrangements for the Common Agricultural
Policy in a bold and imaginative way so as to ensure the maximum
public benefits; the major challenge of meeting the requirements
of the Water Framework Directive, and the need to co-ordinate
agri-environmental and land management measures more carefully
with water quality management priorities; the Government's regionalisation
agenda and the new governance and accountability structures in
regions such as the North East; the Government's new localism
agenda and the emphasis on public engagement and participation
at the local level in public policy and service delivery. The
Rural Strategy gives us institutional change, when what is really
needed is a clear strategy to cope with these major policy agendas.
17 September 2004
1 Centre for Rural Economy, University of Newcastle
upon Tyne, NE1 7RU. This memorandum was prepared by Neil Ward,
Terry Carroll, Philip Lowe, Jeremy Phillipson and Nicola Thompson. Back
2
The insights contained in this memorandum are informed by recent
research projects for Defra, the Economic and Social Research
Council, Regional Development Agencies, ODPM and the Beacon Councils
for Supporting the Rural Economy. Back
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