Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
2 NOVEMBER 2004
PROFESSOR NEIL
WARD AND
MR TERRY
CARROLL
Q1 Chairman: Can I welcome everybody
to this first session. It is basically to look at arrangements
post-Haskins Review. We are very pleased that the Centre for Rural
Economy has been able to join us; Professor Neil Ward, Director,
and Terry Carroll, researcher. I am grateful to both of you for
your evidence. I got the impression that you were not very enamoured
with the Haskins Review and you felt that there was far too much
focus on agriculture and not enough on rural policy?
Professor Ward: Yes. I think it
is fair to say that we welcomed the fact that there was a review
going on and certainly recognised that there was a need for a
review. There was a lot of complexity in the system, but it took
nearly two years from the start of the review process to where
we are now and I think we felt disappointed with how far we had
got. It still feels a little bit like work in progress. There
are unresolved issues, and perhaps there is a sense that the farming
and land management side is further advanced than the rest of
it. When it comes to rural affairs, there are more questions raised
than answers given.
Q2 Chairman: Would you like to complete
the picture, "this is work in progress"? If you were
composing an old master, what else would you add in?
Professor Ward: The Rural Strategy
is called the "Rural Strategy". I think we would want
to argue that it is not a strategy, it is a set of institutional
changes and it is not really very rural. There are big questions
in terms of the rural affairs and the rural agenda. It is quite
a step forward, I think, for the Government to set out its priorities
under these three headings: economic and social regeneration,
social justice for all and enhancing the value of the environment.
It is interesting that in two of those, social is mentioned. Yet,
when it comes to the mechanics and the nuts and bolts of the rural
delivery—the delivery end—there is a silence in terms
of how delivery might work. I think one of the arguments that
we wanted to make in our memorandum was that this is a set of
reforms from the perspective of the centre. It talks a lot about
the need for decentralisation and devolution, yet, when it comes
to an analysis of what works locally and the strengths and weaknesses
of different types of delivery models, there is a silence.
Q3 Mr Drew: You also had a go at Haskins's
confusing misunderstanding of decentralisation. Can you define
what you mean by decentralisation?
Professor Ward: When you look
at a decentralised approach, you would ask who are the people
at local level that should have discretion and a greater role
in rural delivery. At the local level, local authorities are quite
important; in local rural development and in local delivery. So,
under a more decentralised approach, you would expect some discussion
of what the role for local authorities might be. There is very
little in the Rural Strategy on what local authorities might do
in terms of rural delivery.
Q4 Mr Drew: Is not part of the problem
this misconception that there is this homogeneity in rural England?
In fact, rural England in many places is dysfunctional; there
are lots of conflicts, there are lots of groups who have little
time for one another and that makes it very difficult to have
some form of holistic rural policy. What you end up with, if you
decentralise, is a whole series of variegated policies, is that
true?
Professor Ward: Yes. I think part
of the problem over the last 40 to 50 years has been an over-emphasis
on a national framework for rural policy. One of the success stories,
if you like, in rural affairs over the last five or six years
has been the recognition that that is a problem and we need a
more differentiated approach, that this entity of rural England
or "the countryside" is a nonsense, and anything that
unites rural Surrey with rural Northumberland under the category
"rural" is far outweighed by all of the differences
between those two places that come from their regional contexts
and their distinctiveness of their social and the economic structures.
Q5 Mr Breed: Over a period of time now
the Government has followed a sort of strategy in lots of areas
of separating policy, which governments do, and delivery, which
others do, sometimes departmentally and sometimes agency. Therefore,
it is no great surprise that Haskins has followed through on that
sort of idea and has made quite a great play for the need to separate
the policy aspects of what we are trying to achieve and the delivery
aspects. It seems that you have been, I suppose, critical of that
in a way and you are suggesting that it is a lot more complex
than that, and it is a rather simplistic way of looking at the
way in which Rural Strategy can be developed. Can you tell us
what specific adverse effects you believe would arise from that
very clear agenda to separate policy from delivery in this particular
context?
Professor Ward: It is a clear
agenda in the sense that it was the centre-piece of Lord Haskins's
analysis, separating policy and delivery. I noticed that when
he is questioned and talks about this issue, he often refers to
Northern Foods and the way he ran Northern Foods. My argument
would be that running Her Majesty's Government is a different
kind of entity from running Northern Foods. There are all sorts
of other factors that have to be taken into account when running
public policy compared to a private corporation. I feel that policy
and delivery cannot be easily separated; it is much more a spectrum
of activities. If you look at the development of agri-environment
policy in the UK over the last 20 years, a lot of that has been
through piloting and experimentation. Policy and delivery are
all tangled up together. The work of the Countryside Commission
in developing things like the forerunner to the Countryside Stewardship
Scheme was an experimental exercise and illustrates how policy
and delivery are all tangled up together. It was tested and rolled
out to become a mainstay, a sort of centre-piece of the British
approach and it influenced wider European agendas. To separate
policy from delivery, and then couple that with a silence on the
role of local government and local authorities, I think, really
risks falling into a trap of policy being seen to be sorted out
centrally and delivery being done in regions and local areas.
When you come to our region in the North East, and look at the
organisations that are responsible for delivering on rural development,
you will see that they want to have a policy role as well. Local
authorities have policies, for example.
Q6 Mr Breed: We are not confusing policy
with strategy, are we? They are rather different.
Professor Ward: You have policies
for regions and you have policies for local authorities. The danger
of having a silence, in terms of the role of local agencies and
local authorities as there is in the Rural Strategy, is that people
begin to talk in terms of policies as being the remit of the centre
and delivery taking place outside of that.
Q7 Mr Breed: Providing the people, who
are going to be charged with the carrying out of the delivery,
have at least some involvement in the policy, what would really
be a negative effect of having a clearer separation? It seems
to me that, in fact, it could have quite a lot of benefits so
that people know exactly what the policy is, and then, the people
who have got to deliver it, who hopefully have been involved in
the policy, have a very clear idea of their role. Otherwise, you
will have a rather confused position. How can we get clarity if
we role them in together?
Professor Ward: I think Lord Haskins's
objection, when he drew on examples to illustrate this problem,
talked very much about the Countryside Agency having a national
policy role and them being responsible for programmes that they
delivered. He was concerned about a single organisation having
responsibility for evaluating its own programmes. That is the
main example that he draws on to press the case for separating
policy and delivery. I think you could separate those functions
without assigning some institutions with a policy role and other
institutions with a delivery role. I do not see a difficulty in
having local authorities having policy and delivery roles.
Q8 Mr Breed: Do you see that policy could
suffer if it is distanced entirely from delivery?
Professor Ward: Yes, because I
think there is quite an important relationship between policy
and delivery.
Q9 Mr Breed: Only if it is going wrong?
Professor Ward: Yes. There is
both positive and negative feedback to it really.
Q10 Mr Breed: In other words, a policy
might be laid down, the people and the agency do their very best
to deliver it, but unfortunately, it cannot be delivered for whatever
reason and therefore a viable policy has to change in order to
achieve that. Can that not happen anyway even if there is a clear
separation?
Professor Ward: The risk with
this argument in a Rural Strategy is that particular bodies become
seen as solely responsible for policy and other bodies become
seen as solely responsible for delivery. In the Strategy, you
have this very limited discussion about the role of local agencies
in rural development and rural affairs and the risk is that their
policy role is going to be marginalised.
Q11 Mr Jack: In your evidence, in paragraph
4.6, you said: "The Rural Strategy gives us institutional
change, when what is really needed is a clear strategy to cope
with these major policy agendas". Can you spell out in more
detail what you meant by that sentence?
Professor Ward: I think that was
partly a frustration that this is called a Rural Strategy, yet
it is mainly about reorganising institutions. There are really
big agendas that pose very serious challenges, I think: whether
it be on development of agri-environment schemes and CAP reform;
whether it be how to manage the interface between land management
and water protection and the way that the Water Framework Directive,
over the next ten years, is going to pose really big challenges
for land management. Also, I think, on the rural, social and economic
development side, and in the context of regional development and
things like the Northern Way Initiative in the north and its city
regions, there are big questions on how rural communities and
rural economies are going to fit in with these rather dominant
urban and regional development strategies and, that tinkering
about reforms institutions does not instil confidence in the ability
to face these big challenges. Yesterday, I was at a workshop where
some Environment Agency research was presented where some modeling
had been done. It was suggested that in order to meet the Water
Framework Directive in certain catchments in the East of England,
you might need to take 50 to 60% of arable land into new types
of land uses in order to meet the objectives of the Water Framework
Directive. That is a huge challenge, and I think there are other
ones in the rural economy and in rural social exclusion issues
as well that require big policy strategies. This is not really
a Rural Strategy in that sense. It is not a clear vision of how
those objectives are going to be met.
Q12 Mr Jack: In terms of the lines of
accountability, I tried to draw a diagram of what this change
meant and I found it very difficult. What I ended up with was,
on the outside of the policy, Government Offices and the Regional
Rural Affairs Forum, and it talks in a way that somehow these
bodies are going to improve accountability in the relationship
between the rural economy and the rural environment and then setting
policy. It does not really smack of the real world to my way of
thinking.
Professor Ward: There is a lot
of faith placed in things getting sorted out at the regional level
through Regional Rural Delivery Frameworks, which I think are
animating a lot of activity at regional level, working out how
those things are going to be developed and how things are going
to work differently in regions. We have been doing some work in
the North East, looking at who is responsible for what and how
changes can be accommodated. The land management and environmental
side of things will be the responsibility of the new Integrated
Agency. Some socio-economic programmes will be the responsibility
of the Regional Development Agencies, and some activities will
be the responsibility of the Government Offices, particularly
on the community development side. So, you have the three pillars
of sustainable development: social and community, environment
and economy and it is three different organisations that are responsible
for these areas of activity. A lot of faith is then placed in
frameworks that will bring that all together and get it working
in synergy. I think there are big questions there about the capacity
to put these frameworks together and about the accountability
structures that surround them as well.
Q13 Mr Jack: I get the impression you
are saying to us that really this is a bit of a mess, in the sense
there is not a clear strategy, because you said so, and the organisational
framework which has been devised does not actually join together
terribly well. I am thinking of the North East and the fact that
a lot of your rural economy has a relationship with the Forestry
Commission—the Forestry Commission give up some of their
powers to Defra but on the other hand they have ended up being
a free-standing body with forestry management issues, yet if we
look at the rural communities of Northumberland what happens in
those forests is very central to the well-being of those communities
and the Regional Development Agencies have no input into that
whatsoever. That is why I find it difficult to make my diagram
work.
Professor Ward: That is why there
is a sensible thing called work-in-progress; unfinished business
really. It is a set of institutional reforms and it does not look
particularly tidy as a set of institutional reforms. Some things
were included in the Haskins Review and some things were not,
and there is not a clear justification for what was in and what
was not in.
Q14 Mr Jack: Have you worked out what
your clean sheet of paper would have on it if you were redesigning
it, if you were given the sole task to produce a new way of dealing
with all the issues of rural Britain which was coherent and met
your critique of this proposal?
Professor Ward: That is a good
question. We do not start with a clean sheet of paper, of course,
because there are a series of institutions which are at work at
the moment. One of the problems is that their work is being hampered
now by the impending reforms and people are unclear as to what
is likely to happen. Certainly this question of co-ordination
at the regional level seems for us to be quite central, and the
accountability as well about how different stakeholders can be
brought in. At the moment you have these Regional Rural Affairs
Forums and there is quite a lot of faith put in those as a sort
of mechanism by which messages can be communicated up and
down. In the North East, our Regional Rural Affairs Forum has
a secretariat which is one-eighth of one person. That is the kind
of capacity for running the Regional Rural Affairs Forum.
Q15 Mr Jack: Who is on it?
Mr Carroll: It is a combination
of the usual public sector agencies with a rural development remit,
but then they also try to attract the representatives of rural
business, community groups, environmental groups, but increasingly
I think those individuals felt it not very worthwhile to attend,
they did not think it was a very productive use of their time.
Q16 Mr Jack: So we have a defunct body
informing the policy, and a policy which does not stick together
very well and a policy which is not very well supported and a
policy which people do not turn up to support. It does not smack
of a meaningful use of time, as you are saying.
Professor Ward: This is our point
about the reform from the perspective of the centre. The Haskins
Review was about rural delivery but we would have liked to have
seen a much more detailed analysis of the local and regional levels
and how organisations can ideally work together to deliver, and
at the moment the strategy deals much more with a perspective
on delivery that is from far away, from the centre.
Q17 Chairman: Remind me, who is the secretariat
to the Regional Rural Affairs Forum? Is it the Government Office?
Mr Carroll: It has been the Countryside
Agency but that is now passing to the Government Office.
Q18 Chairman: Who is going to set the
agenda and drive that forward?
Professor Ward: It depends on
how the development of these Regional Rural Delivery Frameworks
gather pace and whether people feel there is a strong strategy
and vision behind them and how the different interests come together.
For that to succeed it really does require those Forums to work
properly and for people to feel it is worthwhile getting involved
and that things can be adequately shaped at the regional level,
and there is some way to go on that.
Mr Carroll: One of our criticisms
is that at the regional level the agencies responsible for these
three pillars of sustainable rural development-environment
community unity and the economy, are all in separate silos. The
Rural Affairs Forum and the Rural Action Plan we have in the North
East have to be the level at which all of that is put back together
again, and we think that is extremely important. The North East
Rural Affairs Forum, in our experience, is engaged but it is a
kind of talking-shop and that is how it has been criticised. In
our suggestions for the Rural Delivery Framework which we have
been asked to help with, we suggested that the Rural Action Plan
should be the responsibility of the new integrated agency, the
Government Office, and the RDA; they have to produce their Rural
Action Plan and to say what they are going to do with these three
new simplified funding streams. They have to tell us how they
are going to spend all of that resource. The Rural Affairs Forum,
with its independent chairman, we think has to be in the role
of scrutinising that. Those three organisations—in Haskins's
terminology "the priorities board"—have to present
their plan of action year on year to the Rural Affairs Forum,
which scrutinises it and holds them to account. We think the chairman
of that group should have some research capacity, some wherewithal
in order to be able to drill down and see whether these three
Government agencies are delivering the goods.
Q19 Chairman: Let us just take one of
them, the RDAs, and Professor Ward spoke about the RDAs earlier
on. Are they up to the job? Some of them are heavily criticised
for being into urban policy rather than rural policy.
Professor Ward: On balance, over
the last five or six years they have been going, I think they
have become increasingly sophisticated in their approach to the
rural agenda, and partly that was the safeguards in the legislation
about having a rural board member and paying due regard to the
rural areas. I think you probably could make the argument for
some regions that the rural side of things has been given more
consideration than otherwise it would have done without those
safeguards. It is difficult to generalise because they are in
different regions and they have different types of approaches,
there are different organisational structures within the RDAs,
and they have different approaches to accommodate "rural".
Some of them have a separate chapter in their strategy, others
have rural sub-themes which run through everything. I think it
would be too simplistic to dismiss them all as urban dominated;
they did quite well in the foot-and-mouth crisis, for example,
and responded quite rapidly.
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