Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-25)
2 NOVEMBER 2004
PROFESSOR NEIL
WARD AND
MR TERRY
CARROLL
Q20 Chairman: Let us turn to a big player.
This new integrated land management agency is going to look after
the environment, and you were giving us an example about diffuse
water pollution run-off from farms. The EA is going to be a big
player in this, so is the integrated land management agency, so
is the policy coming from Europe. There seems to be an awful lot
happening in this area. How are you going to link it together
and make it happen? Are we clear about the boundaries?
Professor Ward: I am personally
not clear about the boundaries and I do not understand why some
things were included in the Haskins Rural Delivery Review and
others were not, and the interface between land and water is a
really big issue. I was involved in a big study in 1989-93 on
diffuse agricultural pollution from Newcastle University, and
then I was involved in studying CAP Reform and other things for
about ten years and just recently I have returned to diffuse agricultural
pollution, and I have been quite shocked by how little has changed
in that ten years. We hear talk about the Water Framework Directive
but there is a sort of sense of there being not a strong momentum
on the policy issue of dealing with diffuse pollution issues from
rural land management. In the development of agri-environment
policy, which has come on in leaps and bounds in that ten year
period, that land and water interface has not been one where there
has been a lot of progress made—I am sure examples can be
pointed to where things might have changed, I do not know—but
you sort of sense that has been a bit of a blind spot in agri-environment
policy. With the new Integrated Agency and the Environment Agency,
the relationship between those two institutions is going to be
crucially important, and some of those challenges in meeting water
quality objectives, which will inevitably require new land management
practices, and whole shifts in land-use, are really big. From
reading the Rural Strategy, we do not really get a sense of how
that kind of scale of challenges is going to be met through these
kind of changes.
Q21 Chairman: That has got us off to
a good start. Mr Jack used the phrase earlier, "blank sheet
of paper", and I was asking you to compose an old master,
when you are on your way back to the North East and you have had
time to reflect on this, would you like to try and draw us a little
diagram of what would be the effective way of delivering policy
and, secondly, the point of the policy practice recirculation
because they do inform each other, do they not?
Professor Ward: This is without
any sense of there being institutions already at play, because
obviously that is a constraint on how you perform?
Q22 Chairman: Yes.
Professor Ward: In an ideal world.
Mr Carroll: And that is covering
the social and economic end as well as land management?
Q23 Chairman: Will you do that for us?
Professor Ward: Yes.
Q24 Mr Jack: Perhaps you might just pen,
if not in detail, a line or two as to what the strategy should
be? You were critical in your opening phrases in replying to colleagues'
questions about the lack of a strategy in your judgment, and what
you talked about was a series of ill-thought-out managerial changes.
In the context of having a proper strategy, in the context of
what the Government has brought forward—and they have dismantled
various bits of the current institutional framework and reblended
them together, some bits have gone into the Integrated Agency
and other bits stand by themselves—they have taken some
of the existing architecture and repositioned it, but your model
might rub that out and create something new. If there is an alternative,
we would like to know what it is, but in the context of the strategy
which you say is missing from this approach.
Professor Ward: I am happy to
do that.
Q25 Chairman: So two papers there. Thank
you very much indeed, thank you for getting us off to a good start.
Professor Ward: Thank you very
much.
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