Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
2 NOVEMBER 2004
MR DAVID
MARLOW, MS
JUDITH BARKER
AND DR
RICHARD HUTCHINS
Q60 Mr Drew: Can you give me one example
in your own region of how you see this working better? Obviously
you cannot compare it with before, but working better than you
were led to believe the situation was? Just a simple example of
some good practice in the West Midlands of rural delivery.
Dr Hutchins: Is the question directed
at the West Midlands or—
Q61 Mr Drew: I am directing it at the
West Midlands because that is what you know best.
Dr Hutchins: What I know best,
they can obviously comment from the East of England perspective.
I will take the Market Towns Programmes as an example. There are
34 market towns in the West Midlands, we receive funding of around
£2 million to support that programme. We put in an initial
£10 million to support the Market Towns Programme which we
believe works in terms of rural renaissance and economic development
for those market towns. There is obviously a very significant,
additional investment into the Market Towns Programme. If I can
give you an example of one market town, Evesham in Worcestershire,
it has just won a national award, jointly with another market
town, and they have been very successful in matching the investment
which Advantage West Midlands have made into Evesham, which I
think was around half a million pounds over the period, to deliver
their plan with other funds from Europe, for example, from the
Heritage Lottery Fund and from other sources. So you develop a
momentum there in terms of leveraging other sources of funding,
matching it with other single pot funding from the RDA and the
result is therefore plain to see in an award winning market town.
Q62 Mr Drew: Is that very much what you
are trying to do in the east of England?
Mr Marlow: I will give you a slightly
different example. In the east of England the RDA has established
rural enterprise hubs, hubs where business can get advice, innovation
support and so on particularly for rural businesses. Under the
regime clearly there are multiple agencies and multiple strands
and channels of advice that rural businesses can get from RDAs,
from Business Links, through the SBS route, from Defra routes
and so on. We think that one of the potentials of the Rural Strategy
2004 is actually to reduce the number of channels and the simplicity
to the customer and to make rural enterprise hubs much more business
driven and transparent and easy to access for the customer; we
think that that would be an improvement. We have got six in our
region at the moment, in each of the sub-regions effectively and
actually joining up the different channels and making a single
access point and a single advisory service and a brokerage service
can help businesses to improve.
Q63 Chairman: I would just like to go
back to money because I think you told me a minute ago that you
were getting an extra £21 million. My impression was that
the pot was going to go up from £45 million to £72 million.
Why are you only getting an extra £21 million?
Mr Marlow: In a sense you will
have to ask Defra that.
Q64 Chairman: How does it feel to you?
Mr Marlow: The RDAs as a whole
are pretty excited by the increased opportunities, not only from
the Defra additions to the single pot, but actually from the opportunities
of other new responsibilities, new roles and functions coming
out of the Spending Review 2004 because, as Richard said, RDAs
invest a lot more in rural development than comes out of Defra.
Yes, the additional resources that Defra wants to put through
the RDAs are helpful. It actually only amounts to about 1% of
the RDAs' single pot as an addition, but if you join it up with
the new responsibilities from DTI and the Small Business Service,
some of the issues that are coming through in terms of having
more influence on the European funding programmes, which are quite
significant, some of the work on skills and so on, that is where
we can really make some sort of step change in rural development
terms.
Q65 Chairman: Why did you not get all
the money that you were promised to begin with? You have told
us that it is about 1% on your budgets, but this is to be shared
out between the nine RDAs. What is the allocation formula for
that? Are you all going to get an equal share or are some areas
more rural than others?
Mr Marlow: That is a matter for
Defra and for ministers to decide, but there is an existing rural
formula that determined the original £48 million.
Q66 Chairman: Judith, you seem to know
about this.
Ms Barker: Firstly, in terms of
the £45 million going up to £72 million, obviously there
were predictions in the mix about Defra's single pot contribution
increasing into 2005-06 anyway, so there is an element of that
in the £71 million and then you have got the £21.3 million
on top of that. RDAs had looked at the Countryside Agency's corporation
plan produced in 2003-04 looking forward and at that time the
socio-economic element of the Countryside Agency's budget was
around £37 million. So we had originally anticipated that
we would be getting nearer that sum rather than the £21.3
million, but there were cuts to that corporate plan subsequent
to it being published, particularly to the socio-economic element
of that and so the figure has been reduced from £37 million
down to the figure that we see now.
Q67 Chairman: David, you told us earlier
that you were still working on the tasks that you were going to
do and you still do not know how much money you are going to get
because it has not been sorted out, and you are going to kick
off live on this on 1 April. That is a tight timetable, is it
not?
Mr Marlow: Yes. We would like
to think that the RDAs have a "can do" mentality. I
think, being perfectly frank, 2005-06 will be a learning year.
We also want to work very closely with colleagues on the rural
pathfinders which will also throw up some lesson learning. I do
not suppose it will be a finished project in 2005-06.
Q68 Chairman: We could have a bit of
a planning failure here, not on your part.
Dr Hutchins: It is important to
recognise that each region is working closely with its government
office on developing the regional rural delivery framework and
that is a very tight timetable, but I think there has been good
progress on that so far. A draft of each of those has to be ready
by December of this year. From next year in some regions it is
likely, although the funding allocations have not been signed
off yet, that some regions will inherit a fully committed programme
of legal commitments. There will be no headroom for sub-regions
to do anything radically new next year unless they put in extra
funding from the single pot. 2005-06 will be a year of transition
and learning rather than radical change in terms of delivering.
Q69 Chairman: This is all about improving
rural delivery. Here we are, we have been told it is a learning
year and there are expectations out there, but you have got no
money to spend.
Dr Hutchins: That is not true
because, as I said earlier, the RDA has put in significantly more
investment into rural areas.
Q70 Chairman: I am talking about the
fact that there is no uncommitted money.
Dr Hutchins: For some regions
that may well be true in terms of the Countryside Agency's socio-economic
programmes.
Q71 Mr Jack: I just want to follow on
the Chairman's theme because paragraph 56 of Defra's Rural Strategy
2004 tells me that they are going "to task regional development
agencies to work with local authorities and other regional sub-regional
and local partners to contribute to securing Defra's target to
improve access to services", and then in paragraph 57 it
lists 13 different areas where you are supposed to be working
with lots of people on everything from affordable housing, local
transport, post-16 education, children's services, mental health
services, services for older people, drug treatment and rehabilitation
services, business support, the uptake of sport and recreation,
productivity of the tourism industry, employment rates of
disadvantaged groups, road traffic accidents and community engagement.
That is a colossal list of activity in an area where clearly your
resources are stretched. How much extra management are you taking
on to be able to put your finger in the pots represented by paragraph
57?
Mr Marlow: I think your analysis
is quite right. What the strategy says is that we will be working
with others to achieve those improvements. One of the things that
we welcome is the work with partners on the regional rural delivery
frameworks which would cover that terrain.
Q72 Mr Jack: Let me just add up the number
of partners. You are going to work with local authorities and
at least three other blocks of partners and you might have four
meetings a year with them; that is a colossal amount of activity,
it is something like 150 different meetings you could all be involved
in. Have you seriously got the resources to be able to service
that agenda together with other partners? I appreciate you are
not delivering it all. It just seems a hell of a workload.
Dr Hutchins: I think different
regions will tackle this in different ways.
Q73 Mr Jack: Are you confident that you
can provide a full input to all of those areas to make in your
lower year of learning or perhaps at the end of your year of learning
or thereafter some progress in all of those areas?
Dr Hutchins: I think that most
RDAs will already be engaged in some way with most of those partners
and that may be just in terms of dialogue or at a strategic level.
Let me give an example from the West Midlands. We are devolving
responsibility for delivery in terms of a large part of our rural
intervention to a rural regeneration zone which may become incorporated
over time on which sit representatives of LSPs, local authorities
and so on and so forth. Many of these partners are already working
together on a strategy, on zone implementation plans, on business
plans and on delivering a large programme. In the case of the
rural regeneration zone it is an £8 million programme rising
to £16 million in the next three years, so I think it is
already happening to a certain extent. Yes, it is a big demand
upon resources.
Mr Marlow: Your question is self-evidently
right, that the regional rural delivery framework being convened
and co-ordinated by government offices will consider all those
issues. The RDAs will clearly then have to prioritise where we
can make a value added contribution and it will not be down that
list of issues. It may be through a particular institutional development,
as Richard has said, or rural regeneration companies, it may well
be in the enterprise agenda where I gave you a particular example
of rural enterprise hubs and one would incrementally develop priorities
and outcomes.
Q74 Mr Jack: What Defra say is that that
long list I read out is about securing Defra's targets to improve
access to the services on this long list. If you do not improve
that access then Defra is going to be holding you accountable
for any deficiency. It is a very long and ambitious list. The
impression I get is that you are making a brave face of it by
saying you are in some of this business now, but you are then
going to have to prioritise the areas where you can really make
a difference. How much dialogue have you had with Defra to explore
the deliverability on an agenda like this?
Mr Marlow: We are having a lot
of dialogue about that. The RDA's role in access to rural services,
given that we are not the majority direct service deliverer, is
in strategic added value, helping partners weigh up the priorities
and determining where we can add value to the outcomes. We are
having a lot of discussion about how RDAs would demonstrate our
contribution to that and the RDA position would be that we are
not a principal or even a major affordable housing deliverer,
nor are we a principal or even a major rural transport deliverer.
How do the RDAs add value? It is actually through enabling, for
example, the skills issues or the enterprise issues or the productivity
issues to be fed into the agendas of local authorities or colleges
or whatever so that they can actually provide improved access
to services. That is a debate that we do need to firm up.
Q75 Chairman: Just help me on the mechanics
of this. You were talking about partnerships, Dr Hutchins, but
let me quote Defra properly. Defra say there are "regional
rural affairs frameworks to be built up". Whose responsibility
is it to convene the discussion on this? It is social, it is economic
and it is environmental. Who is the driving force to pull all
this together?
Mr Marlow: Defra have asked the
government offices to convene that.
Q76 Chairman: Are you comfortable with
that?
Mr Marlow: Yes.
Q77 Chairman: How will it work?
Ms Barker: How it is working in
the east of England at present is that there is a board that has
been established by the Government Office, chaired by the Government
Office, on which the Regional Development Agency, the Regional
Assembly, English Nature, the Countryside Agency and the Rural
Development Service sit to work through the regional rural delivery
framework which will be submitted to Defra in December. What we
are doing is we are working through a series of 13 priorities
at present and we are then looking at identifying which are the
ones that we really need to make a difference on in the east of
England and which are the ones where we need to deploy our best
human and financial resource to take those agendas forward, and
that process of prioritising the priorities is what is happening
at the moment and that list is being taken into account in that
process. So the players around the table are being chaired by
the Government Office and they will receive that submission in
December.
Q78 Chairman: Each region has got one
of these Regional Rural Affairs Forums. Would it surprise you
to hear that one of our earlier witnesses said that they would
not give them a lot of marks out of ten? How many marks would
you give the east of England one?
Ms Barker: The project board that
I was just describing is part of the over-arching project management
of the regional rural development framework. Within the work of
the regional rural delivery framework is the review of the Regional
Rural Affairs Forum. In terms of the east of England, they have
engaged very actively in the process of review believing that
they need to review their own processes, the way they work, their
membership, etcetera, to be able to deliver for their stakeholders
in terms of this new agenda. I think that shows that we are all
committed to moving forward and perhaps we all need to look at
what we are doing at the moment to improve the future.
Q79 Chairman: Marks out of ten, or would
you say they are trying hard but could do better?
Ms Barker: I would not like to
be drawn. I would rather involve the chair of the forum in making
that decision.
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