Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-200)
9 NOVEMBER 2004
PROFESSOR PHILIP
LOWE, MR
RICHARD WAKEFORD
AND MS
MARGARET CLARK
Q180 Mr Jack: It sounds to me—and
Mr Wakeford may want to answer this—as if you have a lot
of expertise in the delivery of innovative ideas to regenerate
and refresh the countryside are giving what appears to be a muddled,
ill-thought out, badly-designed policy a parting thumbs down.
Is that a fair summary of where you stand on this?
Mr Wakeford: I would not have
used those words.
Q181 Mr Jack: I know because those are
my words but would you agree with them?
Mr Wakeford: I am not going to
agree with them. I am going to use the word "challenge"
again, if you like, because there is a real issue that some of
the investment in rural sustainable development is made by bodies
that are national bodies and that have national programmes which
may or may not be carved up into regional priorities. Others,
like RDAs, which are focused on particular regions, and others,
as Philip was saying, like local authorities who have every right
to decide what priorities are locally, are operating on a less
than regional basis. So how the government offices are going to
broker this is a challenge and it is untried, but the Government
is intending to try it because it has actually set up and announced
a series of pathfinders to test how this could work before full
implementation. We have highlighted—which I think is a fair
thing for us to do—that this is an area of some difficulty.
The Government has acknowledged that and is putting a pilot into
place in order to test that. I would also like to go back to something
else that Chris Haskins said which we feel quite strongly about
in the Countryside Agency, from the perspective of the customer.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to see a very successful new village
hall development in Brockweir in Gloucestershire. The promoter
of it in that community, a community leader, explained to me where
the money had come from. Some of those funds came from within
the Defra family, for example the Rural Enterprise Scheme, but
other funds came from other sources which are well outside the
scope of Chris Haskins' review. If you are looking for a simpler
system for the customers on the ground, we are making some progress
in the Rural Strategy but the local authorities have still got
their own approaches, the Lottery bodies have their approaches,
different government bodies (including the DTI in the case of
this village hall because it had a magnificent energy-saving roof,
I have to say) and various charitable trusts all have different
funding rules and approaches and there are some overlaps between
them. Chris Haskins' review, if we are looking at it from the
perspective of rural customers, needs to be seen as only a start.
There is a considerable agenda here for the New Countryside Agency
(using our wonderful diagram) to continue to address because success
in achieving sustainable development in rural areas is not only
about Defra's programmes, which are relatively small, it is about
all the other programmes of government. That is where rural-proofing,
one of the major roles of the New Countryside Agency, is absolutely
critical. That is why it is important for the New Countryside
Agency to have the statutory remit in order to be able to go into
those areas and to be recognised as the Government's statutory
adviser reporting to Parliament and having that kind of arm's
length critical friend role that I believe the Countryside Agency
has performed well over the last five years.
Q182 Mr Breed: You were listening when
we were taking evidence from Lord Haskins when we broached the
money aspect. As a sort of lean and mean watch dog you would not
want to have too much money to be fat and lazy, so is £10
million too much?
Mr Wakeford: It is a little bit
less than we would have liked but we believe that we can deliver
a great deal with £10 million.
Q183 Mr Breed: Right, but you could do
with less?
Mr Wakeford: There is a significant
change going on here because the challenge for the New Countryside
Agency to be successful is to have really good communications
and networks with people who are delivering on the ground right
the way across the country. We do not want it to be a London-centric
body influencing policy alone. Until now the Countryside Agency
has had a comprehensive set of regional offices and some sub-regional
offices across the country which has enabled us to be at least
regional as well as national. The challenge to the New Countryside
Agency is to be effective without that set of offices on the New
Countryside Agency side. The regional offices will continue to
be in place for the integrated agency functions but not for the
New Countryside Agency. So we are going to be trying out some
new ways of working but we have a particular challenge there now
and until we have got under way it is going to be difficult to
know whether we are strapped for cash, whether we are adequately
catered for or whether we are flush for funds. What Chris paid
credit to us for at the end of his evidence was the progress that
we are making so that we can get the New Countryside Agency in
particular off the ground within the statutory framework of the
Countryside Agency from next April. So a couple of years before
it becomes a formal reality we have had a really good chance to
show what value for money we can deliver with that budget .
Q184 Mr Breed: So £10 million a
year for the first two years and then a review?
Mr Wakeford: We are reviewed every
year.
Professor Lowe: Our sense is we
want to get the functions and responsibilities right and resources
are a secondary issue. Within that, we are just keen that we have
sufficient resources to be able to be seen as expert and authoritative.
So there is an element that we have got to do in terms of making
sure we are gathering research. There is an element in which we
have got to make sure we are very in touch with rural opinion
and that we can search out pockets of disadvantage.
Q185 Chairman: Chris Haskins told us
that there is a lot of goodwill around and that you are all working
generally in the right direction. That is my general impression.
How long can this go on like that? What is the timetable for change?
When will this process finally be over?
Mr Wakeford: What I am interested
in is what Chris did not say when he brought his little dose of
"this is how it works in the private sector" It is generally
not enough to let people just push towards solutions, if I can
put it that way. I and my fellow chief executives for the integrated
agency are pushing for a confederation from next April and an
integrated agency after legislation. But generally in business
what you also do is put someone out there who is going to pull
as well, somebody who is going to have some vision. That is why
we have made the point that it is a pity that there seem to be
conventions in place that prevent the appointment of a shadow
chairman of the integrated agency until such time as the second
reading of the legislation, especially given the confederation
where we are coming together to be half way there from next April.
In terms of the timetable that really is something that you are
going to have to ask the Secretary of State on because you have—
Q186 Chairman: Just help me, you are
managing things at the moment. If you are managing things you
have got to have a timescale in mind. What is the timescale that
you have got in mind?
Mr Wakeford: The project that
we are implementing envisages a New Countryside Agency created
within the statutory powers of the Countryside Agency next April.
It envisages the creation of a confederation between the Countryside
Agency, what we will call the landscape, access and recreation
division, English Nature and the Rural Development Service from
next April. It is a process of evolution, because that is something
where we will get closer with closer working. The current plan—and
it does depend on the ability to manage the legislative programme,
which is a government-wide thing about government priorities—leads
towards that legislation coming into force in early 2007. At the
moment, I would say that there has been some impact on the delivery
of programmes because of the uncertainty. A number of people are
less certain about what they are doing, less confident about making
commitments in connection with programmes that have been transferred
to the RDAs, and so on. That is inevitable. I am keen to get that
uncertainty out of the way, which, again, is what Chris was saying,
so then people can work within a clear framework.
Q187 Chairman: Put slightly differently,
despite the best endeavours, people working together, there is
a bit of planning blight because of the change process.
Mr Wakeford: I think that was
inevitable.
Q188 Chairman: You are going to move,
are you not, to a "lagging" region or a "laggard"
region? I am not sure I would like to be called a "lagging
rural area". What is the timetable on this?
Ms Clark: We do not have a precise
timetable. The Secretary of State said that in due course the
headquarters of the New Countryside Agency should move to a lagging
rural region outside the South East. We clearly need to have a
proper location review. What we are doing at the moment as a first
stage is a piece of benchmarking: looking at what other similar
bodies do. Where are they located? How do they manage the
work of influencing both central government and having a consumer
interest? We are looking at that, and we will be having a proper
review and testing different locations against that. Since, clearly,
the major customers for the New Countryside Agency are going to
be government and policy makers, most of whom are situated in
London, we will need good communications with London, but we are
going to have customers outside London as well, so I do not think
it is an easy one to crack.
Q189 Chairman: I do not think it is going
to be easy, and I do not think it is easy when you are not going
to have any regional links either. You are going to be this one
office and you are going to have what I think you call the interlocutors
at regional and local level. What does that mean?
Ms Clark: I am not sure I used
that word. It is not easy. I am not sure it necessarily follows
that we only have one office. It may be that we also need a small
London office. I do not think it necessarily means in this day
and age that everybody has to be located in one office. You can
use lots of other methods for having people who are working for
the agency, who come into the office at different times in the
week, or who work from home. Clearly, we are not going to have
a series of regional offices, we are not going to have a regional
presence, which means we have to find new and different ways of
engaging with regional partners and local partners. One of the
ways of doing this will be through Board members. We see—and
the Board themselves have discussed this—Board members being
more visibly engaged with the New Countryside Agency's overall
agenda and work nationally, regionally and locally. We think we
will need to have closer relationships than we have at the moment
with the regional rural affairs fora. We will have to use other
people to act as our eyes and ears on the ground. I hate to use
this word again, but it is challenging and I think it will be
different in different areas. There will not be one prescriptive
model for how we will work.
Q190 Mr Jack: Let us stop for a moment
on the definition of "rural". It is a word we keep talking
about. In September you published a document entitled "New
definition of urban and rural areas in England and Wales".
It is not exactly an easy read when you start looking at the detailed
statistical definitions that you try to use to enable us to work
out what is "rural". The document contains lots of different
maps with different results according to the different formulae.
Have you come to a conclusion yet? Is there any easy way of defining
what on earth is rural?
Mr Wakeford: There is not an easy
way but there has to be across government as consistent a way
as possible so that the data that we are using from the different
delivery and different services can be analysed broadly on the
same basis.
Q191 Mr Jack: Am I right in saying at
the moment that, notwithstanding the valiant attempt you have
made to come to a definition of these matters, there is not one
universal, across-government formula for "rural" at
this time?
Mr Wakeford: There is much more
of one than there was before.
Professor Lowe: There used to
be one. We set up our State of the Countryside Report—that
was one of the big developments that the Countryside Agency pioneered—which
revealed the inconsistency, and ministers became alarmed at that,
that people could make different arguments about the nature of
a rural problem or rural deprivation or whatever. This was a project
to come up with a consistent definition. It is not easy;
within what you might call a predominantly rural district, there
might be a large town.
Q192 Mr Jack: Is not the real reason
that in the past there has been a mechanical distribution of money
that has to be made to what is thought of as rural Britain, and
so that you do not get everybody outside the obvious urban areas,
you have to find a way of defining the people who might be able
to qualify for rural development schemes?
Professor Lowe: Yes.
Q193 Mr Jack: The reason I stop on this
for a second is that, if we are talking about regenerating, sustainability
and conservation, I find it much easier to look at rural Britain
from the point of view of defining it by everything that is not
what I would have any difficulty in defining as urban Britain.
That may be too broad-brush, but do you not think you have to
sort this out? If you go into my constituency, which is what I
would call semi-rural, two-thirds of the land area Fylde is farm
landscape. It is typified by small villages, one or two small
country towns, or something that lies between country towns and
villages, and the people in those areas exhibit all the characteristics
of people who live perhaps in the sparser areas: strong affinity
to the local community, village hall the centre of life, church
important, etc. Yet under the definitions that we might be looking
at here, they are ruled out of being in "the countryside";
they are not counted as rural because, if you take a broad brush,
sparsity approach, as you have done here, they would not necessarily
qualify. If we are going to maximise the economic potential and
therefore deal with the consequences of that maximisation exercise,
taking into account your sustainability arguments and English
Nature's concerns about the environment, are we not in some danger
here?
Mr Wakeford: This Committee—and
I have been giving evidence to you in particular for quite a long
time on this—has several times in the past said clearly
that there needed to be a single rural definition. That work was
going on and has been concluded. It was concluded in an overall
approach which Defra and the ODPM, the Office of National Statistics
and the Countryside Agency have agreed and it has been launched.
That is now being applied across government. It may have a lot
of words on the page, but the general approach is actually much
as you have described. If you live in something which is a reasonably
cohesive urban settlement of more than 10,000 population, you
are not rural; if you live in other areas, you are generally classified
as rural. The significant advance I would say is that during the
Eighties and Nineties the Rural Development Commission needed
to make these sorts of measurements, but at that time the power
of computers and post-coded data was nowhere near strong enough
to be able to measure most things on that kind of detailed basis.
Often needs had to be estimated at local authority level, characterising
them as rural or remote rural, which is a rather crude way of
actually distributing funds. So we are making great progress here.
We have now got to the point, I would say, where the grain of
the science has become so fine that if we are not careful, that
drives the policy as distinct from the way in which people are
living their lives, which you are also hinting at. When you start
to measure rural employment, do you measure rural employment by
where the job actually is or do you measure it by way of where
the worker lives who has that job? There is a whole series of
different functions about the countryside, in relation to entertainment,
access to health services, police service and so on, where rurality
questions need to be asked in a much more careful way. I think
science is helping us here and we are making progress. In a sense,
what you have there, because it is a technical definitional document,
may need a plain man's guide to enable those who look for simpler
solutions to be able to describe it, but your description of it
was pretty close to what we have been trying to achieve.
Ms Clark: May I just add something?
The other positive benefit to having an across-government definition
is that one of the problems in monitoring rural proofing and the
application of policies across government is that, because there
has not been an agreed definition, a lot of the data which is
collected by other government departments—the Department
of Health, Home Office or whatever—is very difficult to
disaggregate. So you do not actually know whether they are achieving
their PSAs, or other targets differently in urban, rural or suburban
areas. The new rural definition now allows most government departments
who have signed up to being able to tag their data to find out
how they are performing in rural areas. That is quite an achievement,
because that has held back their own ability to judge their success—not
just as a stick, but to understand what the data are showing them.
Q194 Mr Jack: Can you send us a note
of which departments are in and which are out? I want to move
on to the name of the new agency. What do you think it should
be called if it is to communicate the broadness of its area of
responsibility and not just be seen as focusing, for example,
on one aspect of the countryside, namely the environment?
Mr Wakeford: We will send you
a note. Can we just be clear whether the question is about the
integrated agency or about the New Countryside Agency?
Q195 Mr Jack: The integrated agency.
Professor Lowe: We are keen that,
whatever the name is, it conveys the notion that this is not a
body which is just about environmental protection. It is a body
which is going to be responsible for streamlining huge amounts
of payments to farmers and land management, so we want to convey
the sense that it is a sustainable development agency as well
as an environmental protection agency. We are keen that any name
should really reflect that critical identity. We have not come
up with a favoured name. I sense it is one of those things that,
if we get the agency right—and we welcome it as a development—it
will grow into its name, if it is doing the right things and is
recognised to be doing the right sort of functions.
Q196 Mr Jack: So we will recognise it
when we see it, will we?
Professor Lowe: Hopefully, you
will recognise that it is doing the job.
Mr Wakeford: The process of branding
is generally one where you identify to start with what you want
the body to do, and the name comes after that, rather than starting
with the name and then trying to fit the functions within it.
Q197 Mr Jack: Let us just talk about
the boundaries between the integrated agency, the Environment
Agency and the Forestry Commission. From your analysis of the
proposals, is "boundaries" the right word to use or
should we be using something fudgier like "areas of responsibility"?
Immediately you start looking, they all impact one upon another,
and yet they are clearly not part of the new integrated structure.
The Forestry Commission in one sense, in the delivery end of it,
maintains its own identity; the Environment Agency clearly represents
what it is doing now; and then there is the integrated agency.
Give us your take on these boundary issues.
Professor Lowe: There has got
to be cooperation, very close cooperation, both at the very local
level and at a regional level. In terms of tackling things like
the land and water interface, it is a critical area where the
two have got to cooperate. I do not think I would quite go along
with Chris's distinction that one is a regulator and one is essentially
not—I forget what he referred to the other one as.
Mr Wakeford: No, but also he made
the point that you should have a separate body which is a regulator
and a separate body that is paying incentives but, if you have
a single body that has both those options at hand, you can actually
secure the outcomes with better value for money than if you have
those options in separate bodies. We have discussed that and come
to a different view than Chris Haskins on that.
Professor Lowe: To a certain extent
the new agency was critical about it. It is bringing together
certain regulatory functions about the land which the old Countryside
Agency had, and English Nature had, and this huge flow of money
under the second pillar of the CAP, and bringing that together
and combining it in a very powerful way, which, hopefully, will
stop the steady, relentless decline of the last 50 years in biodiversity
and countryside character. It is also important that that money
be used to help overcome some of the critical regulatory functions
that the Environment Agency faces. The fact is that now the majority
of diffuse pollution in England is through agriculture. We have
got to have that money that is being made available through the
new integrated agency to solve not just the biodiversity and landscape
issues but also to help deliver on a joined-up approach to land
and water.
Q198 Mr Jack: If you take the river basin
proposals under the Water Framework Directive, by definition,
they are going to bring all the players that we have discussed
round a table, because they are all going to have to deal with
different aspects of the requirements of the Water Framework Directive.
Does that mean that there needs to be some formal structure that
links together the key players? What you said, Professor Lowe,
was that there has got to be lots of cooperation. That means "Shall
we ring somebody up? Shall we have a meeting?" as opposed
to every quarter the heads of all of the bodies sitting down round
a table to discuss matters of common concern. Which of those approaches
would you prefer?
Professor Lowe: You could be either
very prescriptive or you could do what I was saying earlier about
this being a rural strategy, say that government, for spending
this amount of money, wants effective delivery of the Water Framework
Directive and in essence, the new integrated agency and the Environment
Agency have to cooperate to ensure that.
Q199 Mr Jack: You are almost advocating
a bidding-in process, where the government has a series of tasks
that it wants and a series of pots of money which it is prepared
to make available, and it is up to the bodies who can deliver
to come together and put a proposal.
Professor Lowe: Yes.
Mr Wakeford: That was part of
a paper which we produced a couple of years ago about the future
of agri-environment funds. I want to go back to your original
question where you talked about areas of responsibility, because
I like that phrase. When the government comes to draw up the legislation,
it will probably end up with an integrated agency and an environment
agency which have broad areas of responsibility where there will
not be a clear boundary, and I think that is quite important,
because when it comes to the delivery of things like the Water
Framework Directive implementation, which is some way away, if
we want to fine-tune that delivery, we need to be able to actually
pick and choose between those two agencies to see who is going
to lead on particular things. Having said that, it seems to me
there must also be a clear accountability, so that when you call
the chief executive of the integrated agency or the chief executive
of the Environment Agency, they know which aspects of those they
are responsible for delivering. So there is an accountability
role. To me, the legislation needs to be broad, with some flexibility,
and the Secretary of State's management statement which she then
gives to the different bodies needs to make clear how the bodies
should work together.
Q200 Chairman: We are going to have to
stand you down now, because we have to go and vote. Before you
all go, could I wish the transition well and, more particularly,
Richard, wish you well. As you have pointed out, you have been
to see us many times over recent years. We have not always agreed
but we have always had a good discussion. The best of luck with
your new job.
Mr Wakeford: I thank the Committee
very much.
The Committee suspended from 5.09 pm to
5.25 pm for a division in the House
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