Examination of Witnesses (Questions 463-479)
2 MARCH 2005
SIR MARTIN
DOUGHTY, DR
ANDY BROWN
AND DR
TOM TEW
Q463 Chairman: Let me
welcome colleagues from English Nature and, in particular, Sir
Martin Doughty, Andy Brown and Tom Tew. Welcome. We are here to
discuss what I used to call the NERC Bill, but I am now told it
is called the NERCO Bill, which sounds better. Sir Martin, I know
you have been involved with this right from the beginning. Does
the Bill follow the sense of direction on through Haskins, through
the Rural Delivery Strategy to the Bill? Is this a logical next
move?
Sir Martin Doughty:
I think it is. Haskins brigaded environment nationally, particularly
because of legal obligations, but I was always keen to see delivery
joined up and at the local level. So he was happy to see socio-economic
at the regional and sub-regional level in the guise of the RDAs
and local government. That is, basically, I think, what this Bill
is giving us, and there is going to be a real need for a good
join-up in the regions to get the contribution to sustainable
development. Of course, these things are not discrete, they do
come together and we want to see gains all round, but the fact
that this is a brigaded organisation and an Integrated Agency
dealing with a very specific environmental mandate is appropriate
and is clearly where Haskins was coming from.
Q464 Chairman: You broadly
welcome the Bill. What are the problems and what are the issues
that you think need to be resolved here?
Sir Martin Doughty:
The key part of the Bill, obviously, is the purpose. There are
perhaps some wording alterations that might be helpful to the
purpose, but we think it is a good purpose. The overall purpose,
as described in 2(1), neatly encapsulates the natural environment
and benefits to people, including future generations, and things
like climate change, obviously, are of paramount importance.
Q465 Chairman: Let us
just stick with the purpose at 2(1) and, particularly, 2(2). There
are five sub-purposes in 2(2)—(a) and (b) promoting natural
conservation and protecting biodiversity and (e) contributing
to social and economic well-being. It has been suggested to us
that (a) ought to be paramount—the need to protect the countryside—and,
in a sense, (a) to (e) reflect a hierarchy. What is your view
on that?
Sir Martin Doughty:
I do not think they are intended to reflect a hierarchy, and I
have heard many versions of this hierarchy; I have heard of (a)
and (b) as being the primary ones and the others follow. These
five, clearly, are very important areas of work. The agency will
need to make judgments about when there are real issues to deal
with, and those judgments will need to fit in with the overall
purpose at 2(1), and that talks about contributing to sustainable
development. If we define sustainable development as including
living within environmental limits, that will guide decisions.
I think there is no need for that hierarchy. It is not a die-in-the-ditch
issue for me; as you know, I have been associated with national
parks where sound principle lays down the relationship between
conservation and recreation. In reality, there are not that many
conflicts between conservation and recreation. If you look at
National Nature Reserves, we have 30 million visitors to them
and we encourage visitors to them. In terms of the Countryside
and Rights of Way Act, as a body I do not think we have put on
any restrictions, or very, very few, in terms of access to land.
We have said that these issues can be managed, and they are big
issues like dogs and ground-nesting birds. There are probably
greater problems between different forms of recreation, between
recreation on foot and other things that people call recreation,
some of which—
Q466 Chairman: Ski-ing
on Windermere.
Sir Martin Doughty:
Ski-ing on Windermere, four-wheel driving, paintball games—things
like that. Those are described in Schedule 2 of the CROW Act.
That may be a useful place to hang the hat of trying to get a
definition, because people have been trying to get that definition
over many successive bills.
Q467 Chairman: You are
pretty confident that in relation to quiet recreation, conservation
and biodiversity, if appropriately managed on a case-by-case basis,
you can work through this?
Sir Martin Doughty:
Absolutely, yes.
Q468 Mr Jack: In your
evidence, in the helpful summary at the start, you say: "We
believe the broad definitions in the draft Bill will allow the
new Agency to deliver its purpose. For example, it will cover
urban, rural, coastal and marine areas . . . " Going back
to what the Chairman has been talking about, in terms of the hierarchy
of the issues in 2(2), the word "marine" does not appear.
Are you concerned?
Sir Martin Doughty:
I think all of those areas are part of English Nature's business
now (we operate rural, we operate urban, we operate marine and
we operate coastal) and all of English Nature's functions are
carried forward, so they are effectively within this legislation.
Q469 Mr Jack: In the statute
currently establishing English Nature, is all of that explicitly
stated?
Sir Martin Doughty:
I will defer to my colleagues here.
Dr Brown: The broad
purposes of the organisation do allow English Nature to operate
in all those different aspects of the environment. I cannot recall
that they are all explicitly named. In this particular circumstance
it is your interpretation of "natural environment" that
is important. As the explanatory notes indicate, it is interpreted
very broadly to encompass all of these different areas.
Q470 Mr Jack: Would it
aid for greater clarity to have this coastal and marine part put
in? Thinking ahead, we had Elliot Morley giving evidence showing
sympathy, for example, towards the drafting of a marine and marine
habitats bill. That is something this Committee has looked at
with concern, and for many the shorelines of Britain are as important
as the mainlands are. You are, in this Bill, restricted to English
landscape, but given the growing importance of marine issues,
should it be explicitly stated that that is one of the areas under
2(2) that you have a responsibility for?
Dr Tew: It is explicitly
stated in the explanatory notes, and helpfully so—
Q471 Mr Jack: The notes
are not the law.
Dr Tew: but not
on the face of the Bill.
Q472 Mr Jack: Should it
be put on the face of the Bill?
Dr Tew: Our view
is that it would be easy to inadvertently proscribe when you start
putting words like that on the face of the Bill, and that it would
be more helpful to leave fairly broad descriptions like "natural
environment" and then make it clear in the explanatory notes
that the spirit of the legislation is to encompass the breadth
of both natural and semi-natural and the breadth of the environment
from urban to marine. So our view is that it would not be helpful
to prescribe that on the face of the Bill.
Q473 Chairman: English
Nature goes back a long way through its predecessors and it has
always been concerned that you are truly independent and a firm
watchdog of the environment. Are you confident that that is going
to continue to happen in the future?
Sir Martin Doughty:
Reasonably so, yes. I think it comes back to the brigading. English
Nature has got a reputation in things like the response to GM,
and we focus very much on the effects of GM on the environment
and brought an evidential, sound, scientific basis to what we
were saying. I think there is an issue that is not in the Bill,
for reasons that are readily understandable, that is important
in this, and that is that an Integrated Agency needs to have that,
if I can call it, environmental "purity" (not a very
nice phrase) so that the functions it carries out must not prejudice
the independence of its advice. That brings me on to the issue
of which parts of the Rural Development Service come into the
Integrated Agency and which parts go elsewhere. There are land-based
schemes which are ERDP-funded and they should clearly go into
the Integrated Agency, with the exception of farm woodland, which
would be for the Forestry Commission. There are project-based
schemes which are socio-economic and they need to go elsewhere—presumably
the RDAs. The thing I am getting at, Chairman, is if you were
giving advice, say, on GM, how could you, at the same time, attempt
to be dealing with grant aid for economic development to a farmer
for GM? That would make the independence impossible. So that is
very clear. There are other wildlife functions which ought to
go to the Integrated Agency, and then there is a whole range of
other functions. What might be helpful is if I give you a note
on where we think those functions should end up. Although it is
not in the Bill it is, obviously, clearly, very important for
the integrity of the Integrated Agency.
Q474 Chairman: I think
a note would be helpful. Maybe you could start off with a note,
and perhaps you will have a little stab at this one, while you
are here: to tell us why the RDS is not mentioned in the Bill
at all? Secondly, give us a breakdown of what you think should
go where. Thirdly, give us some indications of budget, because
the RDS has a big budget, part of which is passed on to others.
I think we would be keen to have a look at some of the budget
issues around this change in structure as well.
Sir Martin Doughty:
I am sorry, you want the present budget numbers? Our understanding
is this may be, sometimes, counted in different ways. RDS has
full-time equivalent staff (this is 2003-04) of 1,372 and a budget
of £231 million, including the agri-environment programme.
That is in comparison with English Nature, which has 922 staff
and a budget of £83 million, and the Landscape, Access and
Recreation part of the Countryside Agency, with 312 staff and
a budget of £49 million. It is a very long list, this RDS
list.
Q475 Chairman: Maybe you
could drop us a note on that: where it is goes, why it is going
and what the budget is coming across would be useful.
Sir Martin Doughty:
The part of your question I did not answer is, presumably, the
RDS is not in the Bill because this is simply done by ministerial
decision. So the list I will be sending you is not what the ministers
are going to do it is what we think ministers ought to do.
Chairman: That is fine.
We are there to give advice too; whether it is taken is a different
matter. I do not know whether Mr Jack wants to just pursue the
budget issues and, maybe, issues around efficiency savings. We
are told that the merger will bring about efficiency savings,
and many of us have been through these reorganisations before
and, somehow, three years on, the savings do not appear to materialise.
Q476 Mr Jack: Just before
we do that, Chairman, I wanted to ask you about paragraph 8 of
your evidence. You comment about the previous legislation in the
1990 Environmental Protection Act, and you said: ". . .
it was necessary for the conservation agencies to `take appropriate
account of actual or possible ecological changes'." You say
that clause has been dropped from the general purposes of this
Bill and you comment, in the conclusion, saying you would prefer
to see this clause ". . . either restored, or indeed broadened
. . . " Would you just develop your thinking?
Sir Martin Doughty:
I think we find it a bit odd that that sort of clause has been
dropped when issues like climate change are so important to us.
I will ask Dr Tew to answer further.
Dr Tew: Furthermore,
in the 21st Century with an increased human transport of species
around the globe, and so on, this is a more rapidly changing world
than there ever has been before, and so it seems odd to remove
the clause which requires your agency to take appropriate account
of that.
Q477 Mr Jack: It is as
simple as that?
Dr Tew: It is as
simple as that.
Q478 Mr Jack: Just to
follow up, then, on some of the budgetary issues, it has taken
a bit of piecing together but according to Defra they are looking,
by 2009-10, for the Modernising Rural Delivery Programme to have
saved £21 million in that particular year. The Integrated
Agency builds up, in terms of its savings, from £1 million
posted in 2005-06 through to 2007-08, a figure of £6.5 million.
Have you been involved in validating any of those numbers to date?
Dr Brown: We have
been involved in scrutinising those figures and assuring ourselves
that they were deliverable. Those three years of figures—all
three parts coming together as the new agency signed up to—target
efficiency gains for each of those years, partly through changes
in management structure: there are regional directors of CA, English
Nature and RDS—and you only need one of each of those—back-office
services, corporate services, there are several sets of those
around, which could be rationalised; estate rationalisation is
quite a significant efficiency area, and there are some operational
synergies as well, where we would expect to see some savings.
Having dealt with the efficiency savings, there are costs involved
in bringing about these changes, and the most significant costs
are in things like IT systems, harmonisation in terms of conditions
of service, and if there is any movement of staff around the country
it becomes very expensive indeed. Indeed, estate rationalisation
costs.
Q479 Mr Jack: In the brackets
of the type of money that is being talked about for the Integrated
Agency's establishment, costs of between £25 million and
£37 million, is that sufficient to do the job? Have you been
directly involved, again, in validating the breakdown of the numbers
that give rise to that range of possible costs?
Dr Brown: We have
been involved in the production of those figures. In most cases
there are high and low estimates and until you get into more detail
about the precise changes you cannot be sure of your estimates
of costs; hence putting forward ranges.
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