|
UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 408-ii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE ENVIRONMENT, FOOD AND RURAL AFFAIRS COMMITTEE (DRAFT NATURAL ENVIRONMENT AND RURAL COMMUNITIES BILL SUB-COMMITTEE)
Draft Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill
Wednesday 2 March 2005 SIR MARTIN DOUGHTY, DR ANDY BROWN and DR TOM TEW MR TOM OLIVER, MR GRAHAM WYNNE, MS STEPHANIE HILBORNE and DR HILARY ALLISON LORD WHITTY, MR BRIAN HARDING and MS OONA MUIRHEAD Evidence heard in Public Questions 463 - 594
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, Draft Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill Sub-Committee on Wednesday 2 March 2005 Members present Paddy Tipping, in the Chair Mr Colin Breed Mr David Drew Mr Michael Jack Mr Bill Wiggin ________________ Memorandum submitted by English Nature
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Sir Martin Doughty, Chairman, Dr Andy Brown, Chief Executive and Dr Tom Tew, Regional Director SE, English Nature, examined. 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 died 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 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 bill and marine habitats. 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 easier to 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 proscribe 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 RVP-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, 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 03/04) 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 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, it 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, while we are at the early part 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 of Rural Delivery Programmes 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. Q480 Mr Jack: Can you tell the Committee, of the constituent elements that become the integrated agency, what is their current total budget for expenditure? Dr Brown: I think if you add the figures up that Sir Martin Doughty gave earlier, that is the total we expect to move into the new agency. Q481 Mr Jack: I am sorry, I am just trying to get some idea. What is your budget? Dr Brown: £83 million. Q482 Chairman: Do you know the Countryside Agency's budget? Dr Brown: £49 million and the RDS is £231 million. Q483 Mr Jack: Of that £231 million - it is not just the costs of running RDS, is it? Sir Martin Doughty: No, it is the agri-environment programme. Q484 Mr Jack: The figures I am interested in, in terms of savings, obviously refer to some of the issues that you are talking about: management, staffing and estate. You have also put a series of costs down. I do not know whether we are able to get down at this level of detail but perhaps it is something that you might be able to share with us because I want to know how valid these numbers are and, secondly, whether, in fact, there is enough resource going to go in, particularly in the context of the IT, to deliver. It comes back to what Sir Martin was talking about, which is particularly in the context of the programmes on the RDS side which have got to be delivered. It is still something of a mystery to me how all of these savings are going to be achieved at a time of re‑engineering the way the RDS operates, supposedly going from 100 down to three. I think it would be helpful if you could give us a bit more detail and commentary on that area of these proposals. Dr Brown: We can certainly help the Committee by giving a break down of the analysis that we have done. What I would be very hesitant to do is to try and give you an explanation of all of the changes in RDS. One of the areas of uncertainty for us which I do not think has been fully resolved yet is the costs of the department in terms of corporate services to the Rural Development Service, because you need to factor that into all of these other changes and take account of it in efficiency terms. Q485 Mr Jack: Let us look at one or two things in paragraph 9 of your evidence which may affect costs and perhaps you can help me to understand where these come in. In paragraph 9a you say "powers for the Integrated Agency to undertake, commission or support research, which will allow the Agency to build on the scientific expertise of its component bodies and the evidence‑based approach of its work". Did the new agency inherit your existing budget to do this type of work? Did you get anything in addition from Defra? Where does the old Countryside Agency fit into this? What kind of a budget are we talking about? Dr Brown: It certainly inherits English Nature's research budget and the Countryside Agency's. I do not know what the precise size of the research budget is in either RDS or the Countryside Agency, but they will all come forward into the new body. Q486 Mr Jack: Are those budgets the subject of efficiency savings? Dr Brown: The efficiency savings are across the board for the agencies. It is down to the agencies to identify amongst all of these changes where to find the efficiency gains. Q487 Mr Jack: Is it a question of doing more for less or the same for less? Dr Brown: We are always interested in doing more for less. Q488 Mr Jack: I am interested in your remit. If we go back to the list in 2(2), I do not know whether anybody has produced a budget that goes alongside that. It is alright writing lists down, but unless this body has got adequate resources then clearly it is going to struggle to deliver. Sir Martin Doughty: Those are all functions which the three agencies are already carrying out within their present budgets. Q489 Mr Jack: So those are going to be squeezed, are they not? Sir Martin Doughty: They are not necessarily going to be squeezed. As Dr Brown has said, there are efficiency savings, things like how many less people are going to go up a farmer's drive. Q490 Mr Jack: Perhaps you could address my concern that there is going to be enough money to do the positive things and if there are going to be efficiency savings, they will come out of the natural reduction and duplication by marrying these three bodies together. You have the power, as English Nature does at the moment, to enter into management agreements and those obviously affect things like SSSIs and other land which you manage. Under your current budget you have a line for all of that. Is that unchanged, increased or decreased under the new arrangements? Sir Martin Doughty: It carries through. Q491 Mr Jack: So there is no squeeze as far as that is concerned. You also comment about experimental powers to develop "new methods, concepts or techniques" and it refers to land management and ecological activity. Are you going to have a budget for experimentation which will satisfy that list of things? Sir Martin Doughty: Again, I think we are talking of budgets carrying through. One issue that we are looking at at the moment is the ability of different methods of land management to affect carbon sequestration, to be helpful or otherwise towards climate change. Q492 Mr Jack: The reason I ask those questions is because we have got an Integrated Agency where expectations are going to be raised with a sharper focus on the function. You quite rightly said in answer to a question a short while ago "and climate change is presenting us with new challenges". My judgment is that there will be an ever increasing amount of work for you to do. We are also aware from this Committee's work into SSSIs that there is still a deficit of activity in those areas. The message I am getting is that it is more work that you are going to be responsible for but with, at best, carry on budgets. Is that a fair assumption? Dr Brown: The budget for the new agency has not been set at this point. The work has focused on the costs of bringing about the change and some of the efficiency gains that can be realised as a result of that change. The starting point for the budget of the new agency is obviously arrived at by adding up the existing budgets of the three parts coming together to form the new body. Q493 Mr Jack: With respect, I take the point you make, but you cannot produce a table of costs and establishment costs and savings unless you actually have some budgetary information. You said the budget has not been established and yet here we are talking about levels of efficiency savings, costs of establishment, costs of reducing current lines of expenditure which are in existing budgets, and you are telling me that those budgets are being parachuted through to the new organisation and then you tell me you have not got any budgets. Dr Brown: The budgets have not been finalised. Nobody has talked about what the final figures will be for the new agency from 2007 onwards. To some extent that is going to be influenced by the next Spending Review. My best guess is similar to yours, ie there are going to be tremendous demands on this new body to deliver. The Government has made it very clear that the driving force behind this is to create a powerful, independent and effective body. It is not driven by an efficiency agenda. If Government wants more things to be delivered by this organisation then one would expect the budget to go up from simply adding up the existing bits and pieces of budget that we have already talked about. Q494 Chairman: There is a view around that the Integrated Agency is nothing more than English Nature with some bolt ons. What is your response to that? Sir Martin Doughty: I gave you the figures for the RDS staffing budget. It is far bigger than English Nature for one thing. I guess that view comes from the fact that it is the whole of English Nature going into this organisation and only parts of the Countryside Agency and parts of RDS, albeit the biggest parts. I do not agree with it. I think the joining together of nature and landscape is long overdue. The idea that nature is for enjoyment is long overdue. This agency has an exciting future, given the right budgets and all the other things we have been talking about, to do things much better than in the past and to be much bigger than the sum of its parts. Q495 Chairman: And it will be seen as a new agency, something different, something that is going to accomplish the very adventurous purpose that it has been given. Sir Martin Doughty: Absolutely, yes. Q496 Chairman: You are dependant upon guidance from the Secretary of State which appears to be a bit vague at the moment. There is some tension between acting as a delivery agent for the Government and getting guidance from the Government. How is this process going to work? Is it going to compromise your independence at all? Dr Brown: I think we need to make sure that there is nothing in the Statute that does undermine the independence of this body or even has the perception of undermining the independence of the body. As far as guidance is concerned, there will certainly be areas where some guidance will be helpful, the delivery of agri-environment, for example, where there are lots of different people interested and it is big money. I think publishing guidance helps preserve a degree of independence, it is very transparent and people are very clear what is being said. I think there may be a helpful addition to put into the Bill, which is clarifying that the guidance is something that the new agency would have to have regard to; in other words, it is not necessarily being dictated to, but it is something that they must have regard to and demonstrate that they have regard to. Q497 Chairman: You are going to give us a note about the RDS budget and how it might be broken down. Martin, you talked about the purposes and we are very clear on the purposes. Andy, you have helped us a little bit on the budget. One of the ways of defining success is by having not just a set of input measures but output measures. When will we get a feel of what the output measures are for this new agency? How would you define them? Who will define them? Sir Martin Doughty: Funnily enough, we have just come from a meeting of a body called The Integrated Agency Steering Group, which is comprised of members of my council, the Countryside Agency board and RDS's new non‑executives, and we have been doing what has been called "horizon scanning". We have been looking at what will be the scenario in 2020, what are the political constraints, economic constraints, technological changes, environmental changes and how do we see the success of an agency like this in 2020. Dr Brown: Perhaps I can pin it down slightly further in terms of timescales. We would hope that there is some sort of draft strategy and plan available shortly after a shadow body is created. Q498 Chairman: When will that be? Dr Brown: That depends on when the Bill is introduced to the House. Q499 Chairman: What are your expectations on that? Sir Martin Doughty: Defra's expectations are a Bill maybe in May or June, with a shadow chair, a shadow board and shadow chief executive appointed in the autumn. I guess these things are dependent upon legislative pressures which you would know more about than me. Q500 Chairman: The quicker you can make the change happen the better because there is a cost in delay, is there not? Sir Martin Doughty: And there is momentum. Q501 Mr Jack: Just a quick question about section 11, which is powers to raise money in respect of the issuance of licences. What are these licences for? Dr Tew: At the moment English Nature has a variety of licensing functions, European protected species and so on and we do not charge for that service. The RDS has a wider variety of licensing functions and I do not know whether they charge or not. Q502 Mr Jack: So this is a carry through power more like in relation to the RDS? Dr Tew: Yes. It is a power to charge if appropriate. It is not saying you have to charge. Dr Brown: I think that is right. It is giving the option that if there is a need for cost recovery then you have got the legislative powers to do it. Q503 Mr Jack: You also express some concern about the powers to bring criminal proceedings in section 12. Would you like to expand a little bit more on why you are worried about that? Dr Tew: As we say in the evidence, the issue there is about potential widening of the prosecutory authority role. At the moment English Nature is very comfortable with its balance as an incentiviser and encourager and adviser and we see a distinction between us and the Environment Agency which has largely a regulatory role. We have some prosecutory powers and those are perfectly adequate at the moment. We do not prosecute under Part I, we do not caution people and we do not get involved in sending people to jail because it is the police's job to do that. Q504 Mr Jack: In paragraph 11 of your evidence you register a concern that you think more responsibilities vis‑à‑vis prosecution would be coming in the direction of the Integrated Agency, which would, in the light of your wider functions, make you feel uncomfortable. Have you had sight of that? Dr Tew: We do not know that it will. We are worried that it leaves that option. Chairman: Martin and colleagues, thank you all very much. Memoranda submitted by Campaign to Protect Rural England, RSPB, Wildlife Trusts and Woodland Trust Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Tom Oliver, Head of Rural Policy, Campaign to Protect Rural England, Mr Graham Wynne, Chief Executive, RSPB, Ms Stephanie Hilborne, Chief Executive, Wildlife Trusts, and Dr Hilary Allison, Policy Director, Woodland Trust, examined. Q505 Chairman: Our next witnesses are all members of the Wildlife and Countryside Link. We have Tom Oliver from the CPRE, Graham Wynne, RSPB, Stephanie Hilborne, the Wildlife Trust, and Hilary Allison from the Woodland Trust. Welcome to all of you. You will have heard our earlier exchanges with English Nature. What do you think of the Bill so far? Mr Wynne: I am going to take the question by diving straight into the general purpose. It seems to me that that is the heart of the issue. Our fundamental concern is that the new agency is set up to be a powerful champion for the natural environment. We desperately need a powerful champion for the natural environment and if this agency cannot afford that function then we are in serious trouble. We believe that the general purpose, as outlined in 2(1), is well crafted to enable the agency to be that champion. One can argue about the fine detail of the wording, but we think it enables it to be robust enough to do the job. One specific observation on the general purpose. The clause that says "thereby contributing to sustainable development" we think is appropriate because it is important that this agency does make a full contribution to sustainable development. It is equally important that any discussion about what the precise meaning of sustainable development is in no way curtails the agency's ability to deliver for the natural environment. On the second part of the purpose, we do have some concerns and, if I may, I would like individual colleagues to address those. Q506 Chairman: Tom, are you going to start because I have the impression you were not too keen on Clause 2(2)? Mr Oliver: We are keen on parts of Clause 2(2), but I think the important thing is to get to the heart of the matter. We strongly welcome the use of the word "protect" when it comes to biodiversity, but we are concerned that the fundamental inter‑relationship with its dependence on biodiversity and landscape, evolution and protection, management, should be linked explicitly through the common protection of both. The organisations present here that manage land know that all too well. We can quote you examples of the fundamental inter‑relationship between the two. That is one matter of concern from the point of view of landscape protection. CPRE is also concerned that the term "natural beauty" and the term "cultural heritage" should at least be explained by Ministers and defined because the term "landscape" as it stands is not defined legally. Although the European Landscape Convention definition exists, it does not help with the purposes of this legislation. Turning to the rest of 2(2), however, there are also questions in respect of the priority attached to those and to the definitions of some of the terms and colleagues and I will turn to those as and when you wish us to. Q507 Chairman: Stephanie? Ms Hilborne: In terms of prioritization, we picked up in our submissions to you our concern that whilst we want to see this agency actively promoting quiet recreation and enjoyment of the countryside, we need to guarantee absolutely that we do not, in trying to enjoy the countryside, damage it. I cannot help but think of the Sherwood Forest visitors' centre in your constituency as something that should never have been in the middle of that SSSI. Q508 Chairman: It was nothing to do with me. Ms Hilborne: I know it was not your decision. I did not hear the Environment Agency's evidence yesterday, but they have to carry these two things on a practical day‑to‑day basis. There are examples where objectives championed by the Environment Agency can conflict, for example, water vole conservation and riverside regeneration. Which takes precedence when a riverside bike path is planned or proposed? You really have to be clear that you are protecting the biodiversity at all costs because you can do both if you do it right. We think there is the need for additional safeguards, but we want to see this agency actively promoting access of the right kind. Mr Oliver: The crucial point is that access and landscape and biodiversity conservation are perfectly compatible and in fact essential in our view in terms of the political attractiveness of funding these things in the future, but the crucial thing is that the agency is not in a position where it has to make invidious choices because there is not a clear enough definition in the legislation to do that. That refers both to recreation which is destructive ‑ and we are all very familiar with aspects of that and the Woodland Trust has good examples - and, at point E in the Bill, it refers to socio‑economic management which could very easily be widely interpreted. Dr Allison: Perhaps I could pick up on two particular points. The first thing is, just going back to this word "protection" which appears at 2(2)(a) which I think is extremely important and it reiterates much of the language that exists in the Rural Strategy and also in the UK Sustainable Development Strategy in terms of objectives of sustainable development, I think it is absolutely crucial that that needs to be in there and a key part of the work of the new agency. Just following on from this tension sometimes between the conservation and protection of biodiversity and open-air recreation, I think we all have a view that perhaps leisure activities are somehow inherently benign and probably most of them are highly sustainable. From the Woodland Trust perspective, we have been gathering evidence of threats to ancient woods for the last three or four years. We have a database of 500 cases of ancient woods which are threatened by some form of development. Over 35 of those cases involve leisure activities including caravan sites, golf courses, four by four use and paintballing. To us those kinds of activities are incompatible with the protection of a natural resource which is irreplaceable and therefore by definition that development cannot be classed as a sustainable activity. I think the use of the word "open‑air recreation" is something that does need to be looked at and perhaps building on the kind of definitions which appeared in the CROW Act, in Schedule 2, which defined open‑air recreation more fully, that might be a helpful thing for the Committee to look at. Q509 Chairman: I think there are conflicts and tensions there, but I wonder how far they are real and how far they are imagined. RSPB own a large amount of land and lots of visitors go there, but you are able to have access and conservation as well. Hilary, you made the point about quiet recreation and the Sandford Principle as well. If you are able to work all those things together then maybe the situation is perhaps not quite as alarming as it comes across in the written evidence. Mr Wynne: Everybody here, from all of these organisations, devotes a large amount of energy in fulfilling their charitable purposes to making the countryside accessible, available, open to members and the public at large simply because it stands to reason that if the public cannot appreciate the countryside and the natural environment then why on earth should they be clear about whether it should be protected or not. It is a very utilitarian function there but we believe it is a good thing to do. Certainly for myself, not speaking for the full team, I think that strengthens the argument for tightening the wording here and making it absolutely clear so that we do not get into silly conflicts or disputations which are quite unnecessary. We would agree with you that 95 per cent or a very high percentage of access and recreation in the countryside is appropriate and should be encouraged. There is a portion which is not and there are bodies that are promoting that form of access to the countryside powerfully, with good money behind them and we would like to see clarity. Our colleagues in Defra have told us that we are worrying unnecessarily and that because of the structure of 2(1), the General Purpose, it is clearly apparent that the natural environment is paramount. If that is the case and if there is no possibility of misinterpretation, then why not write it down in some version of the Sandford Principle and have it clarified for all. Mr Oliver: If the Bill passed into an Act in its present form it would be perfectly legitimate to read that it was Parliament's intention that there should be no mechanism for reconciling irreconcilable objectives. It is terribly important if we are talking about the one organisation with statutory responsibility for the natural environment it has that backbone. However excellent the present leadership is, we must legislate in favour of the future so that there is a plan. Q510 Chairman: Let us turn to another contentious area. All of you have been big supporters of English Nature in the past and it being independent and a powerful watchdog. Are you satisfied that the Bill delivers this? Ms Hilborne: There are aspects of the Bill which would give us some concern, but I think overall we are very happy with the purpose. We want to support that. The aspects that give us concern are about what seems to be a slight change in the relationship with the Secretary of State and one aspect of that is that there is no definition currently of the upper or lower limits on the number of people on the board and the way that the board's composition is going to be determined in a sense. It is changing it from the current way that English Nature's board is determined to the way the Countryside Agency's board is determined. That is something we would like them to look at. The other aspects are quite complicated. The Secretary of State has given guidance on the amounts and that has been changed in the Environmental Protection Act to allow a larger area or raft of activities to be guided more directly by the Secretary of State than previously and that is of some concern to us. I think those are the points made in English Nature's own submission as well that it is worth picking up on. Dr Allison: A good example of that is under the constitution of the JNCC where there is a prescription that there should be people with nature conservation knowledge, whereas there is absolutely no indication in the Bill as it currently stands as to the make up of the board in terms of actual technical and countryside expertise, and I think that is another area where there is potential perhaps for that independence to be undermined, not under the current arrangement and current political circumstance, but perhaps in the future it would be possible to load the board of an agency with people who perhaps did not have its best interests at heart for whatever reason. That is a good example of the concern that we have. Mr Oliver: There is an interesting thought about symmetry in terms of independence of other major agencies concerned with the environment. It would be difficult to justify there being a lesser degree of independence one than another. Q511 Mr Jack: One of the things that concern me about the position of this new agency is the number of other organisations who have the ability to interact with it. The new way of delivering the rural services and development of the rural economy, for example, involves the RDA. In addition to that, government officers have a finger in the pie, regional assemblies have another finger in the pie, local authorities still figure in the firmament and all of these people have the potential to conflict with some of the principal objectives that we have just been discussing, but it is not clear to me that a mechanism for dispute resolution exists. What are your observations about that? Mr Oliver: My first objection is the crucial importance of regional spatial strategies, which will be the way in which those conflicts are played out and defined whether or not they are resolved. For that reason particularly it is crucial that the Integrated Agency has very strong and well resourced regional capacity in order that it plays a full part in putting the environmental case in the drafting and fulfillment of the regional spatial strategies. Mr Wynne: Quite a lot of argumentation preceded the proposal for the agency in terms of the efficiencies that would be gained from putting these three bodies together. I think some of that is capable of challenge except it is irrelevant now. I think one of the most powerful arguments there is is that by creating this larger agency it should have the capacity to operate meaningfully at a regional level and be a powerful influence with the other players that you have laid out. The point about influencing regional spatial strategies which are going to be increasingly important is absolutely right. That would probably not have been possible from a suite of smaller organisations and hopefully with one powerful agency for the natural environment here they can do that and it is crucial that they do so. Q512 Mr Jack: It may well be in the Bill but it has so far eluded my discovery as to whether the agency should be a statutory consultee for all of those other bodies. Have you found that? Mr Oliver: I must confess, I do not know for certain, but I would agree with you. We have said in our evidence that the role of the Integrated Agency in planning is crucial, which I am glad to see the policy statement identifies as a crucial element, and for that reason the statutory consultation role that English Nature has, for example, in relation to SSSIs - and we have submitted evidence to suggest the Government should retain that - should be clear. Whether that is through a ministerial statement during the Bill or on the face of the Bill, I am not yet in a position to advise from our perspective. Ms Hilborne: I think you are raising a really key issue which we have been extremely worried about, which is about this current lack of democracy about regional decision making. In some parts there is a bit of a vacuum and with the regional spatial strategies we have more of a structure. Whereas currently we have regional assemblies attempting to pull these issues together, we do not really have any statutory process for making that happen in a valid democratic way. We have not necessarily jumped at the wording that you include within this Bill to allow that to happen, but some statutory basis for both advice and perhaps environmental strategies at a regional level would start to level the playing field because currently there is a statutory basis for economic strategies but not for environmental strategies at that level. Mr Jack: Whilst I would not expect you to instantaneously draft appropriate clauses, perhaps there is a piece of architecture that you would like to spell out by the end of the week as to what you think ought to go into the Bill. There is a danger in looking at Bills that you comment on what is down there as opposed to what is not down there and what is not down there may be just as important as what is down there. It does strike me that there are a lot of players in this field and there is no disputes resolution procedure. I would certainly be very interested if you could develop some ideas rather rapidly to assist us. Q513 Chairman: But around the architecture rather than the democratic deficit because I think that is a slightly bigger argument. We will give you until the end of next week to do that! Mr Oliver: CPRE was instrumental in the sustainable duty of RDAs' legislation in 1998 and we are very happy to work with our colleagues to provide a similar approach. It is crucial that the agency's purposes are clear for that very reason. Q514 Chairman: I want to move on from purposes to outputs. I think in the RSPB evidence you make the point that you want to know what this agency is doing. That is more or less what you are saying, is it not? Mr Wynne: Obviously we are very supportive of the energy in Government to improve and streamline delivery for the natural environment and in the countryside as a whole. That intention is a thoroughly good thing. I do not want to challenge it. We have been a little bit perturbed that most of the descriptions that have come about from that have been described very much in process terms rather than in real world outputs, and we have suggested that rather than casting around for a new set of outputs the agency could make a pretty good start by focusing on existing government commitments and have at the centre the ones that we have suggested: the Government's commitment to halt biodiversity loss by 2010, establish a coherent network of marine protected areas by 2012, restore and maintain fish stocks by 2015, favourable conditions for 95 per cent of SSSIs by 2010, and ensure that all water bodies achieve good status in the Water Framework Directive by 2015. Q515 Mr Jack: In my questioning earlier I asked whether there ought to be explicit reference to the marine environment in Clause 2 of the Bill and English Nature told me they did not think that was needed, that it was implicit. What do you think? Mr Wynne: I think a really difficult issue here is whether the wording can ever be completely inclusive. I have some sympathy with English Nature's stance that the more you attempt to get it inclusive in a sense what then gets left out by accident is interpreted as being purposeful, whereas I do believe the natural environment by definition does encompass marine inter-tidal and the environment in urban areas, so I am not especially concerned about that. Ms Hilborne: I think it is a matter of the relationship between 2(1) and 2(2) in a sense because 2(1) kind of does cover marine if you interpret it in the way Graham said. With 2(2), just reading all five together, you get a terrestrial feeling from it which is almost what you are saying, whereas 2(2)(a), the nature conservation and biodiversity part, we would be very happy to cover the marine. As soon as you talk about landscape it seems to leave it out. Given we are at a slightly different point with marine conservation, we have not pushed to specify enhancing the marine environment, but hopefully we will be getting to a position where we have halted the severe losses and we are putting things back. Q516 Mr Jack: The reason I feel quite strongly about this is in thinking of the Water Framework Directive in an estuarial situation with a responsibility in that context of policy one mile off shore. You could then equally take it in a scenario like that Habitats Directive issue. The point you were making a second ago, Stephanie, is the one that was inspiring my thinking about 2(2). This talks about "the agency's general purposes include ..." and I accept the point that 2(1) is the broadest of brushes, but given the increasing way in which policy is going in integrating land based and marine based issues together, hence my line of questioning. Ms Hilborne: I think it could be politically useful to mention it if we could think of wording that does not make other things look excluded. With what is going to happen through the Marine Bill it is going to be absolutely critical we have an independent voice to any new structures on biodiversity. In a way it could be helpful to ensure we have that. From the Trust's perspective, we have not discussed this across Link actively, whether it is actually on the face of it, if the wording does not fall into the pitfall that it starts to exclude other things I think we would be very happy with that. Mr Oliver: The same issue applies to the countryside. Chairman, you used the word countryside in your opening remarks and it does not appear on the face of the Bill, which is why I mentioned the words "natural beauty" and "cultural heritage" which are not defined. For the same reason we wish to avoid excluding things, but there may be a mechanism whereby both marine, estuarine, coastal and also the natural beauty of the landscape could be explicitly referred to somewhere. Q517 Chairman: I want to ask you about the RDS. The RDS is a big spender. Potentially it can change the environment. Do you feel that this move gives us more tools to use that RDS money in a more effective way? Mr Wynne: I think it gives us a great opportunity to get the best out of that spend and to diminish the gap in philosophies which there has sometimes been between the various agencies operating in the countryside who are all intending to promote better management of the environment through either commercial activities like farming or through straightforward nature protection. Yes, I think it gives us a better chance to get maximum efficiency. Ms Hilborne: We can throw in other issues like data and some of the research angles. If we have a comprehensive dataset regarding the biodiversity resource including that biodiversity resource outside designated sites, then the contribution that agri‑environment schemes can make towards creating a resilient countryside and rebuilding biodiversity across the wider landscape would be much greater because we will be targeting it much more effectively. Whilst we are not going to be lobbying for this Bill to include a duty for local authorities to bring together the data on, for example, local wildlife sites, I think this agency needs to be promoting the collection of that basic data that allows us to make sure that the integration with the RDS brings some of those benefits. Q518 Chairman: CPRE in particular would have an interest in the Commission for Rural Communities. I think Tom told us a moment ago the countryside was not on the face of the Bill. My spies tell me if you look hard you can find it at some point. What is CPRE expecting from the Commission for Rural Communities? Mr Oliver: The first point is that it should have the same level of independence as the Integrated Agency. The second point is that we strongly welcome the clear direction that it should especially pay attention to social disadvantage. The third point is that we are not yet convinced of the effectiveness of the relationship between the CRC and the regions. I am aware you have already covered that so I will not trouble you further on that; we agree with the RDAs on that. Q519 Chairman: Do you think that this kind of watchdog/advocate role of the CRC across government is going to deliver? Mr Oliver: If it is independent it can. I think there is strong motivation among the people who will be leading and working in that organisation that it should. I am less convinced of that with the provisions of the Bill as they presently are framed for the same reasons that we are concerned about the Integrated Agency to deliver that at present. Q520 Mr Drew: Is there a contradiction here between effectively how you try and deal with deprivation in rural areas, which with the best will in the world is going to need resources coming from the centre, as against what most of us want to see in rural Britain, which is a degree of decentralization and bottom‑up initiatives? Is this going to be one of the problems with this organisation, that it is going to be, as so often happens, schizophrenic, it is looking two ways at the same time? What are your views on that, Tom? Mr Oliver: I think at the heart of the question is the dislocation between the national voice, which one hopes will be independent, and the architecture of delivery and for the reason I said earlier, we are not convinced yet that there is an effective link between the regional delivery by local authorities, by RDAs and by others, and the national body. There are grounds for concern and I agree with you that those need to be resolved. Having attended yesterday evening the rural homelessness seminar chaired by Baroness Maddock, it is very clear to me that solutions do lie at a local level and there is a need for the CRC to be able to deliver that expertise and guidance and leadership to that local level. I am also aware that the RDAs made a good point, which is that they do not want to be bypassed in the delivery of information and leadership between a national organisation and a local organisation and for that reason it is crucial that the RDAs in particular have a full commitment to addressing social disadvantage. Perhaps I may just quickly add an issue which you skirted over with the RDAs. I think it is crucially important that where the relationship between farmers and RDS is good it is retained. It is a very precious element of what presently exists within the RDS and it is sometimes overlooked. CPRE is one of the bodies involved in the framing of the new agri‑environment scheme. We are very pleased that the RDS has been so closely engaged with the detail and we look forward to that being an important part of the new agency. Dr Allison: I want to make one further observation about the CRC, not so much to do with the issues that Tom raised but in the way that its purposes are couched. Rural needs is defined very strongly in terms of social and economic needs. That is important in terms of defining very clearly the role of a small organisation, but I think one under‑estimates at one's peril the overlap between that and the functions of the Integrated Agency, particularly in something like issues of health and the link with the environment. I attended a great seminar last week by the Countryside Recreation Network and there was a fantastic amount of new evidence being presented about the importance of green exercise and accessibility to spaces in rural and urban areas in relation to people's health, both psychological and physical. I think it would be a shame if this new Commission focused exclusively on the social and economic dimension of rural need to the exclusion of some of the environmental needs which are probably underplayed in rural areas. We tend to think of rural areas being well endowed with "the environment" when in fact there are some real issues to do with green space and so on in rural areas. Those are the kind of issues I hope the Commission would pick up through close collaboration and working with the Integrated Agency. Mr Wynne: There is an interesting point of symmetry, which is that the duties and purposes of the Integrated Agency specifically refer to social and economic, which I think is appropriate, but the CRC simply refers to sustainable development in the round. I think that is slightly strange. Q521 Chairman: Stephanie, you undertook to let us have a note on the regional frameworks and the regional linkages. One of the things I struggle with a bit is how both the Integrated Agency and, more particularly, the Commission are going to have a footprint on the ground. I am not at all clear what the delivery agency is going to look like. You have been saying to us about an independent agency that has got to be locally based, it has got to be regionally based and you made a point about involving local authorities and all of that is right. I am not clear about where the Commission comes in and where it gets its information. We described it yesterday as a brain with no legs! That is a real problem, is it not? Mr Oliver: It is a real problem. It would be very helpful if that were considered in greater detail before the Bill is published. Q522 Chairman: Thank you all very much. Mr Oliver: Chairman, I undertook on behalf of the ramblers to make a point. Q523 Chairman: I have seen them this morning. I hope it is the same point they have made to me. Mr Oliver: So do I. They are very concerned that the resources allocated to the Integrated Agency and the powers allow the Integrated Agency to operate effectively in helping rights‑of‑way be opened up amongst local authorities who are failing to do that. I think that is a very important part of its effectiveness. Ms Hilborne: I agree. To end on resources is key. Chairman: Thank you all very much indeed. Memoranda submitted by Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Lord Whitty, a Member of the House of Lords, Minister for Food, Farming and Sustainable Energy, Ms Oona Muirhead, Modernising Rural Delivery Programme Director, and Mr Brian Harding, Wildlife, Countryside and Land Use Director, Defra, examined. Q524 Chairman: Larry, thank you very much for joining us. The cynics are saying in my ear that this could be the Minister's last appearance before this Committee but you could not possibly comment on any reorganisation and I would not want to put you in that spot! Lord Whitty: The fact I have a smile on my face has nothing to do with it! Q525 Chairman: Larry, last time you came to see us in the autumn you told us that you had acquired the job of guiding this Bill through and it had fallen to you? Is that still the situation? Lord Whitty: It is indeed. Chairman: You are joined by Oona Muirhead, who has been to see us before, and Brian Harding, the Director of Wildlife, Countryside and Land Use. Welcome, Brian. Could we start with a different perspective than we have taken with other witnesses. We have asked the witnesses what they thought of the Bill so far and they have all said marvellous basically. You are bound to say it is marvellous. Mr Jack: He might not! Q526 Chairman: I hope so. I think it is delivery we may come to in a minute but the key point of the discussion has been really around the Integrated Agency and its general purpose in clause 2.1 and clause 2.2, and there have been suggestions that the five purposes in clause 2.2 are not strictly compatible, they do not hang together particularly well. What is your view on that? Lord Whitty: Naturally I think they hang together pretty well. As your others witnesses have probably already indicated, these were the subject of some fairly thorough discussions with the predecessor organisations - indeed in general terms with other stakeholders but in great detail with English Nature, the Countryside Agency and the RDS. What it is intended to do is to set a fairly broad general purpose about the natural environment and the contribution that essentially environmental measures can make to sustainable development and it then goes through the most important of their actual activities. There are always terminological problems as to what is a "purpose" and what is a "function" and what is an "objective", but those in clause 2 (a) to (e) are the main activities contributing to the general purpose as we see it. Q527 Chairman: We are told that there is a potential conflict between nature conservation and open air recreation. Four-wheel drivers, paint ballers and activities like that have been mentioned to us. There is a suggestion that if there is conflict in the countryside that wildlife and nature conservation ought to take priority. Lord Whitty: I think there is always bound to be some conflict between the objectives of the agency as such and, as with any government organization, one has to decide on the tradeoffs and the priorities. What I do not accept is one of the arguments being put to you that conservation should always override everything and that maximising the conservation dimension should always override other dimensions of sustainable development. That is one of the reasons we have put the first clause on general purposes in the context of sustainable development and, as you will know, the theology of sustainable development is that there are three aspects ‑ social, economic and environmental. Clearly the purposes of the Integrated Agency are on the environmental wing of that and its specific purposes are all environmental. That is not to say that some of the individual environmental objectives cannot on occasion clash but pursuing those environmental objectives they need to take account of the social and economic effects. That is not to say that either of those override the environmental objective but if the same objective can be achieved in different ways minimising any damage to the other objectives, then clearly that would normally be the course of action. I certainly accept that the environmental objective is paramount and conservation within that is one of the most important environmental objectives, but I do not think there should be an absolute override in the way people have put to you in the context of, for example, the sound principles. This is a broader body than that but its main contribution is on that front. Q528 Mr Drew: Could I in similar vein take you through Schedule 5 on page 37 where we have got the designated bodies. We met with some of your colleagues from the Lords and I have raised this both with them and in the session we had yesterday. Can you just give me some feel for why that list is as it is? Was this a "this needs to be in because of its importance" or because this is a sweeping up job or were they fighting to get on this list? I am just intrigued because we have got bodies like the Environment Agency, which is a pretty important arm of government, but we have also got ‑ and I do not in any way want to downgrade it ‑ the British Potato Council. What is the logic of this list and does it really matter that these are designated bodies? I know about the levy boards. We might put them in there because they have got to go somewhere but these are not all levying organisations, so what are they and why are they there? Lord Whitty: I hope they are the full list of the NDPBs for which Defra is responsible, I think I am right in saying Oona? Q529 Mr Drew: Every one? Lord Whitty: And the point is that the powers to transfer delegations by consent between them would apply to any of these. Q530 Mr Drew: So this is a pure tidying-up exercise? They have all got legislative underpinning in other ways. If they are not on this list they are not going to fold; they would just go back to their previous incarnation? Lord Whitty: There is a particular aspect of the levy boards which goes beyond the delegation of powers or the transfer of powers or the sub-delegation of powers all of which would be by consent. With the levy boards we are looking at the total structure which could involve some changes over and above that but with the rest of them and including them it is about the power of delegation and therefore we listed those powers which are the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and not other bodies. Q531 Mr Drew: If I could carry on, Chairman. Does this change the basis of any of these bodies? Clearly one which I would be very interested in is number one, the Agricultural Wages Board, which has been quite a controversial agency. Some of us feel very strongly that it should and must remain but I know it is in the party political arena. What are the implications for that particular board which could now become a designated body under this new piece of legislation? Lord Whitty: There is no implication unless a function which had previously been delegated to another body were to be transferred to or from the Agricultural Wages Board, and that would have to be by the consent of the Agricultural Wages Board as with the boards of the other bodies. As you know, the Agricultural Wages Board, is in a slightly different category in that it is in effect a collective bargaining operation and therefore the structure of decision‑making is slightly different but the same principle applies - it does not alter its function unless by consent that there was some cross delegation. Ms Muirhead: If I may just clarify in terms of the face of the Bill earlier on, that schedule needs to be read very much in support of Part 3, Chapter 1, about agreements with designated bodies where the intent here, as we set out in the policy statement, is to allow flexibility for the future for organisations to deliver most effectively without constantly having to come back with primary legislative change and causing the sorts of delays and disruption that you talked about in the previous session. Obviously any delegation of powers either from the Secretary of State or between these Defra‑sponsored bodies would have to be mutually agreed and would have to be within the overall purpose of that body. Q532 Chairman: But would there need to be some primary legislation? There will be colleagues in both Houses who will say, "Hey, this is a bit odd, we want to have a say on that." I can see them saying that a bit more strongly. Is there a need for regulation around these points? Ms Muirhead: Indeed, 41 (6) makes it clear that there would be a requirement to come forward for resolution in the Houses. Q533 Mr Drew: Can I ask just one last thing to be absolutely clear. If someone came up with the bright idea that the British Potato Council's job could be done by the Meat and Livestock Commission, is this a mechanism by which, if the two bodies agreed, it could handle that? Lord Whitty: It could not handle the complete abolition of the Potato Council. That, however, could be handled under the clause relating specifically to the levy boards, which is broader than the powers which relate to all of these authorities. Which number is the levy boards one? It is 53. Ms Muirhead: Pages 16 and 17. Lord Whitty: 49 through to 55. Those powers give more substantial powers on the levy boards, subject to a review which I have announced in principle and which I will announce in practice very shortly to look at levy board structure. That is not a particularly typical example. For everything else, as Oona says, it will have to be within the current remit of the body but it may be that a function could be transferred, for example, from the Environment Agency to ‑ probably not a very good example ‑ the Integrated Agency or vice versa by mutual consent. It would not change the remit of the bodies. One possibly more immediate area might be some of the forestry schemes and the Integrated Agency. One might transfer either way but probably to the Integrated Agency. Q534 Mr Drew: That would not require any secondary legislation? Lord Whitty: In most cases - and it varies ‑ it would probably require a negative procedure which is provided for in the clause that Oona just drew your attention to, which is clause 41(6). Not every one would require that. Q535 Chairman: Can we just take up clause 42. Can you clarify whether non‑designated bodies under that clause could include NGOs and private bodies? Is there any expectation that such bodies could carry out investigations or policing roles? Lord Whitty: Which clause? Q536 Chairman: Clause 42. Lord Whitty: Where would you suggest 42 in relation to private bodies? Q537 Chairman: It is a suggestion that has been made to say that the Secretary of State has absolute powers in sub‑clause (3), and that "non‑designated bodies" means any body which is not listed in Schedule 5. Ms Muirhead: What we try to do is to look at public bodies in two groupings, if you like, the first being those which are sponsored by Defra and then those which the Secretary of State might wish to delegate her own powers and, secondly, under clause 42, delegation of powers between bodies. We did not want to narrow it to Defra‑sponsored bodies. We wanted to allow for, let's say, a Defra body in future to delegate a function to maybe the RDAs which are sponsored by the DTI, and that is why we have got a list of the Defra ones and then we say there may be others. Q538 Chairman: There will be bodies like the NFU and the CIA (?) perhaps, Oona, who can see that there are fairly wide‑ranging powers here and I suspect that what they are worried about is that you bring in, say, an NGO that maybe they are anxious about ‑ sometimes there is a bit of conflict there ‑ to do some investigative work and some policing work which they would not be comfortable with. Lord Whitty: Certainly the intention of this was to ensure that we could cover non‑designated public bodies, which could include local authorities for example, but I guess it is part of the job of pre-scrutiny for us to check whether in fact this would be exclusive before we produce a final Bill. Q539 Mr Jack: Before you decide to check something that you have now written down, what inspired you to write it down in the first place? Lord Whitty: Precisely the reason that ‑‑‑ Q540 Mr Jack: There must have been a piece of policy advice that crossed desk that said "the Minister may care to note that the following circumstances might occur in the future where the Secretary of State would want to pass on her powers to a non‑designated body" and I would be surprised if it did not give you some examples of what we are talking about. Could you perhaps give us a specific example of the kind of delegation of powers in the way that this clause allows you to do? Lord Whitty: My colleague Oona Muirhead has just identified one, a transfer of a function to an RDA which is sponsored by a different Secretary of State. Q541 Mr Jack: Give us a for instance. What kind of function might an RDA be tasked to do? Ms Muirhead: The RDAs are being tasked to carry out socio‑economic regeneration. Q542 Mr Jack: They are, but that is now. Ms Muirhead: From April, yes. Q543 Mr Jack: You want to put something in this Bill, a power which does not exist at the moment, and you must have had a pretty good idea of a for instance as to why you wanted it so could you give us an example? Ms Muirhead: We were doing a bit of horizon scanning actually. Q544 Mr Jack: What did you see on the horizon that made you write this clause? Ms Muirhead: Sometimes it is a bit difficult to see beyond the horizon. Q545 Mr Jack: Was it Three Wise Men bearing gifts or something? You do not take powers in a Bill unless you want to use them. Ms Muirhead: Sorry, if I may just elaborate on the example which Lord Whitty mentioned earlier which is that of grants for land conservation and management, ie to do with land that either does or does not have trees on it and, as you know, some grants at the moment are delivered by the Forestry Commission and some are delivered by the RDS. In future we wanted to ensure that we could maximise the effectiveness of delivery. In various parts of the country perhaps the Forestry Commission might conclude that it was more effective in terms of the environment and the customer for the Integrated Agency to carry out some of its functions in that particular part of the country, or indeed vice versa. The Environment Agency and the Integrated Agency (at the moment English Nature and RDS ‑ I am getting ahead of myself in terms of these organisations) are carrying out work in support of the Water Framework Directive in relation to catchment area pilots. These are only pilots and we wanted to ensure the flexibility for that kind of delegation. It is not a transfer of functions. It is not a wholesale "I am never going to do this again, this is now for you to do from now on." This is just a delegation for a specific time period by mutual consent where it makes sense in terms of effectiveness of delivery and outcomes. Q546 Mr Jack: It is not a mechanism to sub-contract wholesale activities that are currently done in‑house by Defra to outside bodies who could be tasked statutorily to carry out certain functions that might have been done by Defra internally, is it? Lord Whitty: Part of the whole pattern post the Haskins Report is to move delivery outside of the core department of Defra so some of the activities we are talking about, by definition, were previously done by Defra. For example, the Defra core department includes the RDS and it includes certain inspectorates. Moving those out of Defra would be very much in line with the Haskins Report and the Rural Strategy. If you mean are we sub-contracting them to the private sector, then, no, we are either creating or using public bodies to carry out tasks that were previously done by the central department or transferring them temporarily, delegating them in the strict sense of the word, from one existing public body to another, by consent. Q547 Chairman: Let's park this one here because we have heard some evidence about it and the Bill team have been very helpful and worked closely with us. Perhaps you could give us a quick note about precisely what this means and if it is possible to give us some hypothetical for instances that would be useful. I am keen to move on to another bigger issue which is about the independence of both the Integrated Agency and the Commission, and again it just seemed to us from some of the evidence we have heard that the Secretary of State has got a lot of power. The Secretary of State appoints the members for both these bodies. English Nature, for example, told us that the way that their membership is appointed at the moment is more prescribed and leads to a balance. Can you take us through the thinking on the membership of the Integrated Agency? Lord Whitty: The Integrated Agency is in the same category as the Environment Agency and other bodies to which the Secretary of State makes appointments, as it does in relation to English Nature. That does not mean that they are not independent bodies advising Defra and other parts of government on the areas in which they operate. So I think the issue of who appoints and the issue of independence need to be separated out here because this is, in essence, no different from the predecessor organisations. Indeed, RDS employees were direct employees of the Secretary of State previously and then we moved out to an arms' length organisation so there would be more independence in that sense. The board would be more independent from the Secretary of State than is the case now. Q548 Chairman: My impression, Larry, is that English Nature, for example, has a maximum number of members and a minimum number of members and there are some comments about the way that the membership should be built up for English Nature. None of that is envisaged for the Integrated Agency. It has led to suggestions - and I would not put it higher than that ‑ that that compromises its independence a little bit. Lord Whitty: The current position on English Nature is that the numbers are prescribed but the make‑up is not prescribed in legislation. Indeed, if we were to prescribe it in legislation we could find ourselves in a bit of a straitjacket. For example, probably ten years ago you would not have wanted somebody who is an expert or experienced in the climate change area whereas now we would, and one can envisage similar changes in the balance of the board that one might want in the future. There are precedents for both having a maximum or a minimum number and a range and having no number prescribed, so we have a knock‑on for a range in this case but there are arguments both ways and no doubt this will also emerge during your process. Ms Muirhead: I think it would be fair to say we do not feel strongly about the question of prescribing members. It was again a question of maintaining flexibility for the future and following the Countryside Agency example. Q549 Chairman: The other issue around this is around the guidance that the Secretary of State can issue to the Integrated Agency. What kind of things have you got in mind with that guidance? What would the Secretary of State be prescribing, as it were? Lord Whitty: This is no requirement to prescribe; it is a facility to prescribe, and the guidance would be fairly broad as to what would be the broad remit and the broad priorities of the organisation. It is a similar power in relation to the Environment Agency. It is not a binding power. The Agency needs to take that guidance into account. It is parallel to the Environment Agency structure. Ms Muirhead: Certainly as far as the Environment Agency is concerned I believe that they found the provision of guidance by the Secretary of State on sustainable development and their role in sustainable development extremely helpful. It is something that perhaps they do not sleep with it under their pillows but Barbara Young said she looks at it relatively regularly to get a feel for that, and there may be others circumstances in which the individuals might find it helpful to have a steer from the Secretary of State. It is very much taken into account. Q550 Chairman: But the intention of the Bill is that both the Integrated Agency and the Commission are to be independent, robust watchdogs, which get on with their own things but without government interference. Lord Whitty: Well, they are delivery agents for broad Government policy but in terms of individual decisions, yes ‑ I am talking about the Integrated Agency ‑ it is not a body which in detail would be interfered with by the Secretary of State. However, we would need to have regular contact and regular assessment of what the role and priorities were, some of which may be reflected in guidance and some of which would be more informally done. Q551 Chairman: Michael will come in in a minute but let's remember that English Nature were critical of the approach to GM. Suppose we are three years ahead and the GM issue was still alive and the new Integrated Agency, the delivery agency as you put it, was saying, "Hang on a minute, we are not entirely happy with this," what is the constitutional arrangement then? Lord Whitty: The Integrated Agency, should it so wish, would be in the same position as English Nature. It would have to offer its advice in relation to its own remit which I guess would be on biodiversity in this respect. Neither the Integrated Agency nor English Nature are or will be the delivery body for any future decisions on GM. That is an entirely different process. Q552 Mr Jack: But when we listened to our previous set of witnesses Graham Wynne from the RSPB hoped that the Integrated Agency would be a powerful defender and advocate for the countryside and for biodiversity, sustainability and all of those factors. Could you envisage the Secretary of State writing something by way of guidance which said "but I do not mind if occasionally you feel very strongly and you want to write to me fundamentally disagreeing with any view that I might have"? Lord Whitty: I do not think the Secretary of State needs to do that. It is within its powers so to do. Q553 Mr Jack: You just indicated that you thought this body was a delivery agency, in other words it was an agent of government to do things on behalf of government. To a certain extent that is true in terms of some of the statutory activities but it also stands in the role of informed commentator and I think that there is a concern from the evidence that we have had that this guidance could constrict an element of independent analysis and thinking. Could you give us an assurance that that is not what we are trying to do? Lord Whitty: That is not the intention. Clearly the Integrated Agency is specifically an advisory body in certain respects inheriting it from English Nature and to some extent from the Countryside Agency, for example in relation to certain planning decisions. It is a more informal advisory agency on areas within its remit but it is also a delivery body and an enforcement body and a management body in certain respects. Chairman: Let's just take stock for a minute. We are going to go and vote and come back in ten minutes. I know you have got other appointments. The Committee suspended from 4.40 pm to 4.53 pm for a division in the House Q554 Chairman: We can start again and Oona you wanted to put in a postscript to an earlier answer. Ms Muirhead: I wanted to apologise for having misled you on the delegated powers where I drew attention to 42(6), I think, and suggested that that meant that there would be a resolution for a delegation of powers. Actually that refers to the adding or removing bodies from the list of schedules and it is not intended that the delegation would be subject to resolution. Q555 Chairman: Okay, but it takes us back to the point that I was raising with Larry that there will be certain colleagues in your House who will have anxieties about this and will feel that they will want to be consulted in some way. Lord Whitty: Yes. We have to deal with the anxieties in my House. It is also true that there is a degree of frustration that where there is a reasonable consensus about organisational change it ought to established that it takes so long to do it and I think there is a balance to be struck here and the balance is that any use of that power has to be by agreement of the organisations concerned whereas obviously anything done by force majeur is an entirely different matter. Q556 Chairman: We want to come on to some of the budget and timetable issues in a minute but before we do that can I ask you about the Commission. In the past the chair of the Countryside Agency has also been the rural advocate. The Bill is silent on this point but I got the impression ‑ maybe wrongly ‑ that that was going to remain the case. Lord Whitty: The title "rural advocate" is not a statutory title as at present. The Prime Minister designated Lord Cameron as the rural advocate and has so designated Dr Stuart Burgess. There is not much of an argument for saying that this should be a statutory provision. It could be that some future Prime Minister might want to deal with it separately but it would be the intention, as has been indicated, that the chair under the present Prime Minister would be so designated, but we did not particularly want to tie the hands of everybody. Q557 Chairman: Okay. And the Commission will have a wide‑ranging view across government and be able to comment on things outside the Defra remit as is the case now? Lord Whitty: Absolutely, yes. Q558 Chairman: Right, nothing has changed in that respect? Lord Whitty: Nothing has changed in that respect. Clearly, a lot of things have changed between the Countryside Agency and the new Commission. The new Commission will not be an executive delivery agent in that sense but have only an advisory role, and the ability to comment and monitor policies of all government departments and indeed regional bodies remains and is explicit in this case. I think there is a focus on disadvantage in their role which was clearly not there before but it does not preclude them from commenting more widely. Q559 Chairman: Before we move on to the budget issues can we talk a little bit about social and economic schemes and the RDAs. Some of the work that the Countryside Agency has done has been with parish councils with very small communities. I think there is a feeling out there, as it were, that the RDAs are just too big organisations to take into account the smaller communities, things like Vital Villages for example and Village Plans which the Countryside Agency has experimented with and has been prepared to take risk with. Are you confident that the RDAs are going to pursue that work? Lord Whitty: They will pursue similar work. It is part of our passing of the remit to the RDAs. Of course, much of what the Countryside Agency did was, as you explicitly said, experimental to see whether they took off and the original intention was that some of them might run for a limited period of time, others would be taken up by other bodies at local and regional level, so the RDAs would not be doing precisely what the Countryside Agency did, although they will fulfill the commitments of the Countryside Agency in respect of the schemes they are taking over responsibility for, but they will also develop, hopefully, other schemes, small scale and larger scale, which meet the criteria of the rural dimension of their work. Q560 Chairman: Right, but there is a view around that RDAs first of all have an urban focus rather than a rural focus. My own RDA takes delegations to India and China and the United States and there is a difference in scale in doing that and working with a community group in say Cropwell Bishop, which I know you have been to. There is a bit of disbelief around that the RDAs are going to take this seriously. Lord Whitty: Well, I have just referred to the RDA tasking focus and it give them a bigger focus on rural matters and indeed bigger resources to deal with the rural dimension going into the RDA pot. So yes, it is true that RDAs are often seen as urban and big scale but that is not their remit. Their remit is to intervene strategically where they can help the social and economic development of those areas. Of course there will in relation to their remit here also be the focus on disadvantage and those areas which lack accessibility or job opportunities or whatever should benefit from the RDA's attention in rural areas as well as urban. Q561 Mr Jack: I wonder if you could help me understand in terms of the future delivery of various programmes that Defra is responsible for how the Integrated Agency fits in. I am referring particularly to the fact that you said in one of your documents talking about simplification of funding schemes that the proposed simplification builds on existing work across Defra and other agencies, notably the Forestry Commission, to simplify the current 100-plus national, regional and local funding arrangements to a new framework around three major Defra funding programmes. One of those funding programmes, funding programme three, deals with environmental land management and it says your objective is to achieve natural resource protection and the accompanying Defra public service agreement which seems to touch on a lot of the work of the Integrated Agency. Would it be responsible for delivering particular programmes with budgets and handing out money to people? Lord Whitty: Yes, it would take over the work of the RDS currently in that field, and the social and economic ones will be devolved to the RDAs, so that covers a number of different schemes. Q562 Mr Jack: In the architecture the Integrated Agency has responsibility for the RDS, does it? Lord Whitty: The RDS becomes part of the Integrated Agency. The three predecessor organisations or a significant part of the ‑‑‑ Q563 Mr Jack: And that does not require any legislative change to bolt it into it? Lord Whitty: There is no statutory existence of the RDS at the moment so we therefore do not have to alter statutes but we have to delegate what have hitherto been Defra functions to the new Integrated Agency. Q564 Mr Jack: Right. Just help me to understand in clause 2.2 how is the work of dealing with the RDS covered? Lord Whitty: It is covered in a number of respects. The agri‑environment schemes will promote nature conservation and biodiversity and conserving the landscape in some respects. Some of the RDS schemes make a contribution towards promoting access and to the educational dimension. I think that a number of the RDS schemes which are ERDP-funded under the present system or some of the national ones would make a contribution to pretty well all of those. Brian, do you want to add anything to that? Mr Harding: No, I do not think so. Q565 Mr Jack: When we are talking about going down from 100 of these various streams to a limited number how is this going to be done? Is the new Integrated Agency going to manage down, administer the end of existing scheme, and invent new ones? Lord Whitty: No, the schemes which are running will clearly continue to run on their current terms, but be brigaded into the three areas in which the environmental one landscape and biodiversity one will be largely administered by the Integrated Agency. Q566 Mr Jack: It says here that you have got 100-plus funding arrangements so how many funding arrangements will the new Integrated Agency is responsible for? Lord Whitty: Most of those 100 will not exist. There are on‑going commitments under the ones that already exist. Q567 Mr Jack: I am interested to get some feel for the workload of the new Integrated Agency in addition to taking on the English Nature functions that we talked about earlier. I am trying to establish in my mind whether we are asking the agency to be doing more work than the sum total of the parts that are currently there but which are going to be put into it. Lord Whitty: Not more work. Obviously the whole point of creating a single agency in this area is that the new agency will be more than the sum of the parts but that is in quality rather than in quantity. Q568 Mr Jack: Help me to understand the budgetary arrangements around this. We have got the RDS and we have got English Nature. I am talking about the administrative budgets. The reason I am asking this question is clearly if you are going to bring the agency into power then it has got to be properly resourced for the role and functions which we have just been discussing and you are posting a number of savings which you hope are going to be made and yet the task appears to be as big as English Nature's together with the re-engineering of current programmes into lesser programmes, so there is quite a lot of work to be done to get to a point at which you are going to have a new, streamlined, more efficient programme. And according to all of this if you are to yield the £13.8 million saving which you are posting in 2007‑08 this is all going to be done rather quickly and yet you have just told me that the Integrated Agency will be responsible for looking after the continuing stream of payments associated with a large number of existing programmes, so where are the savings coming from? Lord Whitty: The savings are not so much in the programmes. Q569 Mr Jack: I am talking about the administration of them. You are going to be reengineering and carrying on with the existing ones; where are the savings going to be coming from? Lord Whitty: The savings largely come from the overheads and economies of scale. When you say they are responsible for a large number of on‑going schemes, there are schemes that go on longer but most schemes maybe go on for two or three years, some of the agri‑environment schemes go for seven years, and they are responsible for what has already been committed. They are not responsible for continuing those schemes in their present form. They will be responsible for deploying the money in a more flexible way than the tight constraints on those 90‑odd individual schemes. Q570 Chairman: You talk about economies of scale. Are you able to give me a bit more detail as to how the resources are going to be deployed and how the savings are going to be generated? For example, if we take the numbers of people who are currently employed in the constituency elements, the RDS and English Nature, is the agency going to have less people or more people? Lord Whitty: It will have fewer people than the sum total of the existing organisations, partly because some of the personnel in the existing agencies will have been deployed elsewhere and partly because there will be some avoidance of duplication in overhead activities like finance, personnel, estates, et cetera, which will be delivered and also some avoidance of duplication of the functions of front‑line staff, for example inspectors going on land for all purposes rather than one inspector coming from English Nature and another one coming from the RDS, so there will be a number of economies of which probably the overheads is the largest but there will be a reduction in staff generally in various areas. Q571 Mr Jack: How does this effort to makes savings contrast with the fact that the Integrated Agency in terms of implementation costs is going to cost anywhere between £25 and £37 million? Lord Whitty: That takes on the previous costs of English Nature, part of the previous costs of the Countryside Agency, and part of the previous costs of the RDS. I do not entirely recognise the figure of £27 million. Did you say £27 million? Q572 Mr Jack: The figures that we have been given show the one‑off implementation charges which I presume are all the costs of moving people around, redundancy payments, new IT systems, the move to the palatial world of Nottingham in the new premises. All of these add up to a range of between £25.3 and £36.8 million. Lord Whitty: We are confusing two issues. We are confusing the issue of the ultimate savings which is --- Q573 Mr Jack: We are not confusing but contrasting between the savings that are claimed to be able to be made and the costs of establishing it. I suppose what I am looking for is some kind of net saving to Defra as a result of all this and whether in fact the organisation will have sufficient resources at its disposal to do all of the work that we have had identified for it? Ms Muirhead: I think there are a number of different strands to this and perhaps I might try and tease out some of them. Firstly on the funding stream simplification, the intention there is to move away from the situation where there are a lot of small schemes each with their own set of the rules, each with their own process that needs to be serviced, if you like, and servicing a process takes people's time and therefore costs, so the more you can simplify and reduce the lower the cost will be. Q574 Chairman: Oona let me stop you because it is a long sprint from here to the Lords. Larry, are you going to vote and see how you do. If it is okay with you we will carry on. We are being told this is legalistically possible and we are not breaking any conventions. We have got two star witnesses. Ms Muirhead: It is very kind of you to say so. Brian and I will try and do our best. If I may continue on the funding streams, I think in a sense you have to look at that as part of but separate from the establishment of the Integrated Agency. We wanted to do that anyway in the current organisations, and indeed that is of course happening with the introduction of the Environmental Stewardship Scheme which will in itself start off the process of simplifying the number and form of environmental land management schemes so that instead of having a number of schemes you will have this single scheme within which there will be a range of payments depending on which bit of the menu the land manager wants to take on. All that simplification of the funding streams will in itself help to make more cost-effective delivery, if you like, and indeed I think you can see this from the way in which the RDS is changing over the next 12 to 18 months where they are taking on a significant amount of work, their numbers will be increasing in the very short term in other words, in the course of this year, to handle that extra work with the entry level scheme and higher level scheme, then because of the better process and IT platform to support that, the numbers will go down next year. All that will happen before the Integrated Agency comes into being. If you can see this process continuing with the further simplification of funding streams, being ex‑MoD I would say you can get "more bang for your buck". That is one aspect of the costs and savings. In terms of the establishment of a new organisation from the merger of three, clearly there are things that you need to do in order for that organisation to work together as a single entity and at the moment we are indeed doing some work on that and there is work in hand to ensure that the three organisations can e‑mail one another easily, can communicate, can start to work together in a much more collaborative way. Clearly on the IT costs - and we have given you a range for the moment because we need to tease through precisely what they will include - include all the sorts of things around knowledge management and web‑based working within the organisation that you would expect in one that you want to be outcome focused and agile and all rest of it. That perhaps gives you a flavour of the investment that we are looking for on the IT side. You will always expect to get EHR, which is electronic HR, and there are savings that come from that. You would expect some savings from the way in which business is done from the introduction of slicker processes and IT support. Q575 Mr Jack: Are those savings compared to the budgets of the three existing parts now? In other words, if I said how much - and you have got the start-up cost for the Integrated Agency, which is English Nature and the bits left over from the Countryside Agency and the Natural Resources Directorate, which Mr Harding looks after, all being welded together - are these savings reductions versus their budgets as at the moment? Ms Muirhead: That is one way of looking at it certainly. I do not think we will put Brian into the Integrated Agency; we will keep him in Defra. Mr Harding: Good, thank you very much! Ms Muirhead: Certainly if you look at the cost baseline then you would say the cost baseline in administrative terms is the Secretary of State running English Nature and the cost of running that bit of the Countryside Agency and the cost of running the majority of the RDS and, as Andy Brown said earlier, there are some complications there because a lot of support provided to the RDS is provided from the core department of Defra so we have had to try and start to tease out exactly how much it costs to run RDS and therefore to see what is the baseline for the future. You are absolutely right you look at your baseline as being the running cost of the existing organisations. Q576 Mr Jack: Because one thing, having gone back to what you are saying on expenditure via RDS, to achieve the rationalisation you want, means that things go up. That was not reflected in the evidence in 26A which you kindly provided us with. That shows a continuing mounting stream of savings and does not particularly post that extra temporary increased expenditure. Ms Muirhead: I think there are two things on that. Firstly, you have got to superimpose on to efficiency savings that bulge which is the £30 million for the Integrated Agency, or £40 million overall, and then the other thing you have got to take into account in looking at efficiency savings is of course a large part of those are not from the Integrated Agency, they are from the non‑Integrated Agency element of the Countryside Agency and also from the bit of the Defra department that Brian and I sit in where we are also making efficiency savings over the next three years, so I think there is that correlation between a hump and then your costs are starting to reduce thereafter. Q577 Mr Jack: Does the Commission for Rural Communities have to make savings as well? Ms Muirhead: I suppose if you think about it in headline terms, the Countryside Agency in 2003‑04 had a manpower size of about 660 staff. If you then slice off the bit that is going to the Integrated Agency and you slice off the bit that is going to the RDAs, which is about 50 per cent of what was needed for the Countryside Agency to deliver it because they are adding to their functions in the RDAs not taking on completely new ones, and then you take away the size of the Commission, you are left with a saving, and so I think I would rather look at it in that way rather than that you are making an efficiency by creating the Commission. The point about creating the Commission is to have an advisory body which is not distracted by delivery, that is focusing on being nasty to government and public bodies. Q578 Mr Jack: But in that context would it be presented with a budget and be told, "You can be as nasty but that is how much you are going to get for being nasty," or is it going to have the ability to try to negotiate, because if you read the powers and the responsibilities of those powers it could range pretty widely if you wanted it to? Obviously it is not going to have (just as the Countryside Agency did not have) limitless resources for the tasks, but is it going to have the same amount of money as the Countryside Agency in the way you describe, which is to leave something which is the leftover which becomes the new Commission? In budgetary terms will it have the same, more, or less than that than which the Countryside Agency would have had? Ms Muirhead: I think that is a very good question and it is something that we in the Countryside Agency have been grappling with because your instinctive starting point is to say this is what the budget looks like and so therefore we will do a slice off from that budget, but actually of course the way in which one really wants to do it is to work bottom up by saying these are the things that we think we need to deliver and this is what it will cost you, oh Defra, to do that. When I say deliver I mean advice; it is not going to be delivering schemes. We have done a bit of both, if you like. In the Rural Strategy we said that the budget would be something approaching £10 million. There will of course be a negotiation every year ‑ there always is ‑ between executive bodies and NDPBs and the parent department as to how much money is required to deliver a particular set of outcomes. That is the contract, if you like, so I am sure that those negotiations and discussions will continue between the Commission and Defra. I would say that we also looked at some comparators, for example the National Consumers' Association which has got an extremely wide remit (in fact it is GB‑wide rather than England‑wide) has a budget of under £4 million, so that gives you some idea of the kind of resource that the Commission will have to play with. Q579 Chairman: Can we just return to the big headline figures. The cost of reorganisation is in the region of £40 million, I think that is right, so there is an up‑front cost and savings to be made later on. How robust are the savings because figures that we have seen from the Department suggest savings in 2009‑10 of £21 million. My impression is that those are fairly speculative sums at the moment. Are you going to give us more reassurance than that? How far would you be prepared to commit to saying, "I am going to achieve those"? Ms Muirhead: Can I take you through it in a slightly different way. Q580 Mr Jack: Can I be very naughty and say that as you take us through it what it would be useful to know is what of the current budgets that £21 million represents as a percentage. Clearly there is a build‑up over time as the new agency comes into being so where do we end up in 2009‑10 as a percentage saving of what we have at the moment? Ms Muirhead: I did not bring my calculator with me but bear with me. Can I tell you what I can now and if necessary we can follow up. As you have seen from the memorandum we produced, in terms of the cost we did a range because we were not entirely clear. We hope that it will be at the lower end range of the cost than the upper end but we wanted to make sure that we were not kidding ourselves about the kind of investment that would be required. As far as the savings are concerned, as you suggest, there is a savings target which is for up to 2007‑08 and then there is one for 2009‑10. As far as the 2007‑08 figure is concerned, the chief executives and project leaders have confirmed to us that they can deliver that savings element. They pretty much know now they will do it and so I think we can say that we have every confidence that that will be met. As far as the 2009‑10 figure is concerned, we made a judgment about what would be reasonable to continue as the sorts of levels of efficiency savings you would expect from not just the Integrated Agency but also Defra itself over the longer term. If I were to say in the memorandum that we gave you we indicated that the overall numbers in the existing organisations are about 3,500 and we expected that figure to come down to 2,900‑ish and that is very broad handfuls, that in itself would give you a saving per annum of close to £20 million. So just in terms of manpower numbers alone that kind of saving is deliverable so I think you will see we were trying to be reasonably conservative. Q581 Chairman: Let's finish on the budget because we have had a good run through. You made your excuses and left, Larry. Ms Muirhead: Thank you, boss! Q582 Chairman: Perhaps you could just try and drop us a note - and I know it is a bit speculative - saying what the budget will be in 2007‑08 for the situation then. You are suggesting there will be savings of £13.8 million at that stage, and you are fairly firm on that point. Give that as a percentage of the total budget and then roll that forward into 2009‑10 showing us what you think the budget of the system is going to be then and what percentage that £21 million is going to be. Ms Muirhead: Can I just clarify that you are talking about the administrative costs? I obviously would not want to make any speculation about the programme budget. Q583 Chairman: That is fine. I think you have picked up that there is a concern that with all the talk about reorganisation and making cost savings in the long term, having done this myself at times, it appears to be a bit illusory. I am not saying that is so in this case at all but there are some amber lights there. Could we conclude with two points really. One is about the Forestry Commission. The Forestry Commission has gone off in a different direction. We have canvassed this before with you. It is not part of Haskins, it is not part of the new delivery mechanisms although there are going to be better working relationships. I take that. Is there a possibility that at some point you will return to the Forestry Commission and see them as part of the Integrated Agency. Lord Whitty: There is always the possibility. At the moment I think the Defra view would be that we see scope for cross delegation alignment of the activities of the Forestry Commission with the Integrated Agency and, as I mentioned before, some of the delegation of functions horizontally might alter the balance and that would be the way that we would certainly in the foreseeable future look at it. These things are all under review. One of the complications in any case is the Forestry Commission is a GB body not an English body and indeed much of its activity is clearly in Scotland and Wales. Q584 Chairman: That is fine. Mr Jack is going to come back in a minute but first can we talk about the timetable for all this. The hope is that things will kick off firmly on 1 January 2007. To get to that it does depend on primary legislation. Larry, you have been around long enough to know that you cannot commit yourself to these things but that would depend on a Bill in the next session, would it not? Lord Whitty: Pretty much, yes. Q585 Chairman: And if you do not get the Bill? Lord Whitty: It is theoretically conceivable that we could make it in the next session. We would certainly wish to see a Bill in the next session. Q586 Chairman: If you did not get a Bill in the next session what happens then? Lord Whitty: There are a lot of administrative measures that we can take which we have effectively taken already or are in the process of taking in terms of the confederation of the three predecessor organisations and a lot can be done on that basis without primary legislation. Obviously it would be helpful if the primary legislation were in place in the timetable that we have set out. But some of the gains through co‑operation and realignment could be achievable without the primary legislation, although not all of them, and in that context I think I should have said at the beginning we are very grateful that the Committee is engaged in this period of pre‑scrutiny so rapidly because obviously we can clear some of the detail out of the woodwork that we may have to address before we present the Bill to Parliament in the normal way in the next session. Q587 Chairman: Thank you for that. Presumably just in terms of change management you would like to a defined timetable because it always makes it easier? Lord Whitty: Absolutely, yes. Q588 Chairman: On opportunity costs, re‑organisations are always dysfunctional, you lose people, people take their eye off the ball, and they get involved in process. Has any work been done on missed opportunity costs during this period? Ms Muirhead: It is something which we have discussed at my change of programme board very, very regularly with the chief executives concerned as to the risks around the disruption and the risks of losing good people. Obviously the immediate risk for that was the Countryside Agency I think that the Countryside Agency has done extremely well and I do not think that some of the major concerns that we had 12 to 18 months ago materialised. In a sense that was worse because I think ‑ and it would be better to ask Andy and Martin and others ‑ that the people going into the Integrated Agency are probably pretty excited about it. Q589 Mr Jack: Can I ask you one or two questions about chapter 2, clause 49 onwards of the Bill. Why did you put it in? Lord Whitty: A lot of this stemmed from, at least in its first manifestation, the Haskins Report. One of the recommendations of the Haskins Report was to look at ways in which we could rationalise the activities of the levy boards so we took that on board in this context as well as the other recommendations that we made in relation to the delivery agencies which will turn into the Integrated Agency and so forth. It is a follow‑up to Haskins, if you like, and one which, by and large, the agricultural industry has welcomed. Q590 Mr Jack: I have read their submissions and I must admit I was a little surprised at the fact that they were very happy with the operation of powers as in 49 and the powers as in clause 54 which do not, for example, tell us whether they are by affirmative or negative resolution of the House and they do not give any kind of statutory underpinning to prior consultation and, as far as I can see, they could give you carte blanche to do whatever you wanted in this area. So having decided you will take the power you obviously were convinced by Chris Haskins' argument but have you looked at any for instances you can assist us with to give us some idea of how these powers will be used? Lord Whitty: First of all, in the parliamentary procedure any power to dissolve would be by affirmative resolution and some of it refers back to previous Acts and so forth and, as you will know, the levy boards are established under a different Act so it is a bit complicated. As to examples of where this may happen, I would prefer not to appear to pre‑empt any decisions of the review we are about to commence. Clearly the reviewer will have available options which involve the kind of changes that these powers are designed to implement. Q591 Mr Jack: Just to be clear, you have a person who is reviewing this whole area at the moment, do you? Lord Whitty: No, we will have very shortly and that will be announced very shortly. The fact of the review is in the public arena already; the personnel and the timescale are not yet in the public arena but I hope them to be so before Easter. Q592 Mr Jack: Can I seek an absolute assurance that this Bill will be drafted beyond any doubt that it is an affirmative resolution of the House? I am advised that it is, I am sorry I did not discover that and I am delighted that I have been put right on that, so that is one useful thing. What about the question of consultation with the bodies concerned. Can you assure us that there will be full consultation? Lord Whitty: I can certainly assure you of that. There will be consultation during the review and there will be consultation on any proposals arising from the review. The intention is that the review would be very open and very engaging, if that is the right word, with the levy payers and other interested parties to the activities of the levy boards. Q593 Mr Jack: And you do not propose to independently say your reviewer comes up with a view simply to dissolve them and get rid of them and leave certain areas without any kind of levy body just because the reviewer says that one will go so we will get rid of it? Lord Whitty: The Government will have to take a view on what the reviewer recommends, as is normal in these circumstances. Q594 Chairman: Larry, thank you very much for that. I am sorry it has been a bit hit and miss with us all disappearing. We might just drop you a note on one or two parliamentary procedure questions. Michael has touched on that now but we have not had the time to get into that. I think we have covered in detail the issues that we were concerned with. Thank you very much to you and thank you to Oona and Brian. We hope this ship sails and we see it coming back over the horizon after all this horizon scanning we have been seeing. Lord Whitty: Thank you, too, and thank you for this inquiry. |