Examination of Witnesses (Questions 131-139)
MR CLIVE
BATES, DR
JOHN SEAGER
AND MS
CLARE TWELVETREES
20 APRIL 2006
Q131 Chairman: Good morning, thank you
for coming this morning and agreeing to come in a little earlier
than our scheduled time of quarter past ten. Thank you for your
memorandum as well; I am just wondering if you could summarise
for us very briefly why the Agency is involved in development
work?
Mr Bates: Under the Environment
Act we have a responsibility to advise the Government on sustainable
development; part of the Government's sustainable development
strategy relates to international development and the environment
in that context. We have a small international programme and we
already work with other parts of the Government on delivering
on the development agenda and within the Agency we are regarded
as an important thing because of national to global linkages—the
environment is one large entity after all.
Q132 Chairman: Are you able to share
your expertise with governments abroad or do you share it with
NGOs abroad, what is that international link?
Mr Bates: The amount of international
work that we do is not very great, it is very much a small add-on
to our core responsibilities which are to do with being a regulator,
a service provider and adviser about the environment in England
and Wales. My colleagues here are more deeply involved in the
programme, I will ask John to comment.
Dr Seager: The way that we tend
to work overseas is with Government departments, so primarily
with DFID, Defra and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The
way that that tends to work in-country is that we will work with
an environmental adviser, and an example of that is the work that
we are doing currently in Kenya, which has a specific environmental
adviser in the field, and we are working with that person as a
project manager.
Q133 Chairman: This is an area you
would like to expand in I understand; how would that be mandated?
Mr Bates: There are mixed feelings
about this within the Environment Agency. Generally we would like
to do more in this area if we could resource it. There are concerns
from parts of the Agency that we already have labour shortages,
it is difficult to recruit hydrologists and so on, so notwithstanding
capacity constraints we, along with many agencies around the Government,
would like to do more to contribute to this agenda. In fact Hilary
Benn, the Secretary of State, wrote to the Prime Minister in February
asking for a greater mobilisation of the public sector around
the development agenda and of course, if we can, we would like
to respond to that, but there is a degree of caution about going
too far into this simply for practical reasons.
Q134 Chairman: Yes. The work you
do in the UK to protect the environment, how does that relate
exactly to the environmental work that you do overseas? Are you
replicating the work you do here over there?
Mr Bates: A lot of the issues
are the same, to do with water management, floods, biodiversity.
We are already the biggest regulator in Europe so what we have
is the insight that a regulator has and a lot of what developing
countries are trying to do with the environment is set up the
necessary regulatory capacity to have good environmental management
systems, and that is where we can provide some assistance.
Ms Twelvetrees: Just to pick up
your point about who we work with, we work with sister organisations
overseas rather than NGOs in particular, although we occasionally
have worked with NGOs like the World Wildlife Fund in Kenya. Our
international programme really has spanned a few years, starting
off by building capacity in accession countries, so with that
it is really supporting them implement the new EU legislation.
We are working with sister organisations who are trying to do
similar things to ourselves, but at various stages of development.
Within Kenya, for example, it is a fledgling environment authority,
based in Nairobi, but with district offices. We work with sister
organisations and we do not necessarily replicate, we really demonstrate
some of the approaches we have to regulation—monitoring,
compliance, enforcement—and they are able to adopt bits
and adapt, and we work with them to adapt the bits that are useful
for them depending on the context, because obviously accession
countries are a different context to developing countries.
Q135 Chairman: You say you have a
capacity problem, which we have covered a bit this morning; is
that also true in the governments that you work with overseas?
How bad is the situation?
Mr Bates: There is a worldwide
shortage of expertise in these things and they are very subtle
and complex issues to deal with on the ground. There is also a
lot of expertise, in our case we find a lot of it tied up in the
consultancy businesses, but it is generally difficult to lay hands
on people who are well-qualified and experienced in this area.
Q136 Chairman: Are the rewards greater
if you are a consultant than if you are a civil servant?
Mr Bates: Yes.
Mr Vaizey: Apart from pensions.
Q137 Chairman: You have mentioned
working with one or two other Government departments—DFID,
FCO and Defra particularly. How did this work come about? Do they
always approach you first, or do you approach them?
Mr Seager: It has come about through
a dialogue with those different Government departments and also
looking at how the Environment Agency could take advantage of
various funding streams, because we are not specifically funded
through our own grant in aid to do this kind of work. Therefore,
funding has been an issue for us. The dialogue has been around
some specific funding streams, for example in Defra there is a
scheme called Partners for Water and Sanitation, the PAWS scheme,
and in the FCO there is a thing called the Global Opportunities
Fund, and we are able to do work in South Africa on the basis
of that. With DFID there has been an on-going dialogue with their
network of environmental advisers and it has really been them
that have steered us to specific priorities in-country.
Q138 Chairman: Are these advisers
consultants or people actually working for DFID?
Mr Seager: These are DFID staff
and there is a small network of environmental advisers within
DFID, some of whom are in place in-country and some of whom are
in head office. That is really how the work has started, it has
been quite experimental for us and it really started after the
World Summit on Sustainable Development when we asked some questions
within our own organisation as to what we could and what we should
be doing to support international development on the environment,
and it has grown slowly, I would say, since then at a rate we
find sustainable, both in terms of our own capacity but also at
which we are able to attract the funds to do this kind of work.
Q139 Chairman: Do you find that your
relationship with DFID is a positive one that is developing by
leaps and bounds or is it constrained by their capacity problems?
We have heard that they only have 18 environmentally tasked staff
out of 3,000.
Mr Seager: First of all I would
say that we have a very good relationship with the network of
DFID environmental advisers. We are invited to their retreats
and we have carried out training sessions for them on UK environmental
practice which I think have been well-received, and also we work
with them in-country as well. Our relationship with the existing
network of environmental advisers is really good. What we have
observed over certainly the three years that we have been working
with DFID is that there has been a progressive diminution of environmental
capacity within the organisation and we are continuing to work
with the environmental professionals that are left there and we
see a role for ourselves as UK environmental adviser to provide
the kind of advice that DFID may need on environmental issues.
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