Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
RT HON
DAVID MILIBAND,
DR SIMON
HARDING AND
MR ANDREW
LAWRENCE
12 JULY 2006
Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon, ladies and
gentlemen, and welcome to the Committee's evidence session with
the new Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs. Secretary of State, welcome to the Committee for your
first hearing. I think we indicated to you that there were two
general areas that we would like to talk to you about, one of
which is how are things going and what are you going to do with
your gigantic department which you have now taken responsibility
for, and the second area would be to focus on the Government's
vision for a CAP reform document. I see you have brought two helpers
along with you, Dr Simon Harding, the Deputy Director for Economics
and Statistics, and Mr Andrew Lawrence, who is the head of the
CAP Strategy Division. Gentlemen, you are very welcome indeed.
Secretary of State, I read with very keen interest the reply that
you sent to the Prime Minister in response to his Letter of Appointment,
and the Number Ten website prints out on eight pages of hyperactivity
a huge canvas that has been prepared for you. I worked out that,
in terms of the remainder of this Parliament, you have got a thousand
working days to deliver this. Are you actually going to flesh
out all the things you say you want to do with some more detailed
explanation on timetable as to when you hope to be able to achieve
them?
David Miliband: Good afternoon,
Chairman. Thank you for the chance to come and talk both about
the broad range of Defra issues and some of the specifics. As
you say, if the questions get difficult, I have got some people
who can provide you with answers based on long experience. Dr
Harding has been in our team working on the economic and social
research since 2002 and Lawrence has been on the CAP strategy
for two and a half years, and so on those issues they will be
able to help us all. In answer to your question, I thought that
the Prime Minister's letter gave us at Defra a chance to reflect
on the progress that had been made since Margaret Becket took
over or created the department in 2001 and the huge task that
she took on in trying to build a single department out of the
old MAFF and part of the old Department of the Environment. In
respect of your specific questions, some of these are very long-term
questions and it would be foolhardy for me to say that all of
them will be completed within the thousand days. I do not know,
but that is the end of the Parliament, not necessarily a prediction
of the election date. I thought maybe you knew something that
I did not for a moment.
Q2 Chairman: We are a very perceptive
committee, but there are limits.
David Miliband: Indeed. Well connected
but not that well connected! Some of the things are very long-term.
I thought it was very important that, five years after the creation
of Defra, with a broadly new ministerial team—of course,
Ben Bradshaw remains—it was important that we gave people
a clear sense of where we were trying to go with the department,
where we were trying to take it, what we saw as the high-impact
policies and what we saw as the key levers, because, of course,
this is a department which does want to use a range of levers,
be they financial incentives, be they regulatory, be they exhaustive
and persuasive, based on negotiation, and also recognising that
in a number of areas we do earn our license to operate from effective
delivery on things like avian flu protection, in respect of the
RPA, which you are also doing an inquiry about, floods, where
there are some basic necessities that we need to get right, and
in some area we are performing well and in others we are performing
less well. I thought it was important to set that out and use
the opportunity of a reply to the Prime Minister to show to you,
but also to many of the people we work with, the timelines within
which we wanted to work. Obviously, we do have a job to flesh
it out, in your phrase, and in some areas there will be faster
progress than in others. Obviously, in something like energy,
which is topical at the moment, there has been significant progress
since even the Prime Minister wrote to me as of the announcements
yesterday. So, yes, there are different timelines and we will
want to flesh that out over time.
Q3 Chairman: Let me press you on
one thing. It says in this letter, "We also need to maintain
the confidence of people in rural areas that the Government understands
their concerns. In the long-run, I believe that must mean mainstreaming
rural issues across government." Does that mean that rural
proofing, which I thought was a central plank of your government's
approach towards rural matters, has failed up to now? Why, all
of a sudden, have you rediscovered rural proofing?
David Miliband: We have not rediscovered
it. If anything, what I have written is the opposite, that far
from being a failure, rural proofing has been essential. What
the sentence that you have quoted I think admits very clearly
is two things: (1) we are the Department for Rural Affairs, amongst
other things, but we do not control all the things that impact
on rural communities, and we need to keep working to ensure that
across the piece the Government's policies and programmes benefit
rural areas, but also, (2) I did not want to write a letter that
simply said, "Everything is going fine. We will come back
to you when we need to." It was important to say, "There
are real challenges that we face in a range of the areas that
we are responsible for", and I think it is important that
we recognise that there are big economic and social issues in
the more or less 25% of the country that you could classify as
rural and that we have got to continue to work both on our own
agenda but, more widely, to deliver on them for those areas.
Q4 Chairman: Later on in this you
say, "We are keen to improve our understanding of the services
that whole ecosystems provide and how we can value these services."
That is a very interesting statement. Would you like to develop
exactly what it means?
David Miliband: The World Bank—I
thought you had taken evidence from them in one of your inquiries—and
you might say "of all people", but they are thinking
and writing about how we should understand the value of the "ecological
services" is the phrase that they use—it is not a particularly
user-friendly phrase, but the environmental services, you could
say, that are produced by nature—and that is everything
from the Amazonian Rain Forest to the biodiversity that is part
of the ecological system. Their point is that we have never priced-in
the value of those ecological systems and that explains, in part,
why we have had a history over a long period of environmental
pollution that has not protected those services. So, the first
thing I would say is that I wanted to reflect in the letter and
in the work that we do that we want to take seriously some of
that work that the World Bank has started off and see if we can
find ways of pricing-in some of those environmental costs. Secondly,
I met the outgoing director and the incoming director of Kew Gardens
this morning, which is a real national treasure, a world heritage
site. It is about to celebrate its 250th anniversary in 2009.
They emphasised to me their international role in protecting ecological
services and working in other countries to prevent a species dying
out, whether it be plant or animal, and I think we have to take
seriously that whole biodiversity agenda. I think what I said
in the letter was trying to indicate that.
Q5 Chairman: I asked at the beginning
about the sort of timeline. If you take that as an objective,
what is your programme to actually flesh this out? Can you expand
how you are going to do it, spell out in detail what it is you
are going to be valuing, relate that to the Government's policies
and produce something that is a little more tangible?
David Miliband: I do not think
we are about replacing pounds, shillings and pence or pounds and
pence within two years with an ecological value. What I think
we are about over the next, I would get guess, good six to nine
months is trying to see the extent to which this World Bank approach
can help us make sure that we do value the environmental services,
ecological services as they are called. It is, if you like, a
research programme, but I thought it was important in this letter
to put on public record that we wanted to engage with these debates
in a serious way, and that is what we intend to do.
Chairman: My colleagues have got lots
of interesting things to ask you about. We will start with Daniel
Kawczynski.
Q6 Daniel Kawczynski: Thank you,
Chairman, and I welcome the new Secretary of State to his position.
In your letter you state that farming is central to your department,
and you go on to say, "Our goal must be to develop a profitable
and competitive domestic farming industry." Certainly, having
read the farming journals myself recently, you have been making
some very positive statements about what you hope to do for farming,
but, as you will know, the dairy industry is in crisis at the
moment and, as Chairman of the All Parliamentary Group for Dairy
Farmers, we had a meeting yesterday with the OFT—and I have
sent the minutes of that meeting to you today—and the OFT
have very clearly put the emphasis on the responsibility of the
Government. They told us, "It is nothing to do with us, mate.
It is the Government, basically, that are letting dairy farmers
down over the way that supermarkets are treating them." I
would like to have your comments on that.
David Miliband: In what way did
they think the Government were letting dairy farmers down? I have
not received the minutes; I am sorry.
Q7 Daniel Kawczynski: They believe
that they cannot interfere in the process, given the current set
of legislation that they are working towards—they have done
as much as they can and they can go no further in terms of regulating
supermarkets vis-a"-vis the dairy industry—and they
believe that more legislation is needed by Parliament and by yourself
in order for them to intervene. I have read articles by yourself
in farming journals where you have said that you take this very
seriously and you intend to intervene. My question to you is:
how are you going to make sure that supermarkets treat our dairy
farmers better before our dairy industry collapses totally?
David Miliband: I think it is
very important that we state our position very, very carefully
in this area because there are very clear rules about what ministerial
licence there is in this area and what are the limits to it? What
I think I said in my speech to the Royal Show last week and what
I said in a number of articles around it was, first, that it was
important that there was a fair deal for those who were suppliers,
whatever part of the food chain they were in, secondly, that the
department had written to the Competition Commission in respect
of their inquiry urging them to take a broad look at the issues
under consideration—if that is what you mean by intervene,
I do not know—and, thirdly, I have always emphasised that
there are great benefits from having independent competition authorities
from making sure that their independence is free of day-to-day
political interference, although you are actually right to say
that the legislative framework is set by Parliament. I think that
the inquiry that is now underway does provide an opportunity to
look at the issues that you raise. I have not yet had a chance
to meet the Dairy Board, but that will be an important part of
my getting to grips with this, and before you get the chance to
ask, I should say I have not had a chance to meet your All Party
Group, which I promised to do, and I will, of course, honour the
promise. I think they are trying to find a date that meets as
many of your members' diaries, as well as my diary, as possible.
That is the approach that we are taking. As I say, I think this
Competition Commission inquiry is an opportunity. Obviously, there
are some acute issues in the dairy sector that are affected by
the way in which the supply chain works.
Chairman: Before we move on, would you
like to drop us a line and define in some detail what you mean
by "a fair deal"? Would you just park that one for a
moment, but it would be very interesting to know? I want to move
on.
Q8 Mr Reed: Secretary of State, I
note with interest the point you make about wasting electricity
to the Prime Minister. In particular, you will not be surprised
to learn that I am particularly interested in radioactive waste
management. I hope you will be able to give some consideration,
and I think I speak with some authority as the only former Nirex
employee in the House of Commons, to putting them out of their
misery, both my community and the nuclear industry, in the very
near future, but that is not what I wanted to ask you about. I
wanted to ask you about the environmental contract, which to me
sounds like an incredibly exciting proposition. How soon do you
think you will be able to fetch forward details of what that might
look like and, given the difficulties posed by inter-departmental
working, how difficult will that be to deliver?
David Miliband: I think it will
be very difficult to develop and deliver, not because of inter-departmental
issues, but because it is a very difficult concept to come to
terms with. Maybe for background it is worth saying that when
I was appointed I tried to think for myself how to understand
the environmental challenge that we faced, and the best parallel
I could find was that the need to reshape our economy and society
to take account of carbon limits was the development of social
welfare legislation based on the idea of a social contract during
the latter half of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century,
because every aspect of industrialised society, its public services,
its tax and welfare systems, its social norms, were affected by
the drive to civilised industrial capitalism, I suppose you could
say, and to establish a set of social and economic norms that
protected people and gave them opportunities that they did not
previously have, I think, is the best parallel for the scope and
size of the challenge we face in reshaping our economy and society
to take account of the environmental limits that we have been
breaching for a long time. I am due to speak to the Audit Commission
next Wednesday when I want to flesh out some of the ideas. What
I would say is, first of all, the idea of an environmental contract
has to be different from the idea of a social contract, because
it is necessarily international, not just national. The welfare
state which we developed over the last 100 years was really a
national contract. An environmental contract has to be international
as well as national and local. Secondly, I would say that, like
the welfare state, it does require that we look across services,
fiscal instruments, regulatory instruments as well as social norms.
I was talking about recycling as a social normal last week. It
seems to me that failure to recycle is a form of anti-social behaviour—I
said that to the Local Government Association Conference last
week—and so we have to develop social norms as well as government
intervention and new business practice. The third thing I would
say is that in some areas environmentalism offers an easy win
for business. There are 400,000 people working in environmental
technology jobs in Britain at the moment; there are 1,500,000
in Germany. We have to think about those win-wins, but we have
also got to be sensitive to the need for those parts of the economy
that are internationally competitive to make sure we have international
agreements that deliver the level playing field that is important
and deliver the global changes that we need. That is a rather
long answer. I apologise if it went on. I will hopefully be saying
more next week, and it is something that we obviously need to
develop in the months ahead.
Q9 Mr Reed: My concern would be,
having taken evidence over a year now on a number of occasions,
that what always comes up is this difficulty between Defra, DTI
and the Department of Transport in achieving effective environmental
policies across the whole of Whitehall. To me this seems one of
these truly transformational ideas and we really cannot afford
to fall victim to that kind of inter-departmental inability?
David Miliband: I would say two
things about that. First of all, the Government was elected, you
and I know well, with three ideas at the heart of its manifesto.
First of all, a commitment to expand economic opportunity and
national competitiveness, secondly, to deepen social justice and,
thirdly, to promote environmental sustainability; and I am a here
as Secretary of State for Defra, but I am also a Member of the
Cabinet and a Member of the Government and my job is to make sure
that Defra makes its maximum contribution to all three of those
goals, not just to one of them. Equally, other departments and
other secretaries of state have got a responsibility for all three
of those goals, not just to one of them, so I do not see this
as virtuous Defra standing up for the environment, villainous
DTI out to do-in the environment. My experience over the last
10 weeks working with Alistair Darling on the Energy Review says
to me that actually we have got a real sense of common purpose
as a government about what we are trying to achieve. I think if
I had been here on Monday you could have said those were hollow
words, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, but since we
are meeting on Wednesday, the day after the Energy Review has
been published, whatever different views there are about the nuclear
issue to which you referred, there is chapter after chapter there
about energy efficiency and energy reduction, about renewables,
about microgeneration that I think cannot gainsay the fact that
there has been real DTI/Defra collaboration on that work never
mind on the nuclear work as well. I feel I can come here today
and say the Government has just published a genuinely comprehensive
and radical set of proposals in respect of the environmental challenge
which offers to deliver a 20-25 million tonne reduction in carbon
emissions by 2020 on what we published in the Climate Change Policy
Review just three months ago. So, in my experience of Defra, we
are working very, very closely with DTI and Alistair Darling,
certainly in what we did when he was at the Department for Transport
and I was at what was the ODPM, and that is what we will carry
on doing.
Q10 Chairman: Is that why biomass
manages to scrape in on pages 72 and a bit of 73 and tells us
that you have not finished all this hard, close detailed work
so you will have to come back and report on the Renewables Heat
Obligation concept in April 2007?
David Miliband: It is one reason
it appears there, but also—and I cannot remember the page
number—if you look at the commitment, you mentioned the
Department for Transport, the fact that we are doubling the RTFO.
I think, in all fairness, you would want to reflect that as a
big commitment to bio-fuels as well. I am concerned and committed
to saying that that is a document which we all have to take full
responsibility for. I do not take responsibility for the bits
I like and Alistair Darling takes responsibility for the bits
I do not like. I take responsibility, joint responsibility, for
all aspects of that, and I think the fact that we should have
said, not just that we are going to 5% RTFO by 2010 but that we
are doubling it shows that even in that area, where there is a
lot of work still to be done, we are committed on an inter-departmental
basis to make progress; and it is easier for me to say that today
than it would have been on Monday, because on Monday you could
have said, "Hang on, what does it all add up to?" Now
you can just say, "Just read." Unfortunately, I cannot
remember the page number, I have not got it with me, but I think
it is a decent answer.
Chairman: There is plenty of process
still to be made.
Q11 Lynne Jones: But biomass for
heating and power, particularly for heating, which is a third
of our energy requirement, can be far more significant in terms
of carbon saving than bio-fuels, which many do not actually have
a very good record in terms of the carbon saving. Perhaps we are
giving too much emphasis to transport and not enough to heat.
Whose responsibility is that? It seems that we are forging ahead
with a scheme which potentially will give us less benefit in climate
change terms and carbon saving than biomass, which seems to be
on the back burner.
David Miliband: If you are saying
we need both, I agree with you. Al Gore was here. I cannot remember
which members of the Committee where at his lecture where someone
asked him about whether there was a silver bullet for the climate
change challenge, and he said, "Look, take it from me, there
is no silver bullet. Anyone who tells you that one policy is a
silver bullet, you do not need a silver bullet you need silver
buckshot". In that sense, I agree with you, we have got to
make sure that transport, housing and heating, the energy sector
all play a role.
Q12 Lynne Jones: Have you not got
the priorities wrong in going for transport and not for heat?
David Miliband: I think we have
got to go for both. I think the heat thing is very, very important.
That is why we have something to say about combined heat and power
in the Energy Review. I think there is technical and research
work that we are still doing on this, but, take it from me, there
is absolutely no inhibition in going as far as we can in the most
effective way on biofuel, biomass issues.
Q13 Lynne Jones: You are not going
on the most effective way; you are going on the least effective
way?
David Miliband: I dispute that
we are going on the least effective way. You are saying you want
us also to make progress in other areas.
Q14 Lynne Jones: No, because you
have only got a certain amount of land mass; so your prioritisation
of how you use that is very important?
David Miliband: Yes, that is true,
but remember, one issue which you may want to ask me about in
another context is how you make sure that it is British farmers
who are supplying the biomass, biofuel, not just foreign farmers.
Slightly underlying your question is the idea that the only land
on which we can grow these non-food crops is British and, of course,
it is not, and so I think that the scarcity of the land for biofuel
is not actually the constraint.
Chairman: I think the point that Lynne
Jones was making was that per hectare of land to bio-crops the
biggest reduction in greenhouse gases comes from the use of biomass.
It is a very simple, straightforward view. Shailesh.
Q15 Mr Vara: Thank you Chairman and
welcome Secretary of State. I would like to continue with the
theme that was started by the Chairman earlier on, and there has
been some continuity with subsequent questions. If I could repeat
a quote the Chairman made earlier on, in your letter on page two
you say to the Prime Minister, "We also need to maintain
the confidence of people in rural areas that the Government understands
their concerns. In the long-run, I believe that must mean mainstreaming
rural issues across government." There are the obvious rural
issues, rural poverty, the concerns of the farming community,
the next generation does not want necessarily to continue with
farming, but you quite rightly said that your brief covers other
issues, not only pure rural. For example, and these are my examples,
crime, transport issues, people cannot get out of rural areas
easily, anti-social behaviour, which a lot of people would associate
with urban areas, but there are pubs in rural villages as well
which on a Friday and Saturday night have difficulties as well.
What exactly do you propose to do to ensure that you do work across
government to ensure that these other issues that concern the
rural community are properly looked at? I understand that you
are liaising with Ruth Kelly, you mentioned earlier on that you
intend to engage in serious debate, but what I am trying to pin
down is specific responsibilities, specific actions so that perhaps,
if you come back here in a year or so's time, we can actually
say, "Minister, you said you were going to do this. Have
you achieved it?"
David Miliband: First of all,
thank you for your welcome and thanks for the welcome from other
colleagues as well. The truth is there is no one mechanism that
will ensure "mainstreaming" of rural or any other issues.
I am happy to write to you with details of the Cabinet committees
which exist and how they deal with different areas of policy,
but, in the end, this is not just about Cabinet committees it
is about how one engages, not just through me but through my ministerial
and official colleagues on issues as they come up so that as there
are new policies being debated we make sure there is a proper
engagement with them, and the Cabinet committees is an obvious
way of doing this but it is not the only way. We have also got
to make sure that in the implementation of policy that exists
that there is proper engagement at local level. One reason I went
to the Local Government Association last week was to emphasise
that, while climate change may be a global issue, a lot of what
Defra is about—and I mentioned rural housing, I mentioned
green space as well—those are areas where local government
has got a critical role and we have got to make sure that Defra's
links into local Government are strong, that is partly working
with the DCLG but it is also our own direct relationships, and
we have got to make sure we develop our own agenda, whether it
be on farm diversification or other issues that are within our
own sphere or elsewhere, and that we make sure that we use all
the tools at our disposal to develop a positive policy programme.
We have got things like the Affordable Rural Housing Commission
that has come out of inter-departmental work. It was two departments
that sponsored it. There is work going on between Barry Gardiner
and Yvette Cooper to take forward those recommendations. Some
of them will be taken forward in the Spending Review, others in
other contexts. What I would say to your last point is: ask me
in a year's time about where there has been progress and where
there has been less progress in life in rural areas, ask me about
various inputs, but, in the end, what counts is what has changed
on the ground, and I think that is a very fair thing to challenge
about and be challenging about, and we have got to make sure that
we have got the formal and the informal channels that allow us
to make progress.
Q16 Mr Vara: I hear what you say,
Minister, and also you have got to take account of what new issues
arise, but these are existing issues and, if new issues arise,
you cannot neglect the existing issues. You have, quite rightly,
spoken of engaging with communities, progressing matters and whatever,
but I still do not see any specifics. I get the feeling that in
a year's time you are going to say, "Judge me", but
how can we judge you if you have not set bench-marks in the first
place?
David Miliband: First of all,
you did not address my point about local government. I think it
is important that one does not just believe that there is a relationship
between central government and citizens, local government has
got an absolutely critical—
Q17 Mr Vara: With respect, Minister,
you are again abdicating your responsibility by talking about
local government. I am talking about you, the engine driver at
the top. You are saying, "These are the things in there at
the moment." In a year's time I want to see less rural suicides,
I want to see villages that do not have buses going into them
there. At the moment there are X percentage of farmers whose children
are not carrying on farming. I want to see some improvement in
that. That is what I mean by specific?
David Miliband: With respect to
you, I think that there is a division between us, because you
think that when I talk about the important role of local government
I am abdicating my responsibility, whereas I think when I talk
about the critical role of local government I am fulfilling my
responsibility. An important part of my political philosophy and
the Government's approach is that we need a strong and vibrant
local government. Just to pick up one example that you highlighted—suicide
in rural areas—I think if I came along here and said, as
the Secretary of State for Defra, "It is my job to act directly
on suicide in rural areas", you would say this is a form
of Gosplan Stalinism that even Stalin himself thought was beyond
his wildest dreams. As I say, I pick that example not in order
to score a debating point against you but because you raised the
question of suicide in rural areas. I have to say, I did not think
we would be talking about that when we came in.
Mr Vara: I raised it not to be taken
out of context, which you have.
Q18 Chairman: I think, Secretary
of State, you know that your department is currently involved
in discussions with, amongst others, the Rural Stress Information
Network about strengthening the roles that such bodies can play
in dealing with rural stress of which the final point of failure,
if those support networks are not in place, is suicide, and you
might have wanted to tell us how that strengthening exercise was
to be achieved.
David Miliband: I might have wanted
to tell you also about the work we have been doing with the voluntary
sector more generally, because I think that engagement with the
voluntary sector is not just done on a sector by sector basis
or a specific single issue by single issue basis. As it happens,
I was represented I think by Ian Pearson last week at a DCLG event
with the voluntary sector in rural and urban areas, but, just
to go back to the point I was actually trying to make, in the
end the outcomes are about action by central government, action
by local government but also action by business and by the voluntary
sector. It is important that central government sets the right
framework for that. That is partly a financial framework, but
it is also a legal and programmatic framework, and I am more than
happy to come and have a discussion in a year's time about levels
of stress or even suicide in rural areas. What I do not think
would be right would be for Defra to have a performance target
for the number of suicides in rural areas.
Chairman: In your Annual Report on page
104 there is a section entitled "Sustainable Rural Communities".
That must inevitably form an important part of this new engagement
with rural Britain. The Committee would find it helpful if you
could sketch out if there are new aspects to the agenda which
is spelt out in Chapter Three of your report that you are going
to introduce and what they are, and, secondly, perhaps a commentary
on how you are going to take forward in the context of your present
approach the objectives of which PSA4, for example, is one, and
how that is going to be achieved: because there is an element
of bench-marking, it is down there already, and, clearly, you
would like to build on it. James Duddridge.
Q19 James Duddridge: Can I add my
welcome, Secretary of State. I mean this in the nicest possible
way: it is good to have someone of your intellectual calibre and
also high standing within the Government, representing the Government.
Again I mean this in the nicest possible way, I hope the reports
in the weekend press are not true and that you retain your office
for some time?
David Miliband: I would not to
believe too much in the press, weekend or otherwise! Football
results you can believe.
James Duddridge: But not predictions!
You talked about working closely with Margaret Beckett, Hilary
Benn, particularly on climate change, we have talked about the
DTI, the Department of Transport, also the Deputy Prime Minister
previously had a significant role within climate change and, I
think, has some role still. Is it now not time to have someone
at Cabinet level that has sole responsibility for climate change?
There seems to be a building pressure and one of the things that
I have certainly felt—
Chairman: The Committee stands adjourned
for hopefully 10 minutes whilst those members who wish to participate
in this division do so. We will reconvene in 10 minutes' time.
The Committee suspended from 3.38 pm to
3.48 pm for a Division in the House.
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