Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
RT HON
DAVID MILIBAND,
DR SIMON
HARDING AND
MR ANDREW
LAWRENCE
12 JULY 2006
Q20 Chairman: I think we can continue.
David Miliband: I think Mr Duddridge
was in the middle of his sentence.
Chairman: He was but one of the penalties
you pay for not getting back is you lose your place in the queue.
Mr Taylor, has to go to another House of Commons appointment,
so I am going to ask him to take up the questioning.
Q21 David Taylor: Developing, in
a sense, Chairman, what Shailesh Vara was pursuing a moment or
two ago, last month it was the fifth birthday of Defra and, for
some unaccountable reason, this Committee was not invited to any
celebrations or party to commemorate that fact. When Defra was
born, farming people were concerned about its name. They thought
that rural affairs had been tacked on to the back of the main
priorities for the new department. Your predecessor was the MP
for an East Midlands city; you yourself are a classic metropolitan
man from within the Westminster loop shoe-horned into an urban
seat in the north-east.
David Miliband: I have never been
described as being part of the Westminster loop, but I am sure
my constituents will be honoured.
Q22 David Taylor: How can you demonstrate
in that first year that you talked about a moment or two ago that
the 25% of the population of the UK that live in your definition
of rural areas, 15 million, are actually well served and that
their fears about yet one more urban or metropolitan minister
paying lip-service to their concerns but not really understanding
them are not so? What performance indicators do you set yourself,
not specifically but what broad performance indicators would you
hope you have been measured by in that aspect of Defra's description:
"rural affairs"?
David Miliband: I think the test,
in the end, is not words over days or even months but actions
over months and years, point one, and people, I think rightly,
will be interested in whether one listens, whether one understands,
whether one learns. It is very important to do all three of those
things and certainly my early priorities have been to do just
that and to continue doing it, but I think over a longer period
the test for me is the test that the Government has set itself,
which is in the key areas of employment and economic development,
in terms of social justice and social equality, in terms of environmental
sustainability. It delivers on a range of outcomes that appear
not just in the Defra PSAs and in the Defra commitments but in
those of other departments as well, and so I think that I have
to answer for the positive and less positive rather than positive
and negative aspects of what the Government is doing in rural
areas so I can take a lot of pride and talk about what is happening
on employment or a range of other matters. I also have to grapple
with difficult issues also associated with economic and social
questions and so, in the end, it is about delivery, partly by
me and partly by the Government as a whole.
Q23 David Taylor: But repeating a
mantra at the start about economic opportunities, social justice
and environmental sustainability does not necessarily bring us
any closer to seeing those things delivered; and when the Prime
Minister asked you, along with other ministers, what your core
priorities were going forward, whilst there is a great deal of
focus, quite rightly, on the environment, and I congratulate you
on the items chosen and the way in with which they were expressed,
there is relatively little about what is a core area of the department's
responsibilities, and that would be a concern which might justify
some people on a hot day thinking that what you have said were
warm words?
David Miliband: With respect,
I must not fall into the trap, if you like the trap of metropolitan
man, of believing that rural communities can be equated with farming
communities, but, equally, if I may say in the gentlest possible
way, it is important that you do not think that only the one sentence
that has been quoted by the Chairman and by Shailesh Vara are
the only aspects that refer to rural areas. For example, what
we say about farming is not the sum total of the rural economy
but it is an important part of it. When we talk about waste issues
or other energy issues, those are important in rural areas as
well. I think it is a little bit unfair to say that all we have
said about rural areas is the one sentence that has been quoted
there, because, by definition, a large bulk of what the department
does will impact on rural as well on urban areas, but I am happy
to reflect on what you have said, because obviously in writing
an eight-page document rather than an 80-page document one has
to make choices about where one puts the emphasis.
David Taylor: I understand that, and
I accept, having lived in a rural area all my life, that the people
who live in rural areas are not some sort of homogeneous group
that you can stamp particular characteristics on. They do care
about crime, education, the Health Service and all those other
things. Nevertheless, there is a specific rural dimension to many
social, economic and environmental problems, to use the three
categories that you used at the start, and I think we would love
to see a recognition from the newly appointed Secretary of State
that he will be pursuing those issues with that in mind, and that
is not yet in there. I am happy to leave it at that, Chairman.
Q24 James Duddridge: I apologise
for not being here. The thrust of my question really is should
there be a single Cabinet minister with or without a large department
responsible for climate change issues?
David Miliband: I think that in
terms of leadership on climate change it does fall to Defra and
it is my job to make sure that climate change does have the right
place in the Government's ambitions. However, I am not so vainglorious
or megalomaniac to think that the fact that we are leading on
this issue means we are the only people who can deliver on it,
and that is why I would defend and applaud the fact that we have
got Secretaries of State in other departments who would want to
make a contribution as well. If you think about the international
negotiations, I will be going to Mexico for the Gleneagles One
Year On discussion, I will be going to Nairobi for the post Kyoto
Conference of Parties, but it is a fantastic bonus for me to know
that the Foreign Secretary in her meetings, both in this country
and abroad, on foreign policy is going to be banging the climate
change drum as well. So, I hope we will be able to pull off clear
leadership but also distributed leadership on this issue.
Q25 Chairman: It is all right saying
that, Secretary of State, but I am still unclear who has got the
big stick in government as far as climate change is concerned.
In the Prime Minister's letter to you he said, "I would like
you to explore setting up an office for climate change to develop
climate change policy and strategy working across government."
Is that office going to report to you?
David Miliband: We have actually
addressed at least part of that in the response that I sent to
the Prime Minister. The idea of an Office of Climate Change is
to be a shared resource, I think is the phrase that is used. Let
me finish my sentence, if I may say so.
Q26 Chairman: You have to put up
with being interrupted with Mr Paxman. It is nothing different
here.
David Miliband: He is extremely
polite! I think the Office of Climate Change is, first of all,
there for analysis (it is to provide a shared analytical base),
secondly, it is a policy development base, and, thirdly, it is
a place for monitoring and then ensuring that we are on track
to deliver on the commitments that we have made in respect of
greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide. I think those will be the
three load-starts of its work. We will have it set up by September.
I am happy to report back to you about how it is going to work.
I think it is very important that it is not simply a Defra unit.
It is very important for Defra to have units. There was obviously
a choice. We could set up an Office of Climate Change, even an
Office of Climate Change that had secondments from around Whitehall
that was a Defra unit. I was very keen that we did something more
than that and different from that. My conception is that the Office
of Climate Change should report to a ministerial board drawn from
the range of departments that I have mentioned and should have
its work steered by that. That is not to substitute either for
the work that I would be doing on climate change negotiations
or for the work that the Cabinet committee system would be doing
on deciding particular aspects of policy, but it is there to provide
the analysis, the options and the monitoring that I have talked
about.
Q27 Chairman: Who will chair the
Ministerial Board?
David Miliband: My pitch actually
would be that, while I can chair it, I am very happy to chair
it, I will talk to my colleagues about whether actually there
would be value in me jointly chairing it with one or two of my
other colleagues, but I will ensure that it is driven forward.
Q28 Chairman: I think it would be
helpful for the Committee to have a little note, taking into account
what you have just said, on who in government will be doing what
to try and bring coherence to the climate change agenda. You have
mentioned the Cabinet committee structure. I am still finding
it hard to understand who is Mr, or Mrs, or Ms Climate Change
in the Government?
David Miliband: I do not understand
why you are finding it so difficult, with respect.
Q29 Chairman: Because I keep asking
the question, Secretary of State, and answer cometh none. It was
the Prime Minister who said he was in charge of this the last
time I asked him about this matter at the Liaison Committee.
David Miliband: I do not know
how one can be clearer. The Government has clear targets on climate
change deriving from the 2050 goal to reduce by 60% the amount
of CO2 that we emit on 1990 levels. There is a Cabinet minister
charged with leading that. That is me. There is a range of Cabinet
ministers whose policy choices and decisions will have a critical
impact on that. I am determined to work very closely with them,
and the fact that they are all committed to it is a good thing.
There is a range of mechanisms through which we make decisions,
called Cabinet committees, that is good, that is the way collective
government works, and there is a range of units that support that
work. One of them is a shared resource.
Q30 Chairman: Am I right in still
thinking that it is the Prime Minister who monitors the overall
performance of all of these departments against the objective
measures that you have just outlined?
David Miliband: Of course.
Q31 Chairman: And that, if there
is a slippage, he is the one who is to be held to account?
David Miliband: He can sack me
and you can say you do not like him.
Q32 Chairman: So the answer is, "Yes"?
David Miliband: Of course, he
is. If you are saying to me: "Is the Prime Minister in charge
of the Government?", of course he is.
Q33 Chairman: No, I did not ask that
question. The question I am trying to understand is, for example,
if you take the domestic sector and the transport sector, those
are two areas where there has been an increase in emissions against
a programme that was designed to address those issues. Question
mark: if the respective secretaries of state have presided over
a rising trend, who effectively holds them to account in saying,
"That bit of the policy is not working. You have got to do
better. What can we do collectively"?
David Miliband: You know as well
as I do that secretaries of state, like all ministers, are appointed
by the Prime Minister. Ultimately, they are responsible to him.
That is just a statement of constitutional fact. If you are saying
will it be of concern to me, charged with leading the Government's
work on climate change, that all departments make the maximum
contribution to that drive to combat? Yes, of course it will.
Will I be working with my colleagues in a range of ways to ensure
that they do the maximum to deliver? Yes, I will.
Q34 Sir Peter Soulsby: I want to
take up with you something that, perhaps not surprisingly, does
not feature in your letter to the Prime Minister, but it was something
that you mentioned in your opening remarks, and that is the Rural
Payments Agency?
David Miliband: To be fair, I
do mention it actually.
Q35 Sir Peter Soulsby: Do you?
David Miliband: On the first page.
Q36 Sir Peter Soulsby: Right at the
beginning. Okay. I obviously missed it on my quick read of it
earlier on. You did mention it. Obviously, I do not want to take
up what happened in the past because that was on somebody else's
watch and we are doing an inquiry into that. What I wanted to
ask you about was what the implication of it might be now. In
particular, what contingency Defra is making for any potential
penalty or disallowance as a result of failing to make the payments
on time. How much is Defra putting aside to cover the possibility
of having to meet some of the money from your own coffers?
David Miliband: The reason for
hesitating on this is simple. We have got to have a discussion
with the European Union about the way in which we operate our
systems, and there is a lot of flexibility for the European Union
in the way it makes its final decisions on these financial matters.
I think it is very important that I say to this Committee that
we have worked very hard at every stage of the RPA difficulties
to live up to the letter and the spirit of the EU rules on that.
I do not think it would be right or beneficial to start speculating
about sums of money that we might be fined by the European Union
because, to state the obvious, I am going to be arguing very strongly
with the European Union that it is vital to minimise those fines.
Q37 Sir Peter Soulsby: I think I
can understand your reluctance to put a figure to it. Nonetheless,
you are acknowledging that some contingency plans will undoubtedly
be being made within the department even if you cannot specify
the figure. Am I right that your are as a department beginning
to look at and have discussions with some of those who are recipients
of Defra's funding and that there is the potential for some cuts
in funding to some of the agencies and bodies that Defra supports
as a result of the contingencies you are making?
David Miliband: It would be wrong
to say that we are going from our discussions with the EU to our
partners, or to other parts of the department, saying that as
a result of one thing there are going to have to be cuts elsewhere.
What I would be very happy to discuss with you is that there is
no question but that if you look at the fiscal climate, it is
a very tight one, it is very tight for Defra as well as for other
departments, and I am determined that Defra should make its full
contribution to an economic strategy that every member of the
Government supports, but I would not want to give you the impression
that we have ring-fenced a figure for one part of the budget that
is then being off-loaded onto another part of the budget.
Q38 Sir Peter Soulsby: Can I ask
you very specifically whether there are any discussions with any
of the agencies or bodies that are funded by Defra about potential
budget cuts that might be necessary as a result of having to make
a contribution towards the disallowance as a result of the RPA
fiasco?
David Miliband: Certainly I will
answer for myself, and I do not want to say anything that proves
not to be correct. We are having discussions with all of our agencies
about the tight fiscal climate we are operating in. I am not aware
of any discussion where an agency has been told that, "Because
of the RPA difficulty, we are coming to you to bail us out."
I have certainly not put it in those terms to anyone, but I will
certainly find out. What I would say to you is that we are having
very open discussions with all of our delivery partners and agencies
about the climate in which they need to operate and about the
need to contribute to the efficiency drive that is occurring right
across government.
Q39 Sir Peter Soulsby: Is it a reason
for saying though, if the worst does come to the worst and the
department does have to make some contribution towards the disallowance,
that that is almost inevitably going to impinge on the current
year's budget for some of the agencies and bodies that are supported
by Defra?
David Miliband: My understanding
of the way the EU system works is that some of the disallowances
can operate in-year, others take much longer to come through the
system. So, I think the answer is "Yes" and "No"
to what you have said. I can get sent to you, or send you myself,
a detailed note about the way in which the EU systems work, but
it is neither right to say all the hits in one year nor that it
is all postponed. My understanding of it is that there is a mix.
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