Select Committee on Environmental Audit Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witness (Questions 100-117)

Barry Gardiner MP

22 November 2006

  Q100  Mr Caton: You mentioned the financial limitations of some of the overseas territories and that that might affect their ability to deal with conservation and ecosystem questions. Is that an argument for the UK Government to put in more resources to specifically help with those?

  Barry Gardiner: I am sure that somebody could make it an argument! I am not seeking to do that. What I am seeking to do is genuinely say that I think we have to recognise that there is an issue here because it is clear that many of the overseas territories would find great difficulty in tackling the sorts of habitat degradation that may be affecting species that are located within their borders on their own and I do think we need to not just look at what we can do at an international level such as through conventions like ACAP and so on but we do need to recognise here what the overseas territories are facing.

  Q101  Mr Caton: I would like to ask you how we measure economic growth. Is there any consideration of using a different measure of economic growth which takes into account natural resources and their finite nature in order that we can better ensure that sustainability is at the heart of economic policy as well as environmental policy?

  Barry Gardiner: I think this is very much one of the areas that the MA has highlighted as requiring further work. It is exactly the flipside, if you like, of what I said about moving to a metric and trying to get a proper system of valuation. Only if we do that, only if we can actually begin to quantify the value of ecosystem services and the cost of their degradation, are we going to be in a position then to start talking in the way that you have of measuring economic growth in this way. I would say that what you have put before us is a very attractive vision but first of all we have to learn how to walk and actually getting that basic agreement on a valuation system is something that economists have found very hard to do for a number of years and I think that we need to, as we are doing, renew our research efforts in that area so that ultimately we can get to the sort of position that you are suggesting where we really do have a much clearer picture of the total value of ecosystem services to the economy because what is absolutely clear is that for a long period of time we have regarded these as free goods essentially, whether it is pollination, water regulation, flood defence and climate control, all of these services that the ecosystem provides for us we have taken for granted and what we must now do is start putting a value on them either through carbon in terms of sequestration and so on or in some other way, but we have to get the economist and the natural scientist speaking the same language.

  Q102  Mr Caton: I would like to bring you to the comprehensive spending review because some of our witnesses are very worried that funding for UK conservation, ecosystem management and environment research is under threat in the CSR. Can you this morning reassure us that the CSR will not squeeze the funds for this important work?

  Barry Gardiner: The CSR does not report until next year. What I would say to you is that Treasury have been collecting evidence over the summer and ministers are presently considering next steps both in Defra and the Treasury. We have shared information about the MA and there has been discussion at official level about how an ecosystems approach could be used as an organising principle for information and environmental impacts. Defra will be using the ecosystems approach to quantify and value environmental impacts as part of our revised guidance on policy appraisal and the environment and I have already indicated to you that, as part of that working towards the CSR 07 process, we are putting together the three case studies that I mentioned to try and demonstrate how the approach can be used. We are working with the Department for Transport, DCLG, the Environment Agency and the Treasury on this to include a road scheme, a flood defence scheme and land use change and look at how this can all feed into the CSR 07.

  Q103  Chairman: Is the department considering new PSA targets and will the MA have an impact on that?

  Barry Gardiner: The answer to that is, yes, we must always look at our PSA targets and see how they can be improved. There are some specific ones at which we are looking at the moment. The department is actually going through what we call a strategy refresh process at the moment which has been very positive and very healthy thinking within the department about exactly what our objectives are and, as part of that, one of what we are calling the enabling projects is an ecosystem services approach. Certainly what I hope you will see in the future is that that ecosystems approach is fundamental to the delivery of all the set of different complex problems that the department is dealing with because we really do want to break down the sort of silo mentality and try and make sure that we are looking at this from an ecosystems point of view.

  Q104  Mr Caton: Sticking with the budgets but moving now to the EU Budget, you seem quite sanguine about the EU response to the MA and you have mentioned the European Commission Biodiversity Communication, but that itself pointed out that we were at risk of missing EU biodiversity targets and it also says that limited funds are part of the problem. We have been told that the recent EU Budget made this situation much worse by lowering the amount of money available for wildlife protection whilst neglecting to address the problem of inappropriate farm subsidies. Is it not a fact that the EU is completely failing to address the challenges identified in the MA?

  Barry Gardiner: No other Member State has called louder or longer for reform of the Common Agricultural Policy than we have. Do we need to see a greater transition from pillar 1 to pillar 2 to meet precisely the objectives that you say? Yes, of course we do. We hope and we will be working towards achieving a greater role in the review in 2008 but it is absolutely essential and it has been highlighted—and again I go back to what the MA Board said—that we to move away from subsidy to paying land managers for the environmental benefits that they provide. They are very, very clear about this. If I sounded sanguine about the communication, that is in the true spirit of European collegiality that I have. If I am less than sanguine about the process to date in the shift of resources from subsidy through to environmental benefit in the CAP, then that is an indication that I share some of the frustrations that you have.

  Q105  Mr Caton: What is your perception of how other Member States are responding both to the Biodiversity Communication and Action Plan that it proposes?

  Barry Gardiner: Are you talking about other Member States within the EU?

  Q106  Mr Caton: Yes.

  Barry Gardiner: It is clearly mixed. There are those who feel that certain of the . . . For example, if you look at Natura 2000 in the Habitats Directive, there are certain Member States whose ministers have spoken up against some of what they see as constraints imposed upon them. I am not telling any tales here; this is their own public pronouncements. There are differences of approach. These, I think, to a certain extent are things that we should not be surprised at. Let me return to one of the other things that the MA highlighted and that the Board highlighted. What I think is very interesting about the approach which the MA adopted—here we are talking about 1300-odd scientists coming together and presenting us with the best state of our planet that we have ever had but their own expectations were not that there would be the turnaround and the halting of the loss of biodiversity. They themselves, whilst setting out very clearly what the strategy to reducing that loss in biodiversity must be, are clear that they are anticipate that it is something that will continue for some time and they expressed their own reservations about the capacity of the global community to turn that around in such a short timescale as we have by 2010, partly for the development pressures, pollutant pressures and so on, but also partly because of the climate change that is already in the system. I do think that we have to realistic here if the MA itself, whilst absolutely identifying the problem and whilst absolutely specifying what we need to be doing and the approach that we need to be taking to resolve it, was not optimistic that, in the short term, this could be turned around and the decline halted. I think that part of the reason why they were less than optimistic on that is of course because, in the same way that we hear from developing countries that the pressures for development, the pressures for growth and the pressures of taking people out of poverty often mean that issues of environmental consideration are of a second order of importance in their thinking, I think that one can see that to a lesser extent also even within the EU. I think it is important that we get across the Stern type messages, but actually there is no development without sustainability and that actually taking action now is going to make things a lot easier and a lot cheaper and we are going to achieve success a lot faster if we act within the next five to ten year period rather than delay.

  Q107  Chairman: Owing to the pressure of time, we will have to move on to the next set of questions; we will take this session up to 10.40 if that is okay with you, Minister.

  Barry Gardiner: Absolutely.

  Q108  David Howarth: I want to ask mainly about the place of the MA in UK policy making, which we have already touched on. May I return briefly to the research programme and put to you that you have mentioned two things that clash: one is you said, quite rightly, that you can have too much analysis and you have to get on with doing something but, on the other side, you said that the research programme, although it looks a bit like an MA, is not really an MA because, as you said, it does not cover different scenarios and it does not cover different policy responses. Could it be said that if we went the whole hog and we went for the full MA and put in different policy responses, then it would be more policy relevant?

  Barry Gardiner: Please, do not interpret anything I have said as ruling out going through to conducting a UK MA. What I was keen to do was to distinguish the research programmes that are currently under way, the natural environment research programme and the natural environment policy, with that and I was keen to clarify that they are not exactly the same because some people have suggested that in effect they are and that is why I wanted to be clear on that. I hope I did not say that one can have too much research, but you are right. What I was trying to get at was that actually there is no point in having more and more and more research unless you do something with it and I think that our obligation now, which I hope you will feel we are taking very seriously, is to try and see how we can use the research that has been done through the MA to inform policy making and to inform decision making both within Defra and by developing tools that will help other government departments make better policy decisions on the back of that ecosystem services approach and having a metric that enables them to do that. I take what you are saying that if you went the whole hog and feed in alternate scenario planning, that may ultimately enable us to identify the policy lines that are going to be most helpful in the future. I am certainly not ruling that out. I am saying that we have a heck of a job of work to do already trying to integrate into our thinking what the MA has already come up with and I think that we do have to take this in a systematic way.

  Q109  David Howarth: I suppose it is the difference between not ruling it out on the one side and having a clear direction of travel on the other side. If it were a clear direction of travel towards an MA as opposed to not ruling it out, would that not help to bring more coherence to it in terms of research programme? The Chairman has mentioned the idea of a UK, or perhaps it is technically an English, MA as a kind of Stern type review which would then help to make the case for ecosystems services policies in the way to which you seem to be quite clearly committed.

  Barry Gardiner: I am not yet at the stage that you are suggesting that we should move to. I do want to take things not slowly but methodically and I want to be sure that we have incorporated all the lessons of the MA into our thinking. We are doing a tremendous amount of work on our own biodiversity action plan. In fact, earlier this month, we had a meeting with stakeholders about the future plans and, in January, we will be engaging with all of the ecological biodiversity community precisely to set out where we go from here and some of the remarks that I put in at the end of my opening remarks about how we integrate the ecosystem services approach into that thinking I think would be really relevant to the sort of stakeholder thinking that we do in January because we have tended to adopt a very species based approach. The species themselves of course are of intrinsic value. They are also of real value in terms of the indicators of the health of the ecosystem. When it comes to the point of having 364 or 367, whatever it is, separate species orientated and habitat-orientated action plans, I think that actually we do need to say, let us integrate the thinking of the MA here into all of this and, rather than simply pursuing more and more information, yes, let us use that information as a guide/indicator of what is happening with the ecosystems but how do we focus on the ecosystems themselves? How do we take a much more integrated and holistic approach to this to ensure the healthy ecosystems that are actually going to ensure the health of the individual 364 species?

  Q110  David Howarth: I will leave the research programme now and move on to the place of the MA in UK policy making. We gather that a mapping exercise is going on to assess the UK response to the MA. That is obviously a good thing. I am slightly unclear about a couple of matters. First, what will that feed into? What is the endpoint of this? Secondly, are we talking about simply assessing new policies or are we talking about assessing all the current policies against the MA? For example, is the process we are talking about going to use the MA to reconsider what is in the UK Sustainable Development Strategy? You are talking about refresh and so on, is the MA integral to the refresh of existing policies?

  Barry Gardiner: Yes it is, is my clear answer to that. We are looking at an ecosystem services approach as an enabling project within the whole strategy refresh of the Department, to help us think more clearly, to help us deliver more effectively on the goals that we have already set—which, by and large, you will not be surprised to hear, we think are the right sort of goals in sustainable development or sustainable consumption and production and so on—but we need to be feeding in the lessons and the approach of the MA in helping us deliver on that. I feel very confident that adopting that ecosystems approach will be helpful in enabling us to deliver better. We will be more effective in achieving our objectives if we use an ecosystems approach.

  Q111  David Howarth: Might I come back to the CSR, one of our obsessions in this Committee—although my final question will be about another one of our obsessions. You have talked about using the MA as an evidence base for discussions between Defra and the Treasury. You have also talked about holistic approaches and mentioned other policy areas and getting away from policy silos. Is the MA being used solely as part of the discussion about natural resource policies and so on with the Treasury or is it feeding into transport policy, housing policy, economic development policy, way beyond Defra, into the other departments?

  Barry Gardiner: It is precisely the latter that I want to see. In effect, the two questions you have just asked are flip sides of the MA ecosystems approach coin. One is that it should be able to help Defra be more effective in achieving our own objectives and our own targets and our own goals. The other is that if we can develop the evaluation approach that I have outlined through the pilots that we have set up—and, as I think I mentioned, they are with the Department of Transport, they are with DCLG, they are precisely in the areas that you suggest—we should also be able to help other government departments take better policy decisions because they will precisely be able, for the first time, to assess the true cost of policies because they will take in the effect of decisions on the environment, on ecosystem services into their calculations when making decisions.

  Q112  David Howarth: That is very good, but that is coming from your end, from Defra. It needs to come from Treasury.

  Barry Gardiner: I am delighted to tell you that Treasury economists and Defra economists and World Bank economists are all engaging on this. I do not feel in any sense that this is something where Defra is waving a little flag in the air and saying, "We've got a good idea, is anybody out there prepared to take notice of us?" It is something which the Treasury are keen to look at with us and with economists from the World Bank as well. This is something that has been identified by the MA as one of the gaps that they want to see us move to fill. I should have mentioned that DFID also are using the MA to educate their research programme on services[1] and poverty. This is not something that is just confined to one area of government. That is not to say that we yet have the tool: we have not managed to develop it but we are all working together to try to achieve that because we see the potential benefits.

  Q113 David Howarth: You see our view. The policy centre has to take this up.

  Barry Gardiner: Absolutely.

  Q114  David Howarth: Rather than saying just one department has responsibility for it.

  Barry Gardiner: That is absolutely right.

  Q115  David Howarth: My final question is about another one of those tools of central policy-making, the regulatory impact assessment.

  Barry Gardiner: The environmental impact assessment.

  Q116  David Howarth: We have heard evidence generally about the inadequacy of the present system for incorporating environmental concerns into policy making. Specifically on the MA, we have heard evidence from NERC that the present impact assessments in no way help to incorporate MA-type considerations to the policy. If you go to the summary, which covers one side of an A4 sheet of paper, it has one line that says something like "Does this policy meet the Government's sustainability policy? Yes or no." That does not give a very wide opportunity for discussion of specific policies of this sort.

  Barry Gardiner: The past decade has been a time of incredibly innovative fast-learning of these issues. It is not to say that when the Government introduced environmental impact assessments all policy decisions were going to be able to bask in the glorious knowledge that the environment was secure as a result of what had been done. Of course this is the sort of thing that we need to refine, reappraise and improve upon. I would say to you that there is a commitment not just within Defra but wider in government to do that. It is equally important that we see here that this is not something that is just: "because it will keep those people in Defra quiet if we do". It has to come from that fundamental understanding that this is the best way of making policy decisions because we will establish the true and proper cost of the decisions that we take if we incorporate that MA approach into our environmental impact assessments.

  David Howarth: Thank you.

  Q117  Chairman: Thank you very much, Minister. We have come to the end of our session with you. We are very grateful for your time this morning and your comprehensive answers.

  Barry Gardiner: Thank you very much. I have enjoyed it.

  Chairman: We will get our report out as soon as we can.





1   Witness Addition: ie ecosystem services. Back


 
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