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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 289-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE ENVIRONMENTAL AUDIT COMMITTEE (TRADE, DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENT SUB-COMMITTEE)
TRADE, DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENT: THE ROLE OF THE FCO
Tuesday 30 January 2007 MR PAUL BUCKLEY, MS SARAH SANDERS and MR VASSILI PAPASTAVROU Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 38
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Environmental Audit Committee, (Trade, Development and Environment Sub-Committee) on Tuesday 30 January 2007 Members present Colin Challen, in the Chair Mr Martin Caton David Howarth ________________ Memoranda submitted by Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the International Fund for Animal Welfare
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Paul Buckley, Head of Global Country Programme Unit, and Ms Sarah Sanders, UK Overseas Territories Programme Manager, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB); and Mr Vassili Papastavrou, Whale Team Leader and Biologist, International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), gave evidence. Q1 Chairman: Good morning to you and it is nice to see you here for this first session of our inquiry into the role of the FCO in sustainable development, et cetera. I apologise for the delay in seeing you but we were unfortunately not able to establish a quorum last week. We are only three members serving on the Sub-Committee at the moment so we do need all three on each occasion. It is very good of you to come back. Could you briefly introduce yourselves and perhaps give us a perspective on where you stand in relation to the Government's performance, particularly the FCO's performance on these issues? Mr Buckley: Good morning. I am Paul Buckley from the International Division of the RSPB and my colleague Sarah Sanders is working in the same team. Sarah is particularly involved in the Overseas Territories and has just come back last week from Montserrat and Anguilla to look at a couple of our projects there. The RSPB take our primary experience with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from first of all our advocacy work on a whole range of international issues and multilateral agreements and secondly from our work around the world building capacity with Birdlife International partners and NGOs and small government departments on the Overseas Territories. Through that work we have interacted with the FCO both here and in the posts overseas for a number of years. We very much try to work on the ground with those organisations and as well as partner development work we have a number of big projects, including a couple of big avoided deforestation projects in Syria and Sumatra which together cover about 170,000 hectares of tropical forest. The core of our links with the FCO over the last few years has been with the Overseas Territories and that is certainly our current priority and it is certainly an area where we are already actively in dialogue with the FCO. I know you have heard a lot in your discussions on the MEA about the biodiversity crisis and we do consider with the 16,000 species known to be threatened with global extinction, that this is something that is a major challenge and something that the UK is incredibly well-placed to lead on and be very proud of its work on. We do feel at the moment that a lack of a clear biodiversity focus and environmental focus as far as the Overseas Territories are concerned within the FCO really means we are lagging behind on these responsibilities. We think that the Sustainable Development Strategy is a laudable document and obviously with priorities like climate change, sustainable logging, and so on, we cannot argue with anything in there, but we feel that biodiversity has a rather low profile, and even within the strategy it talks about funding programmes for biodiversity and in fact those have now been abandoned in the last couple of years, and it is very difficult for us to envisage getting funding today for some of the very successful programmes we have had in collaboration with the FCO in past years. You have seen our key points in the submission. I think the two things we seek most immediately are really an explicit recognition within the FCO and within the posts globally that biodisversity is a strategic priority. Secondly, I mentioned that we seek adequate resources for the very important work of conserving biodiversity in the Overseas Territories. We know of 47 birds in the Overseas Territories which are considered to be globally threatened so there is an immense biodiversity resource there which the UK has direct responsibility for. As a final point, there has been a lot of discussion about who should have responsibility for that, whether it should be Defra, whether it should be FCO, or whether it should be somebody else, and I suppose from our point of view, to be honest, we do not really care, we just want somebody to take that responsibility and make sure those resources are available. At the end of the day it does fall to the FCO to be the ambassadors for the Overseas Territories; maybe it is Defra, maybe it is somebody else, but it is the FCO's responsibility to make sure that happens, whoever then provides the resources and the expertise. Mr Papastavrou: My name is Vassili Papastavrou and I am a whale biologist with the International Fund for Animal Welfare which was set up in 1969 and works to improve the welfare of wild and domestic animals, but mainly wild animals, throughout the world. I think we are unusual for having that focus on wild animals, specifically on whales and seals and animals that are both rare and abundant, so on the one hand we have looked at the exploitation of Canadian harp seals which are sill abundant and we have also tried to maintain protection for Mediterranean monk seals which are extremely endangered. The same is true for our work on whales. We have worked to try and address the problem of commercial whaling. At the same time we are also working on some extremely endangered populations of whales such as the grey whales in the Western Pacific which now number only 100 and are threatened by oil exploration. Our focus on commercial whaling has obviously centred around two Conventions; the International Whaling Commission, and when I started working for IFAW in 1992 there were round about 30 active members, there are now 72 active members; and the much large Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which now has round about 170 members. Our work as an NGO has had quite a strong scientific component and we have found science a useful tool in trying to get our message across, so for example we have funded DNA analyses of whale meat on sale in Japan and Korea for about ten years, and for 20 years we have been engaged in benign research on whales using our research vessel Song of the Whale which most recently was in Iceland. When I started personally studying live whales in 1984 it was seen as a bit of a joke and at that stage the only real way to do it was to study dead animals, but now there has been a transformation in the way that we study whales and most of the really interesting things that have been learnt and most of the conservation problems that we are trying to address are through studies on live animals. I mention our research vessel Song of the Whale because it is registered in London and we have had some extremely good support from the FCO when we have come to work in a variety of countries and we have found that the embassies have actually helped us a great deal. As an NGO we have offices in 15 countries and reasonably good contacts in perhaps another 12, and if you consider the disparity between that and 170 members of CITIES, it is clear that we need to work with governments who have a much wider representation. I suppose we have seen the real strengths that the FCO can bring perhaps most specifically when the UK decided to push the listing of the basking shark in Appendix 2 of CITIES. It took two CITIES conferences of the parties for this proposal to be successful, and for both of them we saw an extremely strong team go to CITIES with a clear foreign policy objective and not only work during the meeting to achieve the objective but actually work before the meeting through the British embassies and contacts abroad and also even during the meeting phoning those embassies, so we can see that when the UK has an environment foreign policy objective that it wants to pursue it can really apply a huge amount of force. It should be remembered that it was not an easy listing of this particular species because many countries took the view that as a fish it was not really the responsibility of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species to give it protection. However, what we are seeing now is a downplay in the interest of the Foreign Office in the issues that we are most directly involved with and we are not seeing the same kind of regular contact and interest that we have seen in previous years, particularly I would say on the whaling issue. Thank you. Q2 Chairman: What would you ascribe that to? Mr Papastavrou: When things were going well we had a team within the Foreign Office who were not only experts on the issue itself so they knew and understood the complexities (of in this case the whaling issue but the same was also true of other environment issues) but they also knew how to use the Foreign Office network in order not only to influence other countries but to find out what was going on, so we often received information coming back from those posts and we were then able to interact and provide the more technical knowledge that we had ourselves. Q3 Chairman: Has that dried up? What has happened to that? Mr Papastavrou: I think it is fair to say that there are no longer any real experts on the whaling issue within the FCO and the lead in theory is taken by Defra but we are finding that in some cases FCO officials do not even attend the meetings of Wildlife Link, which is the whole NGO community, and if they do they are fairly passive, they are not contributing actively to our discussion of the issues. Q4 Chairman: But they used to do? Mr Papastavrou: They certainly used to, yes. Maybe we are going to come on to this later but we did a quick analysis of the UK missions which have closed down in recent years and there is a remarkable similarity between the countries where missions have closed down and the countries where Japan is either recruiting votes for the IWC or has already bought votes, so we are losing influence in albeit small countries but they are countries that still have a vote in the big conventions which we are dealing with. Q5 Chairman: It sounds like we are in retreat but is it coincidence that the list you have shows that pattern or have you picked up anything to suggest that this is a deliberate policy? Mr Papastavrou: I could not really argue as to whether it is coincidence or not; it just happens to be the case. We have lost embassies in Mali, Nicaragua, Kiribati, Côte d'Ivoire, Tonga, and in fact recently Anne Main MP wrote to the consulate of the Republic of Kiribati and the reply indicated that although the consul was sympathetic to our position he concluded the letter by saying: "Unfortunately following the cessation of UK aid over the past few years, especially the much valued VSO programme, and then the closure of the British High Commission in Tarawa last year, the UK has lost much of the influence over public opinion in Kiribati that it used to have", so here is a very clear example from a tiny country, that is also seriously threatened by climate change so you could argue that our interest in the whaling issue is fairly small, of where the UK has lost some influence in a particular country. Q6 Chairman: My question to all three of you following on from that is whether or not you would say that the environment and sustainable development has sufficiently high priority for the FCO? Mr Buckley: We feel that there are perhaps some distinctions. There is no question when you look at certain key environment issues that the UK Government has taken a strong lead internationally, and I think we would acknowledge on climate change issues and to some extent on issues like sustainable logging and bush meat and so on they have done a lot on the international scene and also on things like illegal fishing and so on. Specifically on biodiversity there is really very little evidence of the UK really seeing this as a strategic issue. As I said earlier, that is reflected in the Sustainable Development Strategy. Although we get enormous support from individual embassies and individual ambassadors and their staff overseas and so on, obviously there is nothing being driven from the centre that is saying this is something they should be spending their time on. I think it is something that the UK could be making much, much more of, particularly in these really key countries like Madagascar, Brazil, China, India and so on where they are incredibly important countries for biodiversity, and I do not think we are really reflecting that. There does not seem to be acknowledgement in the Foreign Office of the links between environmental issues, development, security and stability and on which we believe there are very clear links. I do not want to suggest it is just about money, yes, of course we would like money for conservation but we also want that role as ambassadors for the issue. Ms Sanders: Just thinking about the Overseas Territories in particular, I do not think the UK Government is meeting its environment responsibilities, particularly as it signed up to the International Convention on Biological Biodiversity for most of the territories. At the moment there are over 240 species which are threatened with extinction but at the same time livelihoods on the territories are almost utterly dependent on their biodiversity from natural resources. You only have to look at the fisheries in the Falklands and in Tristan da Cunha, you only have to look at tourism in the Caribbean; biodiversity underpins the economies of those territories and it is very difficult to see how the Foreign Office can ensure security and stability unless it assists territories in conserving natural resources and biodiversity. Q7 Chairman: You have made an argument that particularly in our relationships with problematic countries that this force for unity focusing on biodiversity can be very important. Do you want to expand a little bit more on that theme? Mr Buckley: As with anything like this, you can find good examples and bad examples and I am sure somebody else could produce bad examples of where it has not, but I think what environmental and conservation issues very often do is that they are a way of bringing together groups of people who otherwise would not perhaps talk to each other. I think we can cite a number of our projects where we have got everybody involved from local communities up to in some cases presidents of countries. I am thinking particularly of our project in Sierra Leone at the moment where we are attempting to conserve the last big area of rainforest, and for a country just coming out of civil war and I believe recognised as the poorest country in the world, the project has included all of those groups and we have regular meetings with the President and at the same time we are talking to people in the villages around the forest and that really has brought people together in some of the divided communities in a very impressive way. We hope in the longer term we will extend that programme perhaps to the Liberian side of the forest and of course that brings in the whole concept of peace parks and things which have been very effectively implemented in Southern Africa and Central America, big areas of border zones which can promote stability between countries that have at times been at loggerheads. Just one other example, I think, which is quite a good one from Birdlife's work which is this is an area where we have found in some cases that we have been able to work in countries which I think the UK finds quite difficult to work with but at the same time courts a very high priority. I am thinking here of some work I have been involved in over the last couple of years in Syria. For one thing, it is a good news story from Syria in a sense, which is not always the case, and it is also something where we have worked very closely with the embassy and we have been able to build quite a good rapport between the two Governments and ourselves. There is a final example from the Birdlife International partnership, and sadly I cannot say this is still the case because over the last three or four years it has been more difficult, but certainly for a good ten or 15 years we had partners in both Israel and Palatine and those two organisations were working extremely closely together, sharing training and collaborating on projects. That is perhaps the ultimate example in the world of where two very difficult countries can collaborate on issues such as this. Mr Papastavrou: Just maybe to follow on from Paul's point, I think we all have some good examples where we have worked very closely with particular ambassadors in particular countries and there does seem to be some really serious interest in some of the work that both RSPB and IFAW are doing in some countries. For us the best recent example is Iceland where both the British ambassador and his predecessor have maintained a really close relationship with us. The present ambassador is very well-connected in Iceland and has given us a huge amount of help in first of all obtaining a research permit for our vessel and then in a whole variety of other ways, but we do not see the whole thing being driven centrally. I think it is fair to say that the whaling issue does not seem to be a foreign policy objective for the UK in the way that it is for Japan, so we see Japan working year round in all the countries where it has representation to secure the objective it wants and we do not see the same coming from the UK at all. Q8 David Howarth: The one thing we need to do is ask you to respond to what we expect the Government's responses to be to your criticisms. One of those is that if, for example, you take one of the apparent causes of the downgrading of the importance of biodiverstity and other environmental issues is that inside the FCO the Environmental Policy Department appears to have disappeared and appears to have merged with something called the Sustainable Development and Business Group, and that does not look too great, but their response would possibly be that this is a good thing because we have got a mainstream sustainable development and it is good to bring it together with business and to make sure the economic policy and environmental policy are done at the same time. How do you respond to that sort of response that I think we will probably get from them? Ms Sanders: In principle, it sounds good but in terms of the Overseas Territories there is no-one within that team who has any responsibility for biodiversity so when they are looking for advice from the UK Government they do not know where to go. I suppose the response from the Foreign Office will be, "Contact Defra." I had someone on the phone from Ascension last week with a question about CITIES, "Who do I get in touch with?" I have one or two contacts in Defra but I have never been told by Defra who is the person responsible for CITIES for the UK Overseas Territories. The roles and responsibilities are not clearly defined and it is almost as if they are trying to pass the responsibility between two government departments so it just slips between the cracks. Mr Buckley: It is entirely up to the Foreign Office how they structure themselves, and I do not think we want to comment on the whys and wherefores in one sense. As with everywhere in the world, restructurings can either work or fail and it is not necessarily to do with the principle of the restructuring, it is more to do with how it works in practice. I think in a way the mere existence of something called the Environmental Policy Department suggested that this is a strategic priority and it is something which the Foreign Office takes seriously. Yes, with it being mainstreamed that might be good but you have to burrow quite hard down into that structure to find people who do have responsibilities for particular issues, and I think potentially the issues we are interested in of sustainable tourism, logging and marine biodiversity are all in different groups and there are no obvious, as people have said, experts within that and many people have responsibilities, so I think yes mainstreaming is great but where are the champions for the subject in that sense within that. Mr Papastavrou: I think from our point of view what we are missing more than anything is experts on environment issues within FCO, people who know and understand the environment issues, they just do not seem to be there any more. One could argue that not all environment issues are sustainable development issues and in some cases if you are trying to protect the environment you have to actually protect it. The UK in certain areas has a policy of for example not using certain species such as whales, so I think sustainable development might send slightly the wrong message and I think the additional problem of not having environment and biodiversity experts within the FCO means that there is no central way for the embassies to be briefed and to work together to secure a good result. Q9 David Howarth: What about their other argument which I am sure they are going to make which is that climate change is the big issue and although there is an interaction between climate change and biodiversity nevertheless they have got limited resources and they should put those resources towards the biggest possible issue; climate change. How do you respond to that point? Ms Sanders: Looking at it from the perspective of the Overseas Territories, most of which are small islands so they are considerably threatened by climate change, you cannot address climate change issues and you cannot adapt to climate change without looking at conservation and biodiversity and natural resources. If you are looking to reduce vulnerability and there are huge areas of mangrove and coral reefs, they all need to be protected and you cannot separate the two. Q10 David Howarth: You mentioned Defra and the response seems to be to ring up Defra. If you ring up Defra are they doing any more or are they just trying to cope with what they had previously? Ms Sanders: It is not a high priority for Defra. The other issue with Defra is that although they have perhaps expertise they do not have the connections on the ground like the Foreign Office does. Q11 David Howarth: DFID has connections on the ground so that raises the question of how well do these three ministries work together - Defra, DFID and the FCO - when it comes to biodiversity issues? Mr Buckley: I am not sure that we have very extensive knowledge of the sort of interconnections between them but I think that the general pattern is probably patchy. We are aware of the Inter-Ministerial Group on Biodiversity which potentially is a very powerful meeting point for those three and perhaps potentially for other ministries and that would seem to be the obvious way at the higher level, but you also need the close working relationships at the day-to-day level as well. Ms Sanders: I think there has been a move to try and improve working relationships between the three government departments for the UK Overseas Territories but I think there is still room for a lot of improvement. Mr Buckley: IDFID clearly does have a biodiversity remit in the OTs. They do not elsewhere and I suspect elsewhere the interactions between the three certainly on environmental issues are probably fairly sparse simply because it is not DFID's primary remit, although clearly they would acknowledge there are links. Of course we would like to see the links more explicitly recognised. Q12 David Howarth: But they do not do any better on other environmental issues than biodiversity? Mr Buckley: I am not sure. Mr Papastavrou: Just to give a specific example about the inter-relation between Defra and FCO with respect to the whaling issue, I think it is fair to say that Defra do a good job when they actually turn up to the meetings of the International Whaling Commission. They have appropriate expertise, they prepare for the meeting and they achieve what can be achieved at the meeting. Where the disconnect lies is the work outside the meeting is not being done so there do not appear to be very much in the way of lobbying efforts beforehand and information-gathering and all the work that you would expect FCO to do, so I think from the point of view of the issue that I most closely work on, which is apparently a foreign policy objective for the UK, in theory at least, there is not that kind of joined-up thinking between the FCO and Defra. Q13 David Howarth: Can we just come back finally to the embassies issue which you raised. I think the RSPB particularly raised the symbolic consequences of the closure of the Madagascar embassy, and that is a particularly striking case. I suppose the FCO response might be first of all they are saving resources and that would free up resources for other projects - environmental projects or biodiversity projects - and that would be good and, secondly, they can handle this on a regional or multi country basis so you do not need to have one ambassador per country. How do you respond to those points? Mr Buckley: I am sure we all appreciate that the Foreign Office like everyone else has limited resources and it has to do what it sees fit to do. My colleague will talk more about this, I am sure, in terms of how this leaves to some extent vacuums for other people. I think we have found generally that we have very good relationships with embassies, they are very helpful. We recently had fantastic assistance from the ambassador in Indonesia again in respect of the other big rainforest project we are involved in, who hosted a reception for us and so on, and that was a very powerful vehicle to push the case for the protection of the forest, so again when they do things they do them very well and we have great assistance from them. I guess we quoted the Madagascar example and Vassili mentioned a number of other examples where closures have occurred in high biodiversity countries, particularly places like Central America, and I think it just reflects perhaps that if biodiversity was a strategic priority you would take a different view about somewhere like Madagascar, particularly at a time when the new government there has just opened an embassy in Britain, funnily enough, but also it is very open and really wants to right the deforestation wrongs of the last few decades and actually work with countries like Britain to help them to do so. It seems a particularly regrettable example but I guess it is just one symptom of that. We do work very well with embassies where we have particular projects. We should acknowledge from Defra the Darwin Initiative which albeit a rather small amount of money is a fantastic fund for our work and we have very good links where we have projects. We have had very good collaboration from the embassies as well. Generally if it is not something that is given to them as a strategic priority and if they do not really have any funds to play with in terms of doing anything, then it inevitably becomes a lesser priority compared with other things in their countries. Mr Papastavrou: Maybe just to underscore the comment that I have already made in reading out the letter from Kiribati, on the issue that I am working on we are actually reaching a critical moment where Japan is about to take over the International Whaling Commission. It has nearly got - it maybe has - a majority of countries, so you are looking in the case of Japan at a 15 or 20-year effort to take over the Convention and we think it is the only time that one country has virtually succeeded in taking over an entire Convention. Then at the same time from non-whaling countries, and maybe the UK is just one of these, there is not even an effort to keep a really small post going in one of these countries which would take a very small amount of investment and the vote of a country like Kiribati could be the vote that would tip the Whaling Commission one way or the other. So although obviously this is only one of many issues that the UK is concerned about, Kiribati has a vote in other Conventions as well, as does Madagascar. The embassy in Madagascar used to deal with The Comoros which are about to join the Whaling Commission to vote with Japan, so again if you do not have your representation on the ground in the country you do not have the same level of influence if you just fly people in for meetings and they then leave. Q14 David Howarth: You mentioned other conventions so the CITIES Convention might have implications for the enforcement of CITIES and I think you mentioned the expansion of it as well. Mr Papastavrou: I just mentioned the two Conventions that I am particularly familiar with. Yes, I think you could probably generalise to all multilateral environment agreements basically. Q15 Chairman: We always refer to the Foreign Office as the Foreign Office but of course it is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Does the Commonwealth play any role at all in these issues? Mr Papastavrou: I would say it should but it does not at the moment and a lot of those Commonwealth countries are leaning further towards Japan than perhaps they might on the whaling issue. I have not done the analysis to give to you but maybe I should after I go home. Q16 Chairman: I think it would be very interesting to see that since you would have hoped that it would really be the other way round, but there we are. Martin? Ms Sanders: Mr Papastavrou, you mentioned ways in which the FCO has helped in your work with other countries and you particularly mentioned the basking shark protection matter. You have indicated that there is some reduction in interest in the FCO but do you believe that it takes full advantage of the potential for working with charities in delivering its international objectives? Mr Papastavrou: I would say that it is very haphazard and variable and there are instances where largely due to personal relationships with individuals we do fully benefit from the FCO and I think they make full use of our expertise, and I think this is essentially the same point that RSPB have made, but there seems to be no overall policy to do that. From our particular perspective there is one bit of the FCO that works incredibly well and it is called the Maritime Division and they are the people to whom we speak if we want help with obtaining research permits for our vessel, and the relationship there is faultless. I think it is a bit like being out there on a cloudy day and occasionally there is a bright ray of sunshine and you see what could be happening if there really was a clear objective to do it. That is what is lacking at the moment. Q17 Mr Caton: A possible new dawn is perhaps the strategy that the FCO is developing at the moment, potentially to deepen its involvement with NGOs and other groups. You could all answer this. What would you hope to see come out of that strategy? Ms Sanders: In terms of the Overseas Territories, what I would really like to see is the UK Government taking its responsibilities seriously because these are part of the UK; these are the territories that want to remain part of the UK. I would like to see the UK Government making sure that there are adequate resources available that concern biodiversity on those territories. I also think the UK Government has a role to play in strengthening environmental legislation in the territories, particularly looking at things like environmental impact assessments and strategic environmental assessments. You will notice that I am talking about the UK Government. We are not concerned whether this drive comes from Defra, the Foreign Office or DFID. From whichever UK Government department, whatever their role and responsibility, it should be clearly defined and the territories aware of what the various responsibilities and roles are. Mr Papastavrou: Your question is a rather difficult one to answer. It may be difficult to answer because, in my opinion, unless the environment is a clear foreign policy objective, then just talking more to NGOs or having more meetings with them will not necessarily help. In the past, when we have seen that particular environmental issues have been a clear foreign policy objective, we have seen a huge amount of progress. Those interactions with the NGOs will form naturally from that. I am speaking here on environmental issues with the exception of climate change where that decision has already been taken. It does not seem to have been taken yet on biodiversity issues. I am not sure if I have made myself clear. Mr Buckley: There is one other matter that I could mention. Obviously we do welcome that dialogue. We have recently had visits from our stakeholder manager. I would agree with the last point. We would also like them to recognise, in whatever partnerships they do form or whatever funding programmes they might develop in the future, which we and others are able to access, perhaps the importance of long-term partnerships. We feel this point very strongly because we have been working with some NGOs in developing countries for ten or 15 years. We have provided them with support through that time and because of that they have become very effective and relatively sustainable NGOs considering the environment in countries in Africa. If it is long-term funding, and projects and partnerships often tend to be boom and bust affairs where something happens for two or three years and then vanishes, I do not think that is the best use of resources. Whatever they do, we would like them to do it for the long term so that they recognise that people in a poor country or in the Overseas Territories, if they are going to do effective projects, will need salaries and people on the ground to do the work. It is crazy to expect the Tristan Government with 280 people to have the resources to employ staff to do all these things. It is very important that people have resources to do the work and they need to be supported in the longer term perspective as well. Q18 Mr Caton: Keeping the focus on the Overseas Territories and the point that you and Ms Sanders have made about improving resources, it is argued that the UK Overseas Territories do not have the capacity to deal effectively with their environmental challenges. Financial capacity aside, how might institutional and knowledge capacity be improved in the territories to help address this? Ms Sanders: There is a range of ways. It has been very encouraging in the last couple of months to see Lord Triesman's decision on the UK Overseas Territories. Students now only have to pay UK fees to go to university in the UK. That is a huge step forward but, at the same time, I think we still need to remember here in the UK the salaries of people in the territories. For example, a conservation officer on Tristan earns £200 a month. Although he may want to come over and study in the UK, he is going to need support to come over here and do that. There are people out in the territories who would like to be trained and to have access to university education. Those opportunities need to be made available to them by the UK Government. A lot of support could be put in there, for example, by access to training, as I said before, and providing assistance and support when you are looking at uninhabited territories. For example, the UK has two World Heritage sites, Henderson Island which is part of the Pitcairn Group, and Gough Island. These are not inhabited territories but there is a lot of expertise both in the UK and, if we are thinking about Gough Island in South Africa, there is a lot of interest in supporting monitoring and surveys and other work on those islands. It is just a question of resources. One of the comments that came back from the Foreign Office about the OTEP Fund was that the Overseas Territories do not have the capacity to take on more projects. I do not think that is quite correct. The capacity is there but more funds need to go in to paying for salaried posts. At the moment, although territories can access those OTEP funds to support biodiversity conservation projects, they are not actually allowed to use that money to support salaries. Often the reason there are fewer projects submitted is because they cannot employ people to take those projects forward on the ground. Q19 Mr Caton: One clear improvement would be if DFID or FCO directly funded environmental positions in these places. Ms Sanders: Yes. Q20 Mr Caton: You mentioned those territories where nobody lives. I guess again the Government's argument against this is that these are very remote places and you have to put in a lot of resources that might show a better return elsewhere. What do you say to that argument? Ms Sanders: If you look at the level of resources there and what we spend on biodiversity conservation in the UK, I do not think we are looking at huge amounts of resources. The UK has a responsibility here. When we talk about Henderson and Gough Islands, these are World Heritage sites. At the moment on Gough Island the Tristan albatross is threatened with extinction because it has been predated by mice. At present we are funded by the UK Government to do a feasibility study to look at the potential for perhaps eradicating mice from the island but to take forward a project like that we are looking at least at £2 million. Resources like that need to be available for the UK Overseas Territories if they are going to meet their biodiversity conservation responsibilities. Q21 Mr Caton: We have already discussed the structural reorganisation in the FOC. Has that had a direct impact on the Overseas Territories in terms of environmental protection? Ms Sanders: I think it has. Who do they go to in the Foreign Office for some biodiversity advice? I am thinking particularly of the recent oil rig stranding off Tristan Island. This had the potential basically to destroy the whole economy of Tristan because Tristan is dependent on its cray fishery. The arrival of this oil rig and the potential introduction of invasive marine species - I think there have been at least 40 potential marine invasives - could destroy the fishery, but who were the Tristan Island Council meant to turn to? Who in the Foreign Office could provide the environmental advice and expertise that they needed? It is just not very clear. Q22 Mr Caton: You have said that you are agnostic on whether environmental responsibility should lie with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office or Defra, but I detect in some of the evidence you have given that you have looked back to a time when FCO was functioning very well and, if you could return to that, that might be the best way forward. Ms Sanders: The advantage that the Foreign Office has over Defra is that it has the contacts on the ground. Defra does not necessarily have those same sorts of relationships. Perhaps the way forward is to increase the internal expertise within the Foreign Office. Mr Buckley: If one moves to a scenario where it is seen slightly more as a focal part of the UK environment policy, there is potentially a role for lots of people. The Foreign Office are clearly the right people to make the links between the territories and people within the UK, rooted in the UK, but obviously Defra, through the organisation, does have a range of expertise which could be usefully employed. The Joint Nature Conservation Committee would be an obvious agency to implement some of this work. We also think about people like DCMS, who have responsibility for the World Heritage sites but also run the National Lottery. One of the issues we are trying to seek clarification on is whether the territories actually could access the National Lottery but they never have been able to do that. One can imagine a network building up of various people being able to help. I go back to the point that the previous life of the Foreign Office was better but there were still very few resources around to do this work. It might have been better but it was not quite there. Ms Sanders: It has been encouraging recently to see JNCC appoint an officer specifically responsible for the UK Overseas Territories. That comes from the Overseas Territories. It is a step forward in the right direction. JNCC would also say that they need more resources if they are going to provide the sort of advice that the Overseas Territories require. Mr Papastavrou: I have a comment on your earlier question. In a lot of ways the FCO is better placed to deal with multilateral environment agreements than Defra. FCO people will know what is achievable in China or Vietnam in a way that Defra will not. If people within FCO have a handle on the overall network of countries that they deal with, they will know which are the best ones to approach in a way that Defra simply will not be able to do. Chairman: Thank you all very much for that very useful evidence. Memorandum submitted by BioDiplomacy Examination of Witness Witness: Mr Iain Orr, Director, BioDiplomacy, gave evidence. Q23 Chairman: Good morning, Mr Orr. It is a pleasure to see you this morning. I apologise for the delay to this particular hearing from last week. Could you, too, briefly introduce yourself and where you think the importance of this issue lies, particularly with the FCO and the UK Government? Mr Orr: In introducing myself and what I have been concerned with, the main point is that I spent most of my diplomatic career dealing with China. Interestingly, when I started in China, China was being opened up to the world through ping-pong diplomacy. I was diagnosed at the age of 50 as being mildly dyslexic. That means that I am very keen not just to give oral evidence but visual evidence as well. With your permission, Mr Chairman, I would like to introduce some of things that I have been involved with through what one might call T-shirt diplomacy. I am very keen on that. Q24 Chairman: Could you give us just one example? If there are other things you have brought, perhaps they could be circulated later. Mr Orr: I did want to tell you that my last overseas post was in Accra where at one point, and this was a country where we were simultaneously accredited to Togo, I was involved as an EU election observer in Togo. The relevance of that to the FCO and the environment is that Togo then was an extremely ill-governed dictatorship, somewhere where biodiversity was suffering very badly. It is very much, if you like, the politics of good governance that, in my view, is the fundamental reason why the environment and biodiversity within it are important for good diplomacy. I worked, as I say, for a full career within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with a primary interest in China, but latterly in one of my jobs I had a great deal to do with the Overseas Territories. I would agree with some of the evidence already given about the lack of sufficient attention being given to the Overseas Territories. As for the priority that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has given to environmental issues, some encouragement can certainly be taken from what is said in the foreword to the Sustainable Development Action Plan 2007, which the Foreign Office has just printed. There is very good political guidance given in that in the foreword by Mrs Beckett. What I am a little more concerned about is the extent to which the Foreign Office understands how and why biodiversity and other environmental aspects are crucial to achieving the other goals of security and prosperity. I think the environment is not as fully integrated as it should be. I also think that there is a great deal more that needs to be done in terms of better liaison with other parts of Whitehall and certainly with civil society, with NGOs. Q25 Chairman: How does it filter down to our overseas posts, particularly with the senior officers there? Do you think they will be avidly reading the Foreign Secretary's foreword and revising any local practices, approaches or procedures? Mr Orr: It is difficult to say. These documents are meant to be guidance within an organisation for work. A great deal depends on the leadership. I have heard some of those giving evidence previously talk of very strong support on certain issues from ambassadors in post. In some cases that will be true. There are some very good sentiments within that document. In terms of delivery, it is important to liberate the enthusiasm that quite often you get on the ground. The extent to which people have mentioned getting support from embassies is quite striking. I think there is a slightly regrettable tendency for over‑management from the centre. It is absolutely vital that clear political guidance is given, but within these guidelines it is very often posts that will themselves see opportunities that arise and make the most of it. Q26 Chairman: I can see that you have brought one exhibit which is on the table, quite a large one. Having made the effort, I guess it would be remiss if the committee did not see it. Explain it to us. Mr Orr: Let me explain one or two of the things that I have brought. I can make certain points on all of them. This poster of penguins is a very easy one. I would urge you all to go to Falklands House and see a magnificent exhibition of art from the Falkland Islands. I certainly have a strong belief that the creative arts and the environment belong very much together. I do not know if any of you saw the exhibition at the Natural History Museum last year called Burning Ice: the Art of Climate Change. It is very important to have that whole creative spirit involved. I see three crises: climate change; huge global extinction in terms of biodiversity; and the crisis that is going to impact most quickly and directly on most people, water. I am particularly interested in water issues because of my time spent in China. The water table in Beijing has dropped in the time that I have been dealing with China something like 30 metres, which is quite extraordinary. Another of these displays shows something that I wish was in every embassy and I do not think you have perhaps heard enough about yet today. It is the trade aspect of your investigation: it is trade, development and the environment and the FCO. This magnificent book is the Eco‑Design Handbook from Thames & Hudson. I have nothing to do with Thames & Hudson or with the author but it is a magnificent guide to good technologies. There are huge areas of environmental work where we need to integrate better the work between those who are involved in the political relationships with other countries and those who are involved with trade promotion work. Chairman: I think it must be true that raising questions of biodiversity might also raise questions of culture, but that is perhaps a little outside our remit. You have made an interesting connection. Q27 David Howarth: What you have said does come into the questions I am going to ask. There was a very striking phrase in your written evidence where you said that the FCO's instinct is to focus on the "traditional muscle-power" of diplomatic carrots and military sticks in its international work. The question is: how effective is that approach to advancing environmental objectives, and what are the other approaches that could and should be used? Mr Orr: In the case of many environmental issues, it is in a sense fairly obvious that people are in it together. In terms of, say, biodiversity issues, the Convention on Migratory Species, which I am involved in and doing some consultancy work for, is trying to bring China on board. One of the concerns with migratory species, looking at it from a sustainable use development point of view, is: whose issues are they? I have been at meetings where Cuba talks about what they are doing with "their turtles", and the Department says, "Hey, now, they are our turtles, not your turtles". The same goes for birds and crucially also for marine species. There are disastrous developments in the world's oceans. You cannot regard it as yours, so it is not a question of using your political or military power to defend your territory. The earth's biodiversity, its climate and indeed its water are not any one country's territory. There has to be a different approach to understanding and certainly to working towards much greater justice in the relationship between countries at different stages of development. Q28 David Howarth: I was thinking of specific techniques. Is this a case where public diplomacy is very important as opposed to threats and inducements, for example? Mr Orr: Yes, I certainly think it is. The United Kingdom has shown itself quite good at that from time to time. That is very important. This phrase has been used elsewhere; it is a coalition of the willing and a coalition not just of countries. There are signs that the Foreign Office is showing a greater understanding of the importance of working with businesses and civil society. It is about the culture of how you approach environmental issues. Much of that, in my view, has to do with good governance. What concerns me in certain areas, both in the UK and in a variety of different countries overseas like China, is that in some of our Overseas Territories the issue is not to do with cuddly animals but with whether people have access to the information that they need. I was very disappointed to find last year that a decision was taken to disapply the Freedom of Information Act to St Helena and that at a time when there is major development work going on with the proposed first ever international airport for St Helena. It is not as easy now for anybody concerned to get information about that. Q29 David Howarth: You mentioned working in business, NGOs and civil society in general. You say that a start has been made on that. How far down the line has that reached? There is obviously a great deal of potential there. How much of that potential has been activated? Mr Orr: Nothing like enough has been activated. We have done quite good things. As I remember, the UK was one country at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg that really had quite a big role for NGOs within its delegation. We provided something of a lead on that. That is all right on the very big occasions. It is difficult to get that into the working psyche of day-to-day working. Certainly I had experience when working within the Foreign Office that one of the important things is not just working with NGOs but working across government with other government departments. I can remember being at many meetings where I thought that it was going to be useful to find out what the views were of a number of NGOs on an issue while we were taking some policy decisions but where the attitude quite often was within the FCO, because we have other departments in the FCO, and with other departments in Whitehall: yes, it is very important to consult the NGOs but first we have to get our act together. That is the wrong attitude. There is no point in consulting people unless you are ready, and this goes for how you conduct diplomacy with other countries. You are only going to influence people if you show that you are open to understanding their interests and being influenced by them. There is a great deal of expertise within not just the British NGO community but also the academic community in Britain. An awful lot of that expertise is not tapped into by the Foreign Office early enough in the process of policy formation. Q30 David Howarth: That is the important point. You also say that the FCO lacks in its Sustainable Development Strategy strategic vision, which implies that you also think they ought to get their original lines straight. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that and say how that could be improved, especially since your previous answer shows that it is also important to consult more widely with civil society, the academic community, NGOs, and so on. Mr Orr: That is a big question. That is very difficult to do. It is a bit like telling people to give up smoking or to go on a diet: the motivation has to come from within. To some extent, the difficulty is how to get motivation within the culture of the Foreign Office to understand. I do not think there is yet a sufficient understanding - it is gradually developing - of the nexus in the trade development environment. How do you bring it all together? I have considerable admiration for the perspective that is set out in the FCO's Sustainable Development Action Plan, and indeed within that there are some very good sentiments. One of the earlier witnesses talked about support for lobbying on whaling issues. That is built into the Sustainable Development Action Plan. It is much harder to do that if some of the important posts are not there. This should be dealt with on a regular and strategic basis so that people realise that it matters to them if the UK, along with other countries, does not want the moratorium on commercial whaling to come to an end. They need to have that at the forefront of their minds. The FCO needs to talk a lot more to people at very senior levels within NGOs, ministerial and also permanent under-secretary directors. You only achieve results with leadership, and that means that the politics have to be decided at the national level and secretaries of state and ministers should have that as a priority. That really has to feed into the top levels and then permeate the culture. It is a tough job. Q31 David Howarth: You were specifically critical in your written evidence of the introduction of targets and objectives into the FCO. You say these can actually hinder the FCO's work. I suppose the question then arises about how could sustainable development priorities be better delivered without targets? Mr Orr: It is not that anyone wants to get rid of targets; they do not want to be driven by them. I think this is related to the tensions between accountability and trust. Excessive targets mean that you are just not filling somebody with a vision of what their job is about. You would imagine that by the time somebody becomes an ambassador or high commissioner, if they do not know what their job is about and they need it to be written down as 20 targets to reach by the end of the year, then you have appointed the wrong person. The people who need to be given targets are those who are work shy, and I do not people in the Foreign Office are work shy, or people who need to be kept going. Sometimes that will apply in business. There will need to be one or two crucial targets. We have seen evidence of this in plenty of areas in the National Health Service and elsewhere where your life and indeed the amount of money you get from the Treasury is judged by how well you are hitting particular targets. Often they are interrelated and you cannot hit more than one interrelated target at the same time. It is like fundamental physics. You have a range of things that you want to achieve and there have to be trade-offs as you go along. You have to be guided by a strategic vision of what you have to achieve. There will be targets or things to remind you that you are not doing as well as you might be. As with sustainable development, you do not just stick a label on it saying, "We achieved that target". You have to understand why it was a target and make good use of it. One area that applies to is the project work with which the Foreign Office is becoming increasingly involved. You will be aware of their Global Opportunities Fund. My experience of the FCO's work on projects is that it fills a very important gap. The overseas development work of DFID is in many ways understandably geared to huge targets where money is not being well spent. DFID now finds it very difficult to spend money that is less than several hundreds of thousands of pounds, whereas very often, particularly when you come to influence countries, small amounts of money to support little projects of £5,000 to £20,000 can be very useful indeed. You do not want a philosophy of having a great fund and needing to be able to tick off how it has all been very well spent in accordance with a set list of priorities. Yes, you need overall guidance, but you need to be able to respond flexibly when opportunities arise and you need to trap the value of the projects. Very often when they have been completed, that may, in the country concerned, be only the start of the project's value. I have certainly seen example of embassies and high commissions forgetting and somebody complaining that the embassy is not doing very much with them, only to find that the minister may not be aware of a pretty important project carried out only three years before. I think the FCO has a real problem keeping alive a good collective memory. Q32 Mr Caton: Like our previous witnesses, you have criticised the closure of the embassy in Madagascar. Does the Foreign and Commonwealth Office need to have a post in a country in order to have real influence? Mr Orr: It does if it has sufficiently important interests there. The point I make about post closures is important. There is certainly scope for working more closely with our European partners and more closely sometimes with Commonwealth partners in certain countries. If you are only visiting there are always going to be some penalties. The penalty is that very often the ambassador is simultaneously accredited to four countries and he will have to organise his life. He will have to make a plan for when he goes to a country. That is almost certainly going to be related to the interests of different government departments. Of course, embassies work for the whole country and they are tasked. In very many embassies the bulk of the work comes from outside the FCO; it comes from elsewhere in Whitehall. They will then target the right time of the year from their point of view to hit that country. That country becomes used to being visited when there is something that Britain wants out of them or wants to tell them to do or persuade them to do, but if they suddenly have an issue, yes, you can send an e-mail, yes, you can get on the phone. There may be language and other difficulties. You simply do not feel that you have the same ability to talk to somebody who understands your day-to-day background. There is always a penalty in being non-resident, wherever you are. I was in Ghana. I would argue that we ought to have an embassy in Togo but I accept that there are certain penalties. In the case of Togo, no, we did not have a sufficiently great interest. The case of Madagascar was a shocking decision, I would say, and a stupid one because it was inconsistent with the Government's policy on development priorities for Africa. It was inconsistent with developing trade, given that the newly-elected Madagascar Government was sending out a very strong signal of wanting to move outside the Francophone world. There were plenty of UK companies and UK interests but the Foreign Office did not listen to any of them. In that particular case, the decision was not taken as a result of strategic thinking. It was a last-minute trade-off. They had to make certain closures. Somebody fought very strongly not to close the Gambia as a post, and you could argue about that, but then said that we cannot trespass on any of our other geographical areas; if we are going to keep the Gambia, who do we close down? They decided to close down Madagascar without any consultation with outside stakeholders. That is not the way to decide whether or not to close a post. I would say that before any post is closed, or indeed opened, that decision ought to be based on a serious consideration. It may take a lot of time. Obviously you know the stakeholders in that country and in the UK and very quickly, if you were doing your job at all, you could consult them. Q33 Mr Caton: Looking more widely, are you aware of moves to shift to a system of having regional ambassadors rather than single country ambassadors? If that is on the cards, can it work? Mr Orr: I am aware of it slightly. I have been alerted by reading some of the material sent to this committee. I am certainly going to look at that. It could work if you have a regional ambassador with real clout who can deliver in terms of our interests in particular countries and who has an effective relationship with those countries. I am pretty certain that if a government with which we want a good relationship has found under the present system that because it is not a priority country within the FCO's current list and it is not one where we have a sustainable development dialogue and therefore it is not managing to get the resources that it would like from the UK and somebody operating regionally could deliver, yes, but I would be a little sceptical about it. The resources are not necessarily aid or development resources but also questions of trade and investment that they would like to see coming from the UK. I would like to see the case made and tried out. It should be driven by a vision of how it is going to improve not just as a cost-cutting exercise but as an exercise in being more effective in influencing countries. I think there is still a great deal to be said for keeping the small posts relatively lightly managed from London and working within very clear guidelines. Relatively young diplomats can gain experience in small posts managed by three or four other UK-based staff, if they are lucky, but probably up to 20, and coping with really tricky issues like how to handle visa operations. That can be very good experience for a young diplomat and the costs of keeping small embassies open are really quite small. Q34 Mr Caton: In thinking about costs, the FCO, the same as every other government department, has had to make staff reductions as efficiency measures. At the same time, the role of the FCO seems to have spread to cover considerably more issues. Do you see those twin factors affecting the ability of the UK to influence the environmental and sustainability agenda on the international stage? Mr Orr: I agree that the agenda is widening and some of that is apparent. We are now much more aware of the fact that degraded environmental conditions can sometimes be a factor in causing refugees and conflict. We have terms like "environmental security" and "climate security". These are new terms but they relate to something that is not entirely new. One way in which you can get better results out of the same or smaller resources is by working more effectively throughout Whitehall. There is scope for that by understanding other cultures. I would like to see a good deal more in the way of both inward and outward secondments in the Foreign Office. You can achieve better results if you put together the right team to work on something; it may well be led by Defra or by DFID with an FCO component. I do not think that is done enough. You can put forward particular strategic objectives if you have a cross-departmental team that really gels and operates. I know there is an inter-ministerial group on biodiversity. If that does better work in giving guidance to Whitehall as a whole, then you will need possibly to have a better co-ordinated approach between DFID, Defra and the FCO. One particular area, which it is important to mention, is the Foreign Office and its responsibilities in respect of the Overseas Territories. I have a great deal of sympathy with the view in the Foreign Office that the Overseas Territories are British. They are not part of the Foreign Office. They are not like embassies or high commissions. They are not even countries that we are seeking to influence in particular. They are part of the British family, if you like. Undoubtedly, the point that was made in your committee's review of the UN's Millennium Ecosystem Assessment that Defra should have a much bigger role is very important. To that extent, the FCO will much better fulfil its responsibilities in relation to the Overseas Territories by dealing with good governance and freedom of access to information. At the moment, in St Helena there is the problem of the one independent newspaper coming under a lot of pressure from the government in St Helena, partly because it sometimes publishes things they do not like. There is huge value in having a free press. Q35 Mr Caton: I would like to come back to the Overseas Territories in a moment. Can I ask you a broader question first? You identified what you called three crises: biodiversity, water and climate change. The Government and the FCO have clearly prioritised the latter, climate change. Are they right to do that? Mr Orr: They are certainly right to prioritise it. It is very important. They should not do it at the expense of the other crises. At the moment, these three crises are interrelated. Even if you have the magic technological solution to climate change, and that still seems to be the Holy Grail of some people in the United States who say that you will be able to have a big shield, I find it very hard indeed to imagine equity between different countries. If you manage to reduce global temperatures by putting up these great umbrellas of one sort or another, that is presumably going to affect different countries to a different extent. How do you compensate those that do better or worse out of that? The danger lies in saying that climate change is causing the crisis and that there is no point in spending anything on biodiversity if you are going to get climate change. All these crises have all to be tackled. Please do not make climate change the only priority. You have to look at the environment pretty holistically. Q36 Mr Caton: Coming back to the Overseas Territories, we understand that you were involved in the original negotiations on the Environment Charters signed with the UK Overseas Territories. In your view, how successful has that proved to be in protecting the environment in those places? Mr Orr: It has been successful up to a point. It has certainly given those, as much within government both in the Overseas Territories themselves and in the UK, something on which to base their requests for resources for priorities. The Environment Charters followed from the 1999 White Paper. That solidified some of the values and changes of attitude in that White Paper. If that had not been there, even the small amount of funding that is presently available for the environment would have been lost in cuts or it would have been subsumed in much larger projects. The delivery is patchy and that is very largely because a lot of the environmental issues in the Overseas Territories demand resources. Some governments in the Overseas Territories are quite well off per capita but, like the Cayman Islands, may not have all the capacity needed to deal with difficult environmental issues. The Cayman Islands is an interesting example. You can argue that they have done very well in recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Ivan. There are things that we in the UK can learn from the Caymans about preparing for natural disasters. There are not enough resources. Policy comes first. There are not necessarily the right policies. Sustainable tourism is something of a joke in some places. There can be conflict when a company is developing a marina; they may be able to take a lot of sand or attack some mangroves. The development could be made a bit more expensive if it carries out the necessary mitigation measures. There is no doubt at all that if HMG is to fulfil its responsibilities in respect of environmental issues in the Overseas Territories a real step change is needed to fund the hard choices that need to be made. If you were given £10 million and asked what you could do to meet the 2010 biodiversity target by spending it in metropolitan UK or in the Overseas Territories, you will get infinitely better value for money out of that £10 million when you spend it in the Oversees Territories. Q37 Mr Caton: You mentioned the lack of capacity in some of the Overseas Territories to deal with environmental issues. That was certainly confirmed in the previous report we did that you have already mentioned. What can the FCO and DFID do to build that capacity? Mr Orr: It is simple. There is relevant expertise in a host of institutions but it is not in the FCO. The FCO does not need biodiversity experts or climate change experts; it needs people who understand the science and the politics of this. For a time in the FCO I was the FCO's lay expert on peaceful nuclear explosions. I had to understand a fair amount about the physics but that was as a layman and not as an expert. I had to understand it from a political point of view. A lot of expertise needs to be made available. I am concerned that there are people in Defra, in DCMS and in the other part of DFID, apart from DFID's Overseas Territories Department, for whom Overseas Territories do not figure in the list of issues they should be considering. I will give you one or two examples. One is to do with any of the important multilateral environmental agreements. There is a real need for engagement in these issues with the Overseas Territories. That is a huge in, say, something like the recent Albatross and Petrel Agreement, which is vitally important for several of the UK territories in the South Atlantic. Undoubtedly it needs experts in the UK who know about how to deal with the international fishing industry and what is involved. They have to translate that expertise, where necessary, to help the Overseas Territories develop the right sort of legislation and get the right sort of training. One concern of mine is that both in the Overseas Territories and in the UK there is a split between the natural environment and the built environment and heritage. There are some real issues about that. There is the current issue in St Helena to do with the Dutch East Indiaman the Witte Leeuw (White Lion) which is a historic wreck that needs to be handled properly. St Helena is being got at by a professional salvage company in the States whose main interest is in just leaving one or two little things with a local museum but making considerable profits from the wreck. There are people like the Crown Estate who have a maritime cultural heritage in the Code of Practice for Seabed Development and the Nautical Archaeology Policy Committee. I am pretty certain that no effort has been made to transmit the expertise that lies in compiling a document like that to guide the Overseas Territories for whom it is relevant, of which there is quite a number, so that they know the right sort of people to contact. Obviously, as well as the expert knowledge, there may well be the need for some agencies within the UK Government, not necessarily FCO, to give adequate support. I would like to see far more people in a variety in different government departments and other institutions in the UK with interests that can be vitally affected as applied to the Overseas Territories, particularly in the marine environment, building into their annual travel budget the fact that they need to visit some of them. You cannot really help properly those places that deserve your help unless you know something about it. You learn by going there. You have to know the politics as well. Nearly all environmental issues are fundamentally political issues. You do not get anywhere without getting the politics right. Q38 Mr Caton: That brings me on to my last question. Do you perceive any conflict or potential conflict between the UK's international responsibilities on something like biodiversity and the right of the Overseas Territories to determine their own solutions to some of these problems? Mr Orr: Yes, but really only in the sense in which you do not look at them as being foreign; do not look at it as being them against us. You get exactly the same thing in the UK. Talk to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport about some of the sites that they want to put forward as UK sites within the World Heritage list. Very often there is a tension about how a management plan will affect the rights of people living in that area. You will find that there is conflict when DCMS is waiting to get what seems a very worthy site on board and the fact that people are reluctant to put together the type of management structure that will pass muster with the demands of the very rigorous assessors from the UNESCO's World Heritage Centre. These issues will arise but it is within the family. Chairman: Thank you very much for coming, Mr Orr. You have given us a wealth of evidence and it is fascinating. I look forward to reading the transcript. |