Examination of Witnesses (Questions 218
- 219)
WEDNESDAY 30 APRIL 2008
MS HELEN
GHOSH, MR
BILL STOW
AND MR
STEPHEN PARK
Chairman: Good afternoon, ladies and
gentlemen. Welcome to this evidence session with the Permanent
Secretary of Defra on Defra's departmental priorities. Can I formally
welcome Helen Ghosh, the Permanent Secretary of Defra, Bill Stow,
who is described as the Director General for Strategy and Evidence
Group—I like the idea of evidence, so we will be looking
for lots of that from you, Mr Stow, this afternoon—and Mr
Stephen Park, the interim Director General of Finance for Defra.
I am going to ask Anne McIntosh if she would start our questioning.
Q218 Miss McIntosh: Can I start by
drawing attention to my declaration on the Register of Members'
interests? Can I ask how you would describe your chief priorities
for the forthcoming year?
Ms Ghosh: What we have done in
framing our plans for the CSR/07 period is very much to go back
to our overall strategy and, in particular, our two Public Service
Agreements which were announced in October around climate change
and the natural environment and also, of course, given the range
of responsibilities that Defra has, to ensure that we are protecting
appropriately what we call our licence to operate areas: for example,
ensuring that we have enough funding, particularly in our Executive
Agencies, to respond to emergencies, whether it is animal disease
or on the flooding side in terms of flood response through the
Environment Agency. So that is what drove our strategic priorities
in terms of framing our budgets for the coming year.
Q219 Miss McIntosh: For our own clarification,
the outgoing Chief Scientist said that climate change was the
greatest threat this country faced; the incoming Chief Scientist
said that food security was the greatest threat. Do you have a
view as to which is the greatest threat?
Ms Ghosh: Of course the two things,
as John Beddington and, indeed, Bob Watson, the Chief Scientific
Adviser for Defra, has made clear, are very, very closely related.
If you look at international food security issues and the likely
impacts of climate change, particularly in some developing countries,
the impact of climate change is likely to have a very significant
effect, and so we regard dealing with the damaging effects of
climate change, since it is one of our two top level priorities,
as the first priority, but we are doing work now, as you know,
led by the Prime Minister and working closely with DFID, both
on food security issues internationally and increasingly thinking
about world economy and demand impacts on domestic food supply.
So we are working on food security issues, but we feel that the
context for a lot of this debate is actually in climate change.
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