Examination of Witnesses (Questions 300
- 319)
WEDNESDAY 30 APRIL 2008
MS HELEN
GHOSH, MR
BILL STOW
AND MR
STEPHEN PARK
Q300 Miss McIntosh: Could I ask why
you decided to stop the funding for Food from Britain after the
coming financial year? What do you think the impact is going to
be on the British producers who used to benefit from that?
Ms Ghosh: I believe—and
I think I am probably going to get my study wrong—that the
idea that in the long run Food from Britain, or the kind of activity
carried out by Food from Britain, should become the responsibility
of the industry is something that has been part of our strategic
approach for a number of years. Therefore, when we were looking
at the choices we had to make about our funding over the next
three years we thought again about this issue. Was now the moment,
given other funding pressures, to transfer the activity? The conclusion
we reached was that now was the moment to transfer the activity.
What is happening at the moment, and my food and farming team
is closely involved in what is happening there, is that negotiations
are going on, for example, between UK Trade International, the
Food and Drink Federation and others about taking forward the
activity. Obviously it is an incredibly successful area. It is
something where our exports are doing extremely well. There is
obviously a close economic interest on the part of the producers
in maintaining it and now seemed the time to us to withdraw our
funding and find a solution supported by the industry and that
is what is going on at the moment.
Q301 Miss McIntosh: Do you know if
in other countries like Denmark their Department for Agriculture
similarly support their industry?
Ms Ghosh: I do not know the answer
to that.
Q302 Lynne Jones: There has been
some reference to the support organisations that have the aim
of cutting CO2 emissions and you have set up this Delivery Landscape
Review. You said earlier that this was because of the maturity
of the advice market. Given the importance, and it is one of your
main objectives, of reducing CO2 emissions presumably you anticipate
that the cuts in programmes such as WRAP and Carbon Trust, and
so on, will not lead to any detrimental effect on the delivery
of CO2 emissions within business and the public sector. You have
decided to make those cuts in advance of the Review. As a result
of the review what savings do you think you can make? What efficiencies
are going to be achieved coming out of this Review that are going
to ensure that business and public sector organisations actually
continue and perhaps do even better in their CO2 reduction targets?
Ms Ghosh: The focus of the Review
is on the question of the number of organisations we currently
support who are in a similar sort of field. The Carbon Trust,
the Energy Savings Trust, WRAP, are all in different but quite
similar ways supporting different sectors: citizens, companies,
raising consciousness in a similar sort of field. The fundamental
issue that the Review is looking at is, is that sensible or has
it just arisen by chance. The fact that both the private sector
market in terms of advise and particularly leading companies,
and indeed small and medium enterprises, are already out there
grasping the nettle and setting an excellent example in terms
of carbon reductions and other environmental efficiencies means
we have got over the hump of having to proselytise and tell everybody
to be doing things and actually there are already sources of advice
that they can get. Actually the machine is now moving and that
is why we have reached the view we have. At this stage we are
still giving significant funding to WRAP and to Carbon Trust.
WRAP this year is getting £43 million and five years ago
it was getting £30 million and in 2001-02 it was getting
£6 million. We are still financing these quite substantially
but we just need to look through the review of whether it is a
sensible way of spending the money through all these organisations.
Q303 Lynne Jones: Before the Review
was carried out you decided that WRAP would get a 30% cut, or
thereabouts, whereas the Energy Savings Trust would get a large
increase.
Ms Ghosh: Because we specifically
wanted the Energy Savings Trust to do work with individual householders
on the Green Home Service. That was a very specific project we
wanted the Energy Savings Trust to do.
Q304 Lynne Jones: That was a political
priority. I am interested in one particular organisation because
it is based in my constituency and that is the National Industrial
Symbiosis Programme. Although you said earlier that delivery organisations
were kept informed about your discussions on the budget, they
last year were led to believe that because they had been so successful
in the amount of carbon reduction that had been brought about
by their per pound expenditure they were going to have a substantial
increase in their budget and yet they have ended up with a substantial
cut. This is an organisation that is not providing direct advice
but is about bringing different companies together. I wonder whether
that was a wise decision. It is reasonable that these budgets
should be brought together but you have substantially cut that
very successful programme which has been delivering.
Ms Ghosh: That particular organisation
was one which I know ministers discussed specifically. There are
issues, as I have said, in order to finance some things we have
had to make decisions about others. I can assure you that we did
specifically discuss, at one of these ministerial events that
I described, the position there and the good work they were doing
but reached the conclusion we did about their funding.
Q305 Mr Grey: What is it?
Ms Ghosh: This company has too
many of something or it has some waste and another company says
they could use that. It is basically a swap, a marriage broking
service between company A and company B: "I have too many
desks. I need some desks", and they do a marriage broking
service rather than send things to landfill.
Mr Grey: I am glad it has been cut by
the sound of it. It sounds like a useless quango to me.
Q306 Lynne Jones: It has been very
successful. In terms of its expenditure the actual savings that
have been achieved have been substantial. Whilst I understand
the particular problems you have, it does seem to me that a programme
such as that you need to make sure in your Review—and I
am not necessarily advocating how it should be done—that
some mechanism is in place to ensure that the work they are doing
is continued and expanded because of the importance of the outcomes
they have achieved.
Ms Ghosh: When we are discussing
with ministers budgets for next year I will certainly take that
back, in particular, to Joan Ruddock who is responsible.
Q307 Chairman: Talking about environmental
delivery, I notice that the department, now headed by your former
Secretary of State, is number one on the Sustainable Development
Commission's latest chart of top performing environmental departments
and you are still struggling mid-table.
Ms Ghosh: The Department of Health
is top in the latest SDC report. The Foreign Office is coming
up. In the Department's Sustainability Leader Programme we are
mid-table though we have improved. We were three stars last year
and we are four stars this year. We fell down on three areas:
energy efficiency, waste arisings and water use. Our energy efficiency
falling off is for two reasons: one, because we have closed down
a number of buildings and moved into a smaller number of buildings
so the energy use of any single square metre in the department,
which is now occupied by two people on a computer where previously
there was only one, has actually reduced the efficiency per square
metre but we are working on that. On waste arisings we have around
the department a Bin the Bins campaign so we have no bins next
to our desks any more. We have to take all our rubbish to recycling
bins of various kinds which we hope will discourage people from
throwing things away. Water is a bigger challenge to us because
you need to do physical things to buildings to reduce water usage
but we are focusing on that. This is all within a programme we
are funding, and which Hilary Benn asks us about every week, to
improve our overall carbon footprint. For example, we have just
done, which is a first for Whitehall, a carbon footprint map of
our total activity: offices, scientific laboratories, travel and
anything we do that produces carbon. We will use that as a base
line for an action plan we will produce in the summer. We are
not complacent; we are working hard. We are delighted that some
of the big departments with big carbon footprints are doing so
well in terms of hitting government targets.
Q308 Chairman: You are supposed to
be the market leader.
Ms Ghosh: In some areas we are
the market leader.
Q309 Chairman: Given that you have
spent all this time putting out your priorities and working out
your budgets and where you are going in a very precise fashion,
where are you going to be in a year's time on the league table?
What is the target?
Ms Ghosh: I would like to be a
five star department, i.e. in the top group. The SDC report was
looking at 2006-07 and not 2007-08. I would be hoping to see a
significant reduction, and we will be putting out these targets
in the summer so you will be able to hold to us to account for
this in our overall carbon footprint. I think we will see success
on waste but we may need some investment around water. The other
thing we are doing is investing in green IT. We will be getting
shortly laptops, IT systems, which automatically do things that
shut off so that you do not have to worry about human error in
failing to turn your screen off at night, that will happen automatically,
and there will be very low energy screen savers and so on. We
are about to be the first ever outstanding BREEAM award, BREEAM
being the environmental awards programme, for our building at
Alnwick. That is the first time any building has got outstanding
and it will be us. We are leaders in some areas but we need to
catch up on some of that basic housekeeping stuff.
Chairman: We shall hold you to account.
Q310 David Taylor: Do you not think
you could have greater contribution towards energy savings if
instead of persistently outsourcing every IT development within
sight and within the department you were able to use your own
in-house skills and thereby avoid costly over-sized delay and
over-budget systems of the classic kind that Defra has made its
own?
Ms Ghosh: If I go back to the
green IT programme that we have, that is absolutely in partnership
with IBM. A key element of carbon footprinting on IT is the cooling
you have to do to keep your servers cool. We have been working
with them and we have been achieving significant improvements
in that. Actually they are being very positive partners with us
in our greening of the department. Their service to the department
in terms of all the measureables is significantly improving.
Q311 Dr Strang: How does the department
plan to shift its recourses to match the two new PSAs that you
take responsibility for, especially as you have already indicated
most of the additional spending has been on waste management and
flood defence?
Ms Ghosh: To take the second one
first, in terms of the natural environment PSA that we have I
suppose the largest single new investment we are putting in that
is the match funding of voluntary modulation, which is about £350
million in year one and rising through the period. That is a significant
investment we have taken out of the flat cash budget. In terms
of climate change, the title climate change means mitigation,
international negotiations, Climate Change Bill, setting our carbon
budgets for the five year periods, but it equally means adaptation.
Under our PSA also comes a requirement, and it is obviously in
the Climate Change Bill, to adapt and so spending on flood defence
and flooding issues is something that is a key part of adaptation.
As I said earlier, one of the most significant things we have
done is we have put a lot more people into that area of the department's
activity. Whereas we only had one director before we now have
three and we have made significant investment in staff to do that
kind of negotiation and we continue to make the investment that
we have made historically in climate change related research including
things like the UK Climate Impact Programme in Oxford which will
be a very good tool on adaptation.
Q312 Dr Strang: There are no specific
PSAs covering agriculture or rural affairs as I understand it.
Does that mean these areas will be downgraded?
Ms Ghosh: Not at all. I will hand
over to Bill to talk about how they are going to happen. The structure
of the new performance agreement the departments have is that
you have the two big PSAs then you have a series of departmental
strategic objectives, some of which are subsets of the PSAs and
some of which stand on their own. For example, strong rural communities
continues to be one of our departmental strategic objectives,
as does an economically successful and environmentally positive
agriculture industry. Of our eight DSOs, we have one, for example,
on handling environmental emergencies which covers animal health
so we will also be reporting on how everything we do feeds into
those departmental strategic objectives. If you take the case
of farming, farming is part of both helping us mitigate climate
change and adapting to it. People from my farming team and from
farming organisations are involved in the climate change work.
Mr Stow: Underpinning the DSOs
we have changed the way we allocate money within the department,
as we were saying earlier, to programmes and projects. We have
a dozen or so programmes that are held at board level, one of
which is on sustainable food and farming and another one on successful
rural communities. For both of those the board will be regularly
monitoring how they are doing, whether we have the resources in
the right place and so on. That is another safeguard that shows
we have a broader interest in the department than in just our
two PSAs.
Q313 Dr Strang: I do not want to
split hairs but does one conclude from what you said that the
PSAs tend to have a higher priority and focus in your approach
than the departmental strategic objectives?
Mr Stow: It is fair to say that
the new structure of PSAs, of which there are only 30 for the
whole of government, is a very deliberate effort to join up government
departments in the delivery of these PSAs so we have a number
of delivery partners, particularly for the climate change one.
The Prime Minister himself will be monitoring those through the
Prime Minister's Delivery Unit and so on. Yes, they do have greater
salience in that sort of way but within the department we are
treating the departmental strategic objectives and these board
programmes as key priorities for the department and when we think
how we are resourcing things these are key priorities.
Ms Ghosh: In terms of the number
of people we have in different parts of the department, we would
be happy to send you that. We still have very, very large numbers
of people both in farming and animal health. Of our 3,000 headquarter's
team, 800 of those work on food and farming and animal health,
which is probably still more than work on climate change partly
because that is a key licence to operate area and one that is
very important to the department and indeed to the government.
Although we have shifted resources, there are still very substantial
resources going into those areas and we have increased the budget
for the Animal Executive Agency and so on.
Q314 Dr Strang: This is a throw-away
remark but I was at a meeting this morning where the veterinary
profession were complaining that they did not feel they quite
had the clout now in the department they had before. I do not
know if that is fair but I leave that with you.
Ms Ghosh: As a relative newcomer
to the department, my impression is that the veterinary profession
have a lot of clout in the department. Obviously they are in the
lead on any animal disease outbreak. They play an absolute key
part in developing animal health policy and they absolutely enrich
our science base which I am very proud of. We have not cut the
number of vets, indeed we are just about to recruit some more.
We are very clear we need to keep up that professional guard.
Q315 Lynne Jones: Why are you cutting
the Warm Front Programme?
Ms Ghosh: Clearly I have to speak
with some care here because there is an application for judicial
review going through. As I think I have said to the Committee
on previous occasions, despite the fact that funding for Warm
Front has risen very dramatically over the last few years, we
are still spending £800 million over the period on Warm Front,
and if you add in the value of things like the Carbon Emission
Reduction Target adding those two together alone we will be spending
something like £2.3 billion on, as it were, fuel poverty,
energy efficiency targeted on lower income households over the
period. We would say that the fact that the funding for Warm Front
over the period will be tapering does not mean anything. It means
nothing in terms of a reduction in the government commitment to
fuel poverty targets. If you look at resources as a whole, particularly
if you add in things like winter fuel payment to pensioners, you
could actually say that our support is something like £20
billion over the period. We will defend very strongly any suggestion
that we are losing our focus on fuel poverty.
Q316 Lynne Jones: The Warm Front
Programme is a direct grant and there are also some limitations
on it in terms of who it reaches. You are cutting that at a time
when fuel prices are going up and when climate change is an important
issue, therefore it is much better to spend money on insulation
and energy efficiency than on helping people met their bills.
It seems bizarre given that you have a statutory requirement under
the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act and yet you are cutting
this budget. It does not seem the right thing to do.
Ms Ghosh: As you know the Warm
Front budget has escalated very rapidly to its current levels
from a comparatively low base. We will still be spending £800
million over the three years. The extent to which we are cutting
the Warm Front budget is not very great. As I say, what we are
doing is saying what we have to do, in terms of looking at the
government's policy on fuel poverty, is not just one way of dealing
with the issue but looking at the whole picture in terms of support
that we are giving to lower income households on fuel poverty.
So far Warm Front has helped 1.6 million households and last year
I think it was 240,000. We have helped, and are still helping,
large numbers of people.
Q317 Lynne Jones: But it is a very
small budget in terms of the condition of our housing stock. Although
you say it has increased dramatically, it is still a very small
budget in comparison with what is spent in Germany in terms of
them bringing their housing stock up to a good standard of energy
efficiency.
Ms Ghosh: If you add in the energy
efficiency requirement on the energy companies, we are actually
going to be spending 2.3 billion over the CSR period on it which
is a substantial amount of funding. As I say, we believe that
we have to look at it in terms of the total support being given
and the wider context which is why we made the decision we did
but it will still be £800 million to Warm Front over the
period.
Q318 Lynne Jones: Even with CERT
it is still a small amount of money in relation to the huge problem
we have in the condition of our housing stock and in particular
that occupied by poor people.
Ms Ghosh: We believe we have made
a reasonable decision and set a reasonable priority. As you know,
there are all sorts of factors involved and energy prices are
as much a factor in this because of the way fuel poverty is assessed.
Q319 Lynne Jones: When do you expect
the fuel poverty targets to be coming back on course?
Ms Ghosh: I am not going to make
any commitment of that kind.
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