UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1115-iHouse of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREENVIRONMENT, FOOD AND RURAL AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
DEFRA'S DEPARTMENTAL REPORT 2009
|
|
1. |
This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
|
|
2. |
Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings.
|
|
3. |
Members who receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant.
|
|
4. |
Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee.
|
|
5. |
Transcribed by the Official Shorthand Writers to the Houses of Parliament: W B Gurney & Sons LLP, Hope House, Telephone Number: 020 7233 1935
|
Oral Evidence
Taken before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee
on
Members present
Mr Michael Jack, in the Chair
Mr Geoffrey Cox
Patrick Hall
Lynne Jones
David Lepper
Miss Anne McIntosh
David Taylor
Paddy Tipping
Mr Roger Williams
________________
Memorandum submitted by Defra
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Dame Helen Ghosh DCB, Permanent Secretary, Mr Mike Anderson, Director-General, Strategy and Evidence Group, and Ms Anne Marie Millar, Director of Finance, Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, gave evidence.
Q1 Chairman: Can I welcome everyone to this inquiry this afternoon into Defra's Departmental Report for 2009. Can I formally welcome Dame Helen Ghosh, the Permanent Secretary of Defra, and she is supported today by Mike Anderson, the Director General of the Strategy and Evidence Group, and Anne Marie Millar, who is the Department's Director of Finance. I think, Ms Millar, it is the first time you have been before the Committee?
Ms Millar: It is.
Q2 Chairman: Well, you are very welcome and I hope it will be a pleasant and worthwhile experience, not only for you, but for everyone! Can I just start with an observation really about the Annual Report. When you are looking at an annual report, sometimes you are looking for something that says, "Well, here we are at the beginning of the new year and here we are now at the end. This is what we wanted to do at the beginning and this is where we are now", but it does not quite work out like that. I looked at the foreword, for example, signed by the Secretary of State, and in that it is a sort of funding-free zone, it does not really talk about the performance of the management of the Department. I wondered why and I wondered, when the report is produced, as a group of the senior members of the Department, do you sit down with the Secretary of State and go through it with him and say, "Well, here's the take stock, this is where we are" before this thing actually sees the light of day?
Dame Helen Ghosh: What we did this year is put together the kind of group, precisely as you describe, of senior people from across the Department. I think what actually strikes me every year when I prepare for this hearing is that in fact so much of what we do actually, in a sense, is not something that it is capable of achieving within a year, and a great many, and it is something, I am sure, the Committee will want to come back to, of our outcomes are things that you achieve over time; they are, by definition, longer-term. We have intermediate ways of measuring them, we have lots of input measures that we, as the Management Board, use to monitor, but it is not something simply where you can say, "At the beginning of the year, we said we'd do this and at the end of the year we have achieved it". We then have a pool of exchange of ideas and think about how to present what we have done, and we have actually presented it in a rather different kind of way this year. We have not simply said, "This is our DSO and this is what we've done. This is our other DSO and this is what we've done", but we have tried to make it more thematic to tell the story. I do think the Report has in it a number of specific achievements, and we have got even more specific achievements, I think, that we can report in the rest of the calendar year in terms of the Marine Bill about to come out, climate change projections published, excellent citizen engagement campaigns and good stuff on food, but it is almost by the nature of what we do that we are telling a longer-term story.
Q3 Chairman: Maybe I have not found it, but one of the things that you normally expect in an annual report is a sort of dossier of who is who in the Department. Is that in here because I could not find it?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Well, again there is a question, and I think for next year we are hoping to achieve having our accounts and our Departmental Report in the same publication. That would be the ideal thing so that you could see all the two things together. You certainly have all the detail on who we are, what we are paid and so on in the resource accounts and I think you have a picture at the beginning somewhere because I was looking at it the other day.
Q4 Chairman: We have a picture of you.
Mr Anderson: And the Management Board on page 25.
Dame Helen Ghosh: And you have got a picture of the ministers. Again, the business model that we have is one which is, as you know because we have discussed it at previous hearings, modelled around projects and programmes and, therefore, actually we do not have the traditional hierarchical organisational chart, so it would be difficult to include that.
Q5 Chairman: Forgive me, and you are quite right to remind me of this, but on the Management Board there appears to be somebody missing. You have got, I suppose, a £2.5/3 billion business that you run.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes.
Q6 Chairman: If this were a private enterprise, there would be one key person who would be on the board, yet I do not see their name down here.
Dame Helen Ghosh: The Finance Director?
Q7 Chairman: Yes.
Dame Helen Ghosh: The Finance Director is, for all practical purposes, on the Board.
Q8 Chairman: But it says here, "Defra's Management Board", and the Finance Director is not on.
Dame Helen Ghosh: This is, I think, one of the problems that you get with Civil Service nomenclature. The list and the photographs of people that you have got in the Annual Report are the directors-general and we, like other departments, have directors-general represented on the Board, we also have permanent members of the Management Board for the purposes of our monthly meetings, our strategic discussions with ministers and our executive team meetings, which always include Anne Marie who is our Finance Director, but she is not formally a director-general and that is why she does not appear in those pictures. She reports to Mike, as Head of the Strategy and Evidence Group.
Q9 Chairman: But do you not think that in terms of laying out a clear line of accountability and seniority, and I appreciate the labels, but in terms of giving authority for somebody running a business of that size, which is what you are doing, I cannot think of a plc in the land that would not formally have the finance director on the board of directors of the company. In other words, it is a way of stamping their authority because the finance director has got a key job in arguing with the other members, sometimes the spending members of the board, about what the priorities are. Do you not think that you ought to address this issue?
Dame Helen Ghosh: I have to say, the Treasury, which, as you know, is responsible for the governance arrangement in other government departments, is entirely happy with the arrangement we have. Anne Marie is on the Management Board and we could perfectly well have put her photograph there too. She, as I say, is always engaged in all our discussions about financial matters both at the Management Board and in executive team meetings, but I think the important point to make is that finance is not a separate activity from what I and all the rest of my management team do all the time. It is not the case that Anne Marie has to argue against the rest of us who are desperate to spend money in a 'not VFM' way and fight her corner. As you know from previous discussions, for example, all our directors-general and Anne Marie are involved in a thing called the 'Central Approvals Panel' which agrees, decides and puts advice to ministers on all our spending proposals. That is also replicated then at a local level in the various DG groups, and finance is strongly represented. Managing our finances is built into what we do all the time every day and, therefore, I have no doubt whatsoever that the finance voice is heard as loudly in our Department as it is in any other department you would find in Whitehall, and that is reflected in the way the Treasury rates us in terms of the step change of improvement in our financial management.
Q10 Chairman: So, if this voice is so loud, how did you underspend by £373 million?
Dame Helen Ghosh: If I may take you back, as you and some members of the Committee will recall, Chairman, this is a question of the rugby balls. The figure the NAO quoted ----
Q11 Mr Cox: What sort of balls did you say?
Dame Helen Ghosh: The rugby balls. Sorry, I cannot remember, Mr Cox, if you were present at the time, but we, like all other departments, have difficulty in explaining, because it is very complicated, the relationship between the cash estimates, ie, the money Parliament votes us to draw down out of the Treasury bank account, and how we manage our departmental expenditure limit.
The Committee suspended from
Q12 Chairman:
You
were going to the sporting analogy of rugby balls to explain why your
Department has got the third-highest percentage variance in terms of underspend
in
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes, as we have discussed
informally, Chairman, with some members of the Committee, there are two
separate things going on here. The first
is the cash that is voted to us by Parliament which is how, as I was saying
before the division, we draw down actual cash out of the system to pay, for
example, farmers, whether it is for single payments or RDPE, and there is, as
you will have seen from the NAO analysis, another element of that which is how
we pay Environment Agency closed-pension pensioners. That is a matter of managing cashflow, and I
will come back to why it is particularly difficult for a department like us,
though I think that over recent years, as something in the Report shows, we are
getting better. There is then the figure
which is the one which both we and the Treasury focus on for the purposes of
the fiscal position for the purposes of market confidence which is our
departmental expenditure limit. That is
what is set in CSR processes, that is what we are managing to in CSR 2007 at
the moment and that is the focus, as I say, both of the main dialogues we have
with the Treasury, the discussions we have with our ministers and the success
factor in terms of delivering public spending outcomes. Therefore, in terms of the cash, what we have
to estimate is particularly challenging because we receive lots of money in
euros and we pay it out to farmers in sterling and the year covered by this Report
was particularly challenging because of the enormous fluctuation in the
sterling-euro exchange rates. We handle
something like £4 billion because we do not just do this for ourselves, but we
do it also for the devolved administrations, and we observed, for example, that
between December 2008 and January 2009 there was an eight per cent change in
the value of sterling. That was
precisely at the moment in the spring supplementary when we had to make our
final determination on exactly how much sterling cash we would need over the
whole year, and we will be doing that process again this year, but it is
extremely difficult to predict exactly that cash point. We have to be pessimistic because we cannot
break the cash which you, as Parliament, vote us, so we tend to go for the
downside figure rather than the upside figure.
This year, because of the extreme volatility, despite all the hedging we
could do, we ended up overestimating the cash we needed by that £373
million. As I say, it was principally a
result of payments on SPS, payments on the Rural Development Programme for
Ms Millar: If I could perhaps just add to clarify, we do hedge for converting from the euro into sterling, but what we have to do is estimate the income for SPS between January and March, so during the financial year 2008/09 we will have hedged for the nine months and that would all be done on the scheme data at the end of September, but for the 2009 scheme, which starts in January to December, we will not actually have an exchange rate set until September, which is obviously after the year ends, so all we do is estimate the income between January and March. Therefore, I do not want you to get the idea that it is a realised gain or loss, but we may have to estimate making the January, February and March income and how that translates to the euro at the end of January, at the end of February and at the end of March, but it is a notional one, it is not a real gain or loss and, therefore, we have to just estimate to make sure that the parliamentary estimate will give us cover.
Q13 Chairman: Under the current arrangements, you ought to be gainers in sterling cash terms.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Farmers are the gainers because they take the money in sterling, and both last year and in the coming year they will have seen in each of those years, that is, the SPS scheme years, a 15 per cent increase in the value of the money they receive from the SPS because they take the money in sterling and the exchange rate is currently working favourably.
Q14 Chairman: Tell us about the hedging arrangements that you put in place. Are these unique Defra hedging arrangements, or are they part of a general government hedging arrangement?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Each department has its own hedging contracts, but they are within a framework and rules set down by the Treasury. I do not think it is reflected in the Departmental Report, but it is reflected in our resource accounts that the volatility of exchange rates last year meant that, as it were, there was a paper loss on our hedging arrangement. It was a highly technical point which I am happy to write to the Committee about, but it all depended on what was the rate at which the Royal Bank of Scotland, as they are our hedging contractors, were hedging, and I am going to get this slightly wrong, but I think they were taking the rate at eight o'clock in the morning and the Bank of England proceeded on the basis that the rate was at an average between ten and noon. It is something very complicated like that, and the difference between those two figures in a very volatile market meant that we were not as thoroughly insured as we should have been. We discussed this with the Treasury. We, as I say, had followed Treasury guidelines and we have now agreed an average rate at which our hedging now happens, but you will find that somewhere in here. All departments that have these exchange rate issues in their accounts have to do some kind of hedging. You may have gathered that, for example, the Foreign Office, which has to make enormous numbers of payments in enormous numbers of currencies, has been quite challenged in recent months by the volatility of exchange rates and the weakness of the pound, so we are not alone in having hedging and we are not alone, because of the way we get our money, in having this difficulty of just precisely pinpointing the cash.
Q15 Paddy Tipping: What do the RPA do about foreign exchange?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Sorry, this is what I am describing. It is, strictly speaking, I think, an RPA contract for hedging, but of course it impacts on the whole accounts for Defra because they are consolidated in our accounts.
Q16 Paddy Tipping: The NAO are not so happy with the RPA performance on foreign exchange, are they? They qualified the accounts.
Dame Helen Ghosh: What they qualified the
accounts on, and again I am not an accountant and I will hand over hastily to
Anne Marie to explain this, is the application of a thing called '
Ms Millar: A 'disagreement'.
Dame Helen Ghosh: A disagreement on the treatment. As I understand it, as a complete layperson, it is something to do with whether you average over the year or whether you put in your accounts at spot points, and that is how it works, so that was the issue for them.
Q17 Paddy Tipping: Let me ask you about your non-exec directors. Have any of them got a financial background? Secondly, I have got a high regard for Poul Christensen; he is the acting Chair of Natural England. Is it right that he should be a non-exec director and, if it is confirmed, is his position going to remain on the Board?
Dame Helen Ghosh: I think you will want to discuss that with him when you see him in a week or so's time, so I do not want to prejudge what he will say to you.
Q18 Paddy Tipping: But he is your non-exec.
Dame Helen Ghosh: He is indeed my non-exec and, I should say, he is a fabulous non-executive. In a single person, he represents business, as a businessman, he represents farming, running his own dairy farm, he represents one of our key delivery agencies and he is a man of enormous good sense and wisdom, so, were he to decide that there was a significant conflict of interest, then he would stand down.
Q19 Paddy Tipping: Let me be clear about this. He is your non-exec and you have got to come to a decision rather than him, and what is your view?
Dame Helen Ghosh: That is indeed the case. Can I just go back to why he was appointed because you first asked me the question about our non-executives. Yes, I do have a qualified former finance director from Unilever on the Board, he chairs our Audit and Risk Committee and he is Bill Griffiths. He performs an absolutely invaluable role for us, as Chair of our Audit and Risk Committee and in participating in Management Board debates. We invited Poul to join us in order to represent one of our key delivery bodies when he was the Deputy Chair and then, as you know, in very sad circumstances he stepped up. I think it is very important to have somebody representing the wider Defra network engaged in our Board, but it is almost impossible to achieve that without there being some element of conflict of interest. Of course, if there were a debate, which, I have to say, infrequently happens because we are very collegiate, which was about how much money should we give to Natural England, Poul would immediately leave the room. Indeed, we have regular discussions about our big four delivery bodies on a quarterly basis and he always leaves the room when we have those, and that is a debate between Peter Unwin, representing the Department, and the rest of the Board. Again, I do not want to anticipate what he will say. I would be extremely sorry to lose him, but I do think that, assuming you confirm and whatever the process now is, if he becomes the permanent Chairman, I think he will probably want to stand down. I will be very sorry to lose him and he will be extremely difficult to replace.
Q20 David Lepper: Ben Gill is looking for a job!
Dame Helen Ghosh: Well, equally, I think one might want to think about, as it were, the wider industries and future that we represent, so one might equally want to look for someone from the broader food and drink industries or perhaps expand the number of non-executives we have. I would welcome any suggestions from the Committee should we have some vacancies.
Q21 Paddy Tipping: I have always been a great supporter of the Rural Development Programme. I think the move towards it has been a tremendous step forward as part of the CAP reform and you are not spending it, but we are still big advocates for further reform of the CAP to move towards investment in rural areas and into the wider environment. Why are you not spending this money?
Dame Helen Ghosh: As you say, some of the spend has gone more slowly than we would have hoped. That is partly because, if you look at, as it were, the agri-environment scheme elements of it, actually there is an awful lot of detailed negotiation that needs to go on to get the right set of plans and agreements there. I think there is also an issue, and this is probably a longer-term issue, about the attractiveness of the amounts of money that we can offer for agri-environment schemes for some farmers at a time when business is booming and the returns that they can get on the open market are very strong. I think something like the recent Campaign for the Farmed Environment, which of course is the perfect way of working in partnership with the farming industry to encourage more people to come in, is probably the way to do it. The Government or even Natural England trying to persuade farmers that it is a good thing and "Please come in" is not going to be as effective as farmers who are doing it enthusiastically, participating and saying, "Look how great it is" and getting some more people to join. The other elements of course are the elements we pay through the Rural Development Agency for economic development, and actually Mike is more of an expert on this than I am because he, as you may recall, last year and Bill Stow had been on progresses around the country talking to RDAs. What is your feel on that?
Mr Anderson: Well, it is broadly the same sort of area. The difficulty was trying to set up the schemes in the first place, and there is actually a false trajectory of spend because, when you project it, you do that. In fact, what all the RDAs are saying to us, which we are going round now, is that they have now got themselves into position in relation to where they want to start putting these monies and that trajectory will go up like that very quickly. That is what they are saying to us now, that there have been issues about how you actually set that pathway. Certainly on the other axes, they are now saying that yes, they are expecting to spend them, particularly as in some areas of the rural economy it is quite a good thing to do at this particular moment to support them.
Q22 Paddy Tipping: Perhaps I could make two more strategic points then. First of all, there is criticism of some RDAs, that they do not deliver for the rural communities and for the agricultural sector, and, if they are not spending what they have got, then that reinforces that. Secondly, we are about to embark on yet another round of CAP reform, and the Government has been a big advocate of reform, yet, if we cannot spend the money that we are arguing for the reform, it puts us in a pretty weak position, does it not?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Well, I do not think we are immediately on the brink, but, as you say, we are in the foothills of CAP reform. Clearly, we need to think about the delivery mechanisms for any expanded Pillar 2, not just what the quantum of Pillar 2 may be, and what it should be spent on, and I think that is extremely important in terms of thinking of the delivery landscape going forward. We are absolutely on the case in terms of having to think about delivery mechanisms as well as the total amount of money that we spend.
Q23 Chairman:
Can I
just follow on Mr Tipping's line of inquiry because on page 37 of the Report,
the section describing the Rural Development Programme says that this is a £3.9
billion programme, and that is big money by anybody's standards, so, when I
look in the Report to see what the explanation is, for example, "The economic
downturn is impacting on the uptake of the socioeconomic measures in the
programme", I am looking for some indication as to what socioeconomic measures
are being impacted. I am looking for
something to tell me about what you have actually spent on different
ingredients in this programme, what is up, what is down, what are the trends. If you are looking after the stewardship of
£3.9 billion, I expect a bit more detail, so I zoom to page 38 and it says to
me that more can be found under
Dame Helen Ghosh: Well, I would be very happy to send you a ----
Q24 Chairman: I am sure you would, but this is the Annual Report of your stewardship of £3.9 billion worth of money and, unless I have missed it, I cannot find anything which tells me what you have been using it for in the Department's Annual Report.
Dame Helen Ghosh: As you know, the bulk of the money here goes to buy environmental goods from land managers and that is the main thing that is bought here. The outcomes of that are explained at various points in the Report in terms of uptake and hectarage and so on and so forth. Just to go back ----
Q25 Chairman: The point I am making is that you are probably right, but you said at the beginning that you want to tell a story, a sense of narrative, yet, in trying to find these things in this Report, you are going here, there and everywhere. This is a massive programme and I would have thought you would have wanted to consolidate to give a clear picture for the reader as to what you have been doing with this money, and I am struggling to find it.
Dame Helen Ghosh: All I can say is that we will take that drafting suggestion for next year. As I say, we always have difficulty in a department like ours where a lot of our activity contributes to a lot of things we do and, unless it becomes a very old-fashioned, straightforward description of every line of spending and what we did with it, it is quite difficult to tell the story, but, if you want more facts of that kind, we will certainly put them in.
Q26 Chairman: I think what I am saying to you is that this is your annual shop window on what your Department is doing, and £3.9 billion merits a page and a quarter of some description, the odd number, and then you turn to another page. If this is a showcase policy, then showcase it properly.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Indeed.
Ms Millar: One point, I thought, which it might be worth clarifying is that £3.9 billion relates to the scheme which is over a number of years, I think at least seven years, so we are not spending that in one year.
Q27 Chairman: It does not tell the reader that.
Ms Millar: It is £200 million per year and it is on an increasing basis.
Dame Helen Ghosh: I think the Report makes that
point. I think what the Chairman is
saying is, "Can we have more examples of what it's being spent on?" I am sure we can get some very good examples
because I know that Mike was down in the South West, for example, and, to go
back to Mr Tipping's point, the
Chairman: Well, we would like to pick up on your kind offer of something which actually does tell the story because we would like to know what is up, what is down, what are the trends and what are the problems because it is difficult to divine that from this particular piece of work.
Q28 David Taylor: Dame Helen, when did you take over the helm of HMS Defra?
Dame Helen Ghosh: I took over the helm on
Q29 David Taylor: At the start of this year that we are looking at of the RPA accounts, you had been there for well over two years and almost three years.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Indeed.
Q30 David
Taylor: The vessel that you inherited from the sainted
Sir Brian was clearly heading in the wrong direction in a number of areas, and
I will give you one of them, and it was also leaking taxpayers' funds, that is
with the RPA, in a way that you might see from a rusty silo trader in a
Dame Helen Ghosh: I am enormously proud of what
I have achieved in Defra and I think that was reflected notably in the
capability re-review, which looked at the capability of the Department in March
this year against March two years before, which said that we had demonstrated
an appetite for transformational change and had made progress in implementing
it and was full of praise for the improvement in our financial management
abilities. We are one, for example, of
the very, very few departments that were given end-year flexibility from
2008/09 into 2009/10. When I said to Gus
O'Donnell that the Treasury team were so pleased with how we managed our
finances they were giving us end-year flexibility, his face went green with
envy. We were described, if you look at
the ratings of the capability re-review, as "one of the most improved
departments in
Q31 David Taylor: It is a cosy club, is it not?
Dame Helen Ghosh: It is not a cosy club at all.
Q32 David Taylor: It is hardly an independent, hard-headed assessment, is it?
Dame Helen Ghosh: It is absolutely a hard-headed assessment.
Q33 David Taylor: You have an accountancy-qualified finance director on the Board in a new position who is not on the Board, a sort of tokenistic approach, which really demonstrates that the importance that you give to financial matters seems to be a tad sub-optimal. Is that not the case?
Dame Helen Ghosh: In fact, the assessment that was made of our financial management and the step change in improvement, and that is coming from my Treasury spending team who, I can assure you, are not a soft touch, is that it has indeed been a step change. In terms of how we manage and monitor our resources, we are one of the very few departments, and I should say that the capability reviews that are done both involve independent scrutiny from people like an ex-executive in the TSB, as it was in his case, and a variety of external commentators and then are moderated by an external group, and they found that in terms of our fundamental systems we had significantly improved and, if I may go back to my personal position, that a large part of that improvement was actually because of my personal passion and drive for making the change, so I am extremely proud of what we have done in Defra.
Q34 David Taylor: Does that include to its geographic extremities, such as RPA?
Dame Helen Ghosh: I believe we are having a session in a couple of weeks' time in early December to talk about the RPA in particular, but, as I said to the Public Accounts Committee last week, what the RPA has delivered, and we have discussed as a committee the action I took more or less on my arrival in 2005 and early 2006 to replace the Chief Executive, it has delivered significantly swifter payments to farmers, which of course ----
Q35 David Taylor: I am sorry to interrupt, but the RPA's accounts for 2008/09 are qualified by the NAO and my friend Paddy Tipping started to talk about that and there were three elements to it. One of the elements was that the NAO could not confirm some of the debtor balance because the figures had very high levels of debt recording errors. These are fundamental matters, are they not? They are not exactly difficult to get right. Your group seems to have put these things into the corner out of the daylight that we need in order to examine performance.
Dame Helen Ghosh: I can assure you, I think I have discussed the issue of under or overpayments with two or three committees and, therefore, the idea that it is somehow in a corner is completely untrue. The issue there which we have now got, following the review, as I set up under Katrina Williams' leadership, is to try to get to the bottom of the highly complex issues about over and underpayment. As you know, for reasons which the Committee has discussed, this is an extremely complex system and precisely pinning down over and underpayment on a particular point in time is very difficult. We have a range, which is what the PAC found and the RPA itself found, of somewhere between £50 and £90 million in terms of possible overpayment, and that is against the scale of a fund of £1.4 billion a year.
Q36 David Taylor: I would agree with you, Dame Helen.
Dame Helen Ghosh: So, in fact, in terms of a percentage it is actually quite small and in terms of the value, the accuracy of value, it is consistently at about 98 per cent, so it is very important to the farmers who are affected.
Q37 David Taylor: I understand. I would agree with you that it is a complicated system, it is an unnecessarily complicated system, but it is not a complex system and there is a key difference there. The system that you have acquired, not you personally, but this was largely the responsibility of your sainted predecessor who seems to have got away scot-free, is one that is innately difficult to operate. I would accept that. In Defra's accounts, you have made provision for disallowances of around £246 million. Are you still negotiating with the Commission about the exact extent of that?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes.
Q38 David Taylor: I would ask Anne Marie Millar, where are we on those negotiations? When on earth do you expect to bring them to a conclusion?
Ms Millar: The majority of the £246 million relates to SPS 2005 and 2006 which, as you will be aware, were the two particularly problematic years. We have no crystallisation at the moment, but there is certainly ongoing discussion with the Commission.
Q39 David Taylor: What is that Civil Service code for?
Ms Millar: Whether 2006 is an improvement or not. My view is that we will not get any formal decision or final payment before 2010/11, I think is our current view on that.
Dame Helen Ghosh: This is true, I should say, for all Member States. No Member States have yet had any final view from the Commission on the accuracy and, therefore, any potential disallowance for 2005 or 2006, so, as Anne Marie said, we are still in negotiations with the Commission, and that is quite a normal sort of timetable ----
Q40 David Taylor: But you have made provision of £246 million for that figure.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Indeed.
Q41 David Taylor: But you have already scored and finalised £95 million.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Which is for previous schemes, so for pre-SPS schemes, satellite tracking fruit and vegetables and those sorts of things, and that was the basis on which we and the RPA got the technical qualification in these accounts, so it was against that £95 million.
Q42 David Taylor: I understand that. I am honestly just a simple accountant, but, as far as I am aware, the £246 million you have already scored for possible future disallowances has to be added to the £95 million, which gives about £341 million and that seems to overshoot already by 25 per cent almost the Treasury view of £270 million.
Dame Helen Ghosh: No, we topped it up with our own money. They gave us £90 million, £90 million and £90 million in the three CSR years, and we anyway, and always, make provision in our own accounts because it is, as it were, the expected level of disallowance, and it was before SPS and maybe for the future, of around two per cent, so we got within our own budget, so they gave us 270 and we have topped it up.
Q43 David Taylor: But it seems to me that the level of disallowances that we are seeing and their impact on the Department is starting to eat into your budget for other programmes.
Dame Helen Ghosh: No, absolutely not. It is completely ring-fenced. It has no impact on our budget for other
programmes. Indeed, I have a great team
negotiating in
David Taylor: I think even the most dedicated Europhile listening to our discussion and your explanation over the last couple of minutes would be tempted to leave the room and ring up UKIP for a membership application form.
Q44 Chairman: I think the idea that you potentially are going to blow over £340 million worth of money, which is a reflection of accuracy, it would be very interesting to know whether you have done an exercise, and we will come on and look at this in more detail when we do the RPA, to say, "What could we have done to have minimised the risk?" because at the moment you are putting a contingent above the 95 that you have already crystallised out and the 246 which is where you may be going, but it still represents, what, about the equivalent of ten per cent of the annual running costs of the RPA, roughly?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes, it is hard to tell because you are comparing a number of years with a single year.
Q45 Chairman: Yes, but just to give it some kind of quantum.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Of course, being a historian, I do not like counterfactuals. There are various things that you could have done. You could have paid farmers much, much, much more slowly, for example, so a large part of ----
Q46 Miss McIntosh: But then you would be fined for that.
Dame Helen Ghosh: And you would be fined for that. You could have paid them more slowly within your payment window and you would have then risked a late payment penalty, which is just automatic, but you could probably have made your payments in that window slightly more accurate, so that is one thing you could have done. As I was discussing with the PAC the other day, we clearly did explore at the time, and I know Jeff Rooker has talked either to this Committee or to the PAC about this, whether that was the moment to revert to a more simple historic basis, though still it is challenging, as some Member States find, but you cannot shift your horses in midstream and, therefore, the conclusion was to continue investing in this and focus on the service to farmers, but, as I say, we will be returning to this next month.
Chairman: Well, we will return to that, so I am not going to take any more questions at this stage on the RPA.
Q47 Miss McIntosh: Could I just ask, because you did refer to other EU Member States having this, where are we on the league table of disallowances?
Dame Helen Ghosh: No one knows because no one has been given any disallowance figures yet, so no one knows what any disallowance anybody is getting for the post-2005 system.
Q48 Miss McIntosh: So how can you sort of reach a balance between disallowance and a fine for late payment? How do you judge it?
Dame Helen Ghosh: To some extent, in the end it is a political judgment and it is a 'service to customers' judgment. It has not been an issue since the 2005 scheme because what happened in the 2005 scheme, which actually means in 2006, was that so great was the pressure to make sure that hard-pressed farmers with terrible cashflow difficulties got payments that we made partial payments on the basis of the claims that we had and then we readjusted them afterwards. That kind of payment in advance and then working out afterwards what an accurate payment was, firstly, of course has produced some of the problems about overpayments and underpayments and it also makes the European auditors very concerned about whether we are protecting the fund appropriately, which is actually the key criterion for them, so that was the thing which, certainly in 2005, was problematic. My recollection is that we did not do the same thing in 2006, and of course in subsequent years we have been paying much faster within the payment window with no partial payments.
Q49 Miss McIntosh: But that was the year when you had the big fine, 2005.
Dame Helen Ghosh: For the 2005 scheme we did have an automatic late payment fine, but that is because we had not hit the percentage target for payments by the end of June, but we have hit that in every subsequent year.
Q50 Chairman: Okay, we will come back to that one when we look at the RPA. Let us move on and look at aspects of the managing of your Department. You have got a DSO9 which is dealt with on page 172 of the Report, headlined, "The respected Department delivering efficient and high-quality services and outcomes", but you are thinking of removing this DSO. Why?
Dame Helen Ghosh: The requirement, I believe, is that you should have a DSO that covers every activity that you do and ----
Q51 Chairman: Can I just interject because one of the things that strikes me is that you seem to have got almost too many things going on. You are busy having all these wonderful DSOs and all the lists of all the things you are going to do and lists of measurements, yet we have been talking about delivery and I get worried sometimes that you have got too many things that are going on to be monitored which is taking away time from actually delivering on the things that really matter.
Dame Helen Ghosh: I do not think I would agree with you on that. I might agree with you on the idea that we have too many DSOs which, in some sense, overlap, so, if you take, for example, a sustainable, secure and healthy food supply and a thriving farming and food sector, those are obviously issues that overlap and both of those things also overlap with adapting to and, as we now have, the responsibility for mitigating climate change in our areas. That is why we organised the Report and indeed have set in our excellent picture, which I hope all members of the Committee have, of our priorities that all of that boils down into three priorities essentially, which are promoting a sustainable, low-carbon and resource-efficient economy, the healthy natural environment for us all in dealing with environmental risks, a thriving farming sector and a sustainable, healthy and secure food supply. That is why we organised this on that basis, because it is an easier way to think about it, but in any future target-setting structure, I think we would say, it is also easier to tell to our own staff the story if you have fewer DSOs. How do we manage and monitor it? I think we have shown the Committee before, we have sent these before, that it is not actually hard to monitor that. What we have for Management Board purposes is, for each of our DSOs, we have a single sheet which we look at within groups on a monthly basis and within the Department on a quarterly basis to track progress against each of our DSOs, so it is not difficult to do in management terms, but I think in terms of telling a story it is harder to do.
Q52 Chairman: So why do you want to get rid of DSO9?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Because, in a sense, it is
the capability of the Department that actually contributes to the success of
all the other things that we do. When we
set up our DSOs at the beginning of
Mr Anderson: I think it is
Dame Helen Ghosh: I think that is the term of art that we use. It is a bundle of those things. Actually we could not achieve our other eight DSOs unless that were true. We also have a corporate dashboard which we look at on the same basis which looks at our partnerships, our processes, our people and our change issues, so we do monitor it, but it is quite a complex story.
Q53 Chairman: What is going to replace it, or is it just going to be scrapped altogether?
Mr Anderson: Well, Chairman, it has
already been embedded in everything else we do.
If you look at, for example, the impact of our influence on DBIS as a
department, because we see ourselves very much as an economic department, it is
whether we are engaged with them in things like a waste project, which we are
at the minute, so their agenda is pursuing alongside our agenda, and that,
therefore, relates really to how we are dealing with the waste and SDP DSO in
that sort of area, so actually that is really what we should be looking at,
what sort of impact we have, as a department, across Whitehall. We are just, as you know, moving from G8 to
G20, which is likely to be the body that is the global body, so Defra is quite
important and is Defra at the table in Whitehall on what our G20 ask is as a
department, and, I can assure you, we are and are very much now embedded in
what is the direction for the future of the G20. You can see where we pursue, therefore,
across the other eight areas, whether it is in food and farming or whether it
is in the healthy environment and adapting to climate change, whether we are
actually having success as a department, as well as, as you rightly pointed
out, whether we are delivering with the RPA, whether we are delivering with the
RDPE and whether we are delivering with the things where we go at the sharp end.
Whether the DSO9 adds any more than that is a way of looking at it, a snapshot
way of looking at it, and it is useful to know whether we are not having enough
influence in Europe, and Europe is about to change, so maybe we should have a
holistic look at that, but actually the real impact is whether we have
delivered on the concrete things that the Department is driving forward.
Q54 Paddy Tipping: This year's budget asked you to make additional savings of about £75 million and so far you have identified savings of £35 million. Could you give us a snapshot of how you are going to deal with the rest?
Dame Helen Ghosh: This is the 2010/11 figure?
Q55 Paddy Tipping: Yes.
Dame Helen Ghosh: It is effectively work in progress and we are trying to gather that kind of intelligence at the moment. As you say, we did identify some specific things which are listed in the table in the further information that we sent to you, but, to some extent, we said to various parts of the Department and indeed our delivery bodies, "Can you live within a smaller budget? If we take that budget away, can you find ways of delivering the same outcome with less money?" and they said that yes, they could, so indeed the data we are collecting at the moment is, "How exactly are you proposing to do that? To what extent is that, what we would call, 'operational efficiency'?" which we would be able to build into the operational efficiency work we are doing, launched by the Chancellor this year, "To what extent is it allocative efficiency? Are you just stopping doing things?" so we will be able to give you a more detailed version of that paper in terms of how they actually found the savings that we want.
Q56 Paddy Tipping: Now that the Pre-Budget Report is not very far away, and I do not know the date and perhaps you do ----
Dame Helen Ghosh: I think we do.
Mr Anderson: I think we do.
Q57 Paddy Tipping: I am not going to ask you that, but what I am going to ask you is: what signals are you getting ----
Q58 Chairman: Is it 9 December?
Mr Anderson: It is. It has gone public.
Dame Helen Ghosh: I heard somebody say it today.
Q59 Chairman: No, we heard it here first. This is good!
Dame Helen Ghosh: Well, I wrote it down furiously at some meeting this morning, but I did not know whether it was official, but it is 9 December.
Q60 Paddy Tipping: So what signals are you getting? There are reports that you will be asked to make further savings.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Well, under one of our most talented young colleagues, we have launched a programme within the Department both for the Public Value Programme, which is essentially looking at our spending programmes, the Organisational Efficiency Programme, which is broadly described as 'back office', but it is everything from procurement to shared services and so on, and the Arm's-Length Body Programme, which is what does our delivery landscape look like, are there too many people, too few people. In fact, with a department like ours, all those things line up very closely together, so, if you take how you deal with flood defence, that is a spending programme, but it is also an efficiency issue in terms of the Environment Agency and ourselves, and it is also something about the relationship with an arm's-length body. We were one of the first departments to get into action on that, and I imagine it is the case that the Chancellor will want to give sort of preliminary indications about what kinds of findings are coming out of that and some of the first kinds of savings that might be found. Again not to blow our own trumpet, but I think that is what I am here to do, I think we were probably the very first Department to send our return into the Treasury in response to an early exercise because we knew where we were and we had set it up. Clearly, in terms of our programmes, a lot of our big spending is, what you would call, 'licence to operate', so flood defences, animal health, in particular, and our science programmes and so on, so we have constantly to hit that balance between getting more efficiency out of the money that we spend and to what extent you can reduce the budgets further. I think on the Organisational Efficiency Programme there is a published target, which is what we are working to, that all departments should find between 20 and 25 per cent of their so-called 'back office' based on 2007/08 by 2013/14, so that is what we are working to there, and again I imagine the Chancellor will want to say a bit about how people might do that.
Q61 Paddy Tipping: But you can only make efficiency savings for so long. Ultimately, it gets harder and harder and you have got to look at spending programmes. What reassurance can you give to us about spending programmes, that they will be cut?
Dame Helen Ghosh: I do not think I can give you any more assurance than the Government has given, which is that, clearly, the first thing to do is to look at how you can get more for the money you have got, but the Prime Minister himself, in his well-covered speech about cuts, made the point that you might have to stop doing lower-value programmes, which ultimately of course is a question of judgment and support both publicly and politically, so clearly, as part of our work, we will be looking at whether we can identify those things that are lower-value programmes. Again, as I think I have discussed with the Committee before, we have difficulty doing that in the sense that, sadly, we do not have programmes which spend a lot of money which do not relate very closely to our strategic outcomes or have 'licence to operate' implications, so there are not easy pickings, which is why efficiency and getting more for our money is where we need to look to first.
Mr Anderson: It is also the value question, with all these acronyms that are going around, but actually the real issue is the value of the programmes that we produce. We do have a real understanding of how our programmes and our money track together now, and that has happened in the last period since the Permanent Secretary has reorganised, and what we really want to merge in the next few months is that full list of prioritisation and understanding of the value, that, if you put more money in here, you will get more result out here and, if you take it away, you are going to damage to a degree so that, when we go to ministers, we have that full list of options, depending on whatever the Treasury say to us at the time they say to us, "Right guys, this is what we have. This is what you're going to get", and that, I think, will ultimately answer your question. There will come a moment though when we will have to stop something and we need to be in a clear position to explain why we are saying that that is the least value.
Q62 Chairman: Just to be absolutely clear, on page 138 of the Report you have identified towards the £75 million about £351/2 million worth of savings already, but is the next stage of finding the other £35 million the process you have just described, in other words, some programmes are going to go, or are they focused on better value for money in other aspects of the way that your Department is run?
Dame Helen Ghosh: The narrative on this is extremely complicated because things come out sequentially.
Q63 Chairman: Well, make it simple for our readers please.
Dame Helen Ghosh: The £75 million that you are quoting was an amount quoted by the Chancellor in the Budget this year where he said ----
Q64 Chairman: Well, I am only quoting from page 137 of your Report. You have written it down. It says here, "Looking ahead, Defra and its delivery bodies will be working together to identify and deliver the additional £75 million of efficiencies required by 2010/11, confirmed in the Budget".
Dame Helen Ghosh: Sorry, the narrative is what I am trying to tell you. That is money we have simply taken out of our budget for 2010/11, it is done, we have taken it out of the budget. The process I have just described, and we know something across the Department and the agencies of what the impact of that is, but we do not yet know, because actually we are however many months we are away from 2010/11, exactly how ----
Q65 Chairman: Not long.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Not long, but all of our bodies, back to the list we gave in the additional information, are working out how to deliver as many of their outcomes for that money. The exercise that Mike describes, the Public Value Programme, is looking at programmes to 2013/14. It is not a CSR, but effectively it is saying, "If you look beyond at 2011/12, 2012/13 and 2013/14, how can you reduce your spending?" All departments have been asked to look at the 50 per cent by value of their programmes for that period and to show how they can reduce or make more efficient, or whatever the outcome is, their spending for those three years, not 2010/11, so £75 million is 2010/11 and PVP is beyond 2010/11.
Q66 Chairman: Let me ask a question about how you monitor it because at the end of the day you are a service department and you deliver services to a broad range of customers.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes.
Q67 Chairman: When you reduce the expenditure, for example, you talk here about £17 million being saved on TSE surveillance, okay, fine, but who is tasked to monitor that you are not actually underachieving in terms of appropriate practices to provide the protection at the same level as it is today, but costing less to deliver? Who is tasked with the quality control of the reduced expenditure, but holding delivery quality constant?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Well, in that case, there is a demand-side issue as well as an affordability issue. It has been clear, as with TSE and all the research we have paid for at VLA and elsewhere and the incidence in livestock, that, if the incidence of TSE is declining, then you need to do less surveillance. We will take those judgments on the basis of the best possible scientific advice that we get and, as you will know, I think, from your previous lives, we have very distinguished scientific groups on things like spongiform encephalopathy to tell us what surveillance they think we should do, so we reduce the surveillance in line with the best scientific evidence that we can get and that is how we test that.
Q68 Chairman: Did it not occur to you, when you see that you can make savings of this order, how, relatively speaking, inefficiently the Department was run before?
Dame Helen Ghosh: That is not a saving that is anything to do with efficiency or inefficiency, it is what we choose to do.
Q69 Chairman: But there are other things where you are doing things in a different way. How radically are you starting to limber up? For example, over the debacle of the RPA, I heard somebody irreverently suggest that, for example, Natural England paid money out of environmental schemes, so, if they do it, why can they not take over the RPA? Why do you not bang it all together? How revolutionary are you going to be? You have got lots of outposts doing similar things.
Dame Helen Ghosh: The exercise that I
described, the arm's-length body exercise, will look at precisely those sorts
of issues. We do constantly look at our
delivery landscape, and
Q70 Mr Williams: One of the targets that you were set was the alliance relocation target and I think you hit that fairly early on.
Dame Helen Ghosh: We have exceeded it.
Q71 Mr Williams: You were going to exceed it because of the relocation of the MMO to Tyneside, but, when the review of the shortlisted locations was done, the staff were not very keen on either Tyneside or Newcastle, which I think was the other one, but you said that the relocation and transition was going to take place without redundancies.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Indeed.
Q72 Mr Williams: But, if the staff are not very keen on it, what procedures are you putting in place to make sure that you can achieve your target of no redundancies?
Dame Helen Ghosh: The Marine Fisheries Agency is an executive agency which is of course part of the Department, so all the current staff in MFA are civil servants, so what we have done, which is what we would do if we were reducing the work in any area of the Department, is say to the staff in the MFA who do not wish to go to Tyneside, "You will, therefore, be able to apply for roles and you become, as it were, moved back into the heart of the Department, or indeed you can apply for jobs in other executive agencies", and that is the commitment we have made to them, so they will now, but I think we are phasing it in such a way so that we make sure that we maintain the skills that we have in the places that we need them. That is the process that the staff who do not want to go are following, so they are just like any other civil servant in the Department.
Q73 Mr Williams: How successful has that process been? Have you some idea of the outcome?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Of course, as I say, we are not doing it as a big bang, because we need to make sure we can maintain the service until the April vesting date. I am very happy to establish how many people have already moved out and back into the normal department, but they are, I know, already exploring, applying for jobs, as it were, back in the Department, though they are in the Department already, in fact. I should also say that I think we are being very successful in recruiting very highly qualified staff to work up in Tyneside. I was recently looking at a list, I think in response to a parliamentary question about the qualifications of people we were recruiting, and they were dazzlingly well-qualified. Existing staff are well-qualified, but we do not seem at the moment to be having trouble in recruiting good people.
Q74 Mr Williams: I understand that Tyneside were very late in showing an interest to view the location for the MMO. Could you tell us a little bit, very briefly, about how the process of selection took place and who, in the end, was responsible for the decision?
Dame Helen Ghosh: It was a ministerial
decision. Again, I would be happy
to give you details of the process, but we clearly wanted to go through a fact-based,
an evidence-based analysis, and so we looked at a variety of issues: whether it
was staff preferences, whether it was the local labour market, whether it was
the issue about access to clusters of scientific excellence. Of course, any choice was bound to be
controversial. I know the staff very
much hoped that we would remain in
Q75 Mr Williams: I think some interested parties thought it was going to go to the South West. I understand there were ten locations on the shortlist. How many of those locations were put to the Minister?
Dame Helen Ghosh: I do not know.
Q76 Mr Williams: Could you let us know?
Dame Helen Ghosh: I could let you know. I should say, it is a management decision rather than a statutory decision, and, therefore, although I think we went through a very open and transparent process, it is not the same as making a statutory decision under a piece of legislation; it is actually a choice which would be based on a number of factors.
Q77 Chairman: Just help me to understand. One of your relocations has seen 223 agriculture and horticulture development board posts relocated to Stoneleigh in Warwickshire from what are described as "various locations in the South East". If those people transferred to their new place of work and they are earning the same level as they were, which I presume they are, it is quite hard to understand where the cost savings are going to come. There is no real detail about what the pre and post property costs were, which must, by definition, be the only other place you are going to save the money. Are these real savings? If you could write to me (because you may not know the answer) I would be interested in a break-down to know where the savings come.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes, I would be happy to do that. There was a business case and, as you say, the business case will have analysed the opportunity costs and, indeed, the actual savings you could make moving out of place A and moving to Stoneleigh, and, indeed, there will have been some, I suspect, voluntary redundancy payments made to staff, so that would have been factored into the business case. The argument for moving to Stoneleigh, which I imagine you are familiar with from your previous roles, is that it is very much a cluster now of agricultural and food-based business and science. The NFU is there, we have now brought together the old levy boards into a single place, and so you will get the synergy advantages of all being in the same place but I am sure that we have got financial savings, and I am happy to send you details of the business case.
Q78 Chairman: I would just like to be convinced that the savings really are real. Let us move on then to the subject of the Customer Focus and Insight Project, a matter that is dealt with on page 131 of your report. In practical terms, what real differences will this exercise make to the quality of the services which you provide? Give me an example.
Dame Helen Ghosh: I will give you an example. I will give you the example of fishermen. I will just go back a stage. Customer insight is useful for a number of reasons in a department like ours. It is useful in order to give customers the service they want and, therefore, serve the public, which is one of the key things we are there to do, and make them feel happy with our service. It is also about getting them to do the things we want them to do and feel happy about that thing. In persuading citizens, for example, to recycle, persuading businesses to be more resourceful, actually you need to understand how they think about things. You might do customer insight for a variety of reasons. A good example is the work we have done with fishermen, where there are, as you will know, a range of issues about delivery, about change, about government strategy. What we did there was we did research about what their attitudes were to the relationship with government and, indeed, to their business, to how they would like to interrelate to government and, particularly, the Marine and Fisheries Agency staff, who were the people they meet most of the time. We did that analysis. We met groups of fishermen in their places of work around the country and, for example, they said, "Actually, we do not want to look at the Internet all the time. We do not read stuff. What we like is information and guidance direct from people who we know and trust." So what we are now doing is training our marine fisheries officers to be able to give a wide range of advice and information to fishermen on the quayside, and that is a much better way of communicating.
Q79 Chairman: Why the heck could you not put that in so that we have got some idea, instead of having to read this kind of gobble-speak: "Improved service, better defined systems and nurturing of a cultural shift which is based on understanding and responding to behaviours and motivators will ensure Defra better delivers policies and services that meet customers' needs and achieve our strategic objective"? It sounds like something from a travel book!
Dame Helen Ghosh: I think we have a tendency to feel that telling stories is a bit infra dig. I have to say, if you listen to any management board member or, indeed, to Hilary, we say, "So, what is it we actually do? Tell me a story." We will have more stories in next year, I promise.
Q80 Chairman: Yes, because otherwise this is just a load of words. Also, can you, when you are printing next year's report, make certain you choose a method of binding that keeps the pages together?
Dame Helen Ghosh: It is probably very sustainable!
Q81 Chairman: But there is a diminished quality in the way that this particular report operates to the detriment of the reader.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Can I tell you one other quick story? One of the things we did with the customer insight was to get all the senior people in the Department out to go through some of the same customer insight training, and it was fascinating. I went round Sainsbury's at Holborn with a customer - just a customer picked off the street - who said that they tried to do the "green" thing, and we walked round in pairs. We walked round the shop and just talked to them and they just explained, as they went round, what was the thing that determined them to get that meat rather than that meat, and it was completely fascinating.
Q82 Chairman: So you have changed your shopping habits?
Dame Helen Ghosh: No, I now walk round my local Sainsbury's, or wherever I go to shop - I cannot do product placement or shop placement - with a different view of the world. So we are doing very practical hands-on stuff.
Q83 Chairman: You made a great play some time ago: you tried to explain to the Committee in about one hour Renew Defra.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes.
Q84 Chairman: I think we were amazed at the dazzling array of different programmes and things that you were doing, but now it has bedded into the architecture at Defra, how are you monitoring the progress, because we do not hear much more about Renew? Are you now fully renewed?
Dame Helen Ghosh: It is just the way we do business. We have actually got an excellent leaflet, which we must circulate to the Committee, called How Defra Works, and it describes how we work, how we do our portfolio, how we move staff around, the way we do performance and project management.
Q85 Chairman: I recognise that as an outcome of Renew Defra. The question I asked was: how are you evaluating the programme? You started off with your list of things you were doing. I presume somebody has done a body of work to see if what you wanted to achieve has been achieved?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes, we have been tracking the achievements of Renew Defra actually in parallel with the action plan on the back of our capability re-review; so we have pulled those two things together. The kind of measures we set ourselves were things like how quickly can we move staff around - because, as you will recall, one of the key objects was to be able to move flexibly when priorities changed - and the speed with which we can move people round in the new structures is much more effective. We wanted to make sure we were more joined up, which was the whole object of joining up programmes across the piece, and I think things like the work we have done on adaptation and mitigation on climate change show that those cross-cutting programmes work. We have a variety of ways of measuring how we have made progress and, again, we would be very happy to give you a quick account of how we measure, but we are absorbing it into other measurement processes.
Q86 Chairman: You have, as I understand it, what is described as a "new policy cycle", which requires signing off of business cases by what are described as "approvals panels" at fixed points in the process. That does not immediately suggest to me what happens, but just give me a "for instance" and give me some indication of how many policies have been through the process and what are the benefits from this approach.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Because I deliberately hold myself, as it were, above this process, I will ask Mike to describe a particular instance, but what this is about is doing the right thing for the right reason in the right way. When ministers or officials identify a problem, how do you decide what do about it? A policy cycle is the thing that says: "What is the problem that we have got here? What are the various ways we might solve it?" looking at the options for solving the problem and then saying, "Is that the best value for money?", making sure you engage, at every moment, both customer insight, economic evidence, and so on, and also making sure, crucially, that your delivery bodies are involved. So something like handling the CAP Health Check last year and making sure that you knew what you were going for, you knew what the options were, the RPA was fully engaged, you were tracking it as a project - that is what the policy cycle is all about. Programmes come to the various approvals panels, like investment committees, at various stages: when they first want people to start up a programme, when they are looking at the various options for what we might do, when we are putting advice to ministers, and so on.
Mr Anderson: It is quite a brutal Star
Chamber, actually, these days, Chairman, because every new business plan that
somebody wants to come up with as a head of a section, head of a group, head of
a team that they want to do with a new idea, whether it is a minister's idea or
their own idea, has to come to this panel, and it is a sort of escalation
process. You can do this locally and you
have to write a full business case with what value you are going to get out of
the programme and how much it is going to cost.
This is rigorously checked by the finance team, by the performance team
and by the policy and by the evidence people: does this make sense? It then comes to, initially, a small Star
Chamber within a particular group, who say, "Yes, actually this makes sense,"
or, "No, you do not need that bit of the money", or, "You do need that
bit. Why are you doing that? Where does it align?" If that particular team or group cannot
afford it, it then gets escalated up to the big central approvals panel, where
the director generals sit, chaired by our colleague Bill Stow, who I think came
here last year, and, again, the person putting forward the plan actually
appears, a bit like here, today, and is left outside and then comes in the room
and is interrogated on the plan, and if it is considered satisfactory, then we
have to decide what else in the budget will need adjusting to allow that piece
of activity to come forward. So it is a
programme now that is being modelled across other bits of
Q87 Chairman: A sort of Defra version of Dragons' Den!
Mr Anderson: It is a pretty frightening thing for those who have not faced it before, Chairman.
Dame Helen Ghosh: It is. Thinking back to your point about telling stories, even things that are obviously priorities have to come and argue their case. So the Climate Change Adaptation programme, which we set up this year, had to come and say, "How many people do I need? What science do I need?"
Mr Anderson: The mitigation programme for farming has just come to us, the programme on the public value: "How many people do you need to run the public value programme?" "Why do you need 12 rather than ten," or, "Why do you need 15?" Every single new programme is coming in that way, some of them quite small and some of them larger. New capital projects will also come in, so everything.
Q88 Miss McIntosh: How much time to do you spend evaluating the programme and how much time do you actually spend delivering the programme?
Mr Anderson: It depends on the programme really. The delivery, I think, would be, arguably, the most important, but if you do not evaluate it you cannot decide whether you have delivered it, I would argue. So I think you have to evaluate it in advance and you have to evaluate it during and after.
Q89 Miss McIntosh: Where are you on the adaptation programme?
Dame Helen Ghosh: As you will know, we had the very successful launch of the climate change projections in the summer. The team has now been out doing its regional road shows on what adaptation means for you locally, and I think now people can look at the more detailed projections for themselves. We are working very closely with DECC and have issued guidance for all departments. We all have to produce our adaptation plans and, of course, we have the longer-term target. I think is 2012, is it not, for the risk adaptation, risk analysis going on?
Q90 Miss McIntosh: Has the sub-committee met?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Has the committee met?
Q91 Miss McIntosh: Has the Adaptation sub-committee met?
Dame Helen Ghosh: The sub-committee? It is now fully appointed, I think. John Krebbs is Chair, with various members. I do not know whether they have met. I think they may have had their first meeting.
Q92 Miss McIntosh: It is just a small point, but it was two and a half years ago that we had the summer floods and it is 18 months since Pitt said that we should have an adaptation sub-committee.
Dame Helen Ghosh: No, the adaptation sub-committee is nothing to do with Pitt. Obviously, the issue of floods is closely related, but the adaptation sub-committee was something set up in the Climate Change Bill at the instigation, for example, of people like Barbara Young, which said that, as well as climate change mitigation, we needed to make sure that society was planning for adaptations. So it is a daughter of the Climate Change Committee that Adair Turner chairs.
Chairman: Let us move on from that. We may come back to it later.
Q93 David Taylor: Last year the Cabinet Office introduced a single survey
across
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes.
Q94 David Taylor: There was a reasonable response within Defra and you scored reasonably well on pay, perception of pay and visibility of senior staff?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Indeed.
Q95 David Taylor: Is that day-glo smocks or do you actually get round the Department?
Dame Helen Ghosh: No, we do blogs. So every week one of us is blogging. As it happens, this week a farmer is blogging and those get tremendously high hit rates. That is the management board diary. We just sit down every day and say what we have done. We have things like the management board "hot-seat", where each of us sits for an hour and answers any question that is thrown at us by staff.
Q96 David Taylor: This is not tokenism then: you actually follow up the points that are made to you?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Absolutely. I can assure you it is not tokenism. I would be very happy to show you the kinds of points that people make, and we respond. We have observers in our management boards, so we have half a dozen people, anybody in the Department, who come and then, locally, I have a regular series of just visiting teams.
Mr Anderson: Every single team has an action plan in relation to the staff survey. Every single team has to take action about engagement. The Management Board has to be a partner.
Q97 David Taylor: You encourage people, we read, to come up with creative solutions at work. Does that include your accountant?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Absolutely. We want everybody to be innovative and creative. We do not want them to do creative accounting, but we want them to be innovative and creative, and that is what Anne-Marie is in charge of and is doing professional development stuff with them.
Q98 David Taylor: At the less pleasant end of the spectrum, as it were, there seems to be a lack of clarity about group purpose and objectives where you scored---
Dame Helen Ghosh: Sorry to interrupt but that takes me back to the point about DSOs. Some departments have perhaps two or three DSOs, people like the Foreign Office or DFID. It is very clear if you are in DFID that you are there to deliver the Millennium Goals. I think what people find confusing about this range of DSOs is the thing I am doing on agri-environment schemes, is that a sustainable food supply? Is that a healthy natural environment? Is it a thriving food and farming sector? It is all those things, but we have been doing a lot of work this year on what we call "telling the Defra story". So how does everything we do join up? It is back to Mike's point about telling a story that, actually, everything we do is about being an economic department. We are part of economic growth, not a barrier to economic growth, and so we are doing lots of stories about that.
Q99 David Taylor: Do you still do anything equivalent to - perhaps in electronic form - team briefing and cascading information down?
Dame Helen Ghosh: We have a very structured system called "Discuss Defra", where we suggest on a quarterly basis, and give local team leaders materials to talk about the things that are of interest to us all at the moment.
Q100 David Taylor: So why do employees rate you less highly on clarity of purpose if this is what you are doing?
Dame Helen Ghosh: We have just done the full Civil Service Staff Engagement Survey, it closed last week, and I very much hope we will have a better rating on that, and, if we do not, I will come back to the Committee and explain.
Q101 David Taylor: The one that worried me most, where the result fell below other departments, was data handling and security procedure training. It seems to have gone out of the headlines a bit so far as major departments are concerned. Is there a higher than average rate of loss of memory sticks, or things of that nature?
Dame Helen Ghosh: No, absolutely not. There is absolutely not a higher rate.
Q102 David Taylor: So why do people report that that is a concern to them? What are you doing about it?
Dame Helen Ghosh: I think what we did this year, in following up the Cabinet Office guidance, was ask everybody in the Department, including all of us, to do an online training scheme, for which the closing date was 31 October. This was a Government requirement. We hit 100 per cent across the Department and the agencies long before that.
Q103 David Taylor: Was this October 2009?
Dame Helen Ghosh: This October that we have just had.
Q104 David Taylor: It post-dates the survey?
Dame Helen Ghosh: It post-dates the survey, yes.
Q105 David Taylor: In a sense you are responding perhaps to that level of ----
Dame Helen Ghosh: Indeed, but, no, in terms of reportable incidents, we certainly are not among the departments with a high number of incidents.
Q106 Lynne Jones: Before we move on to research, the staff survey also said that only 47 per cent of staff agreed they were proud to work with Defra. Why do you think that is?
Dame Helen Ghosh: I think this is a very interesting issue for all government departments, the extent to which external pressure (the media and external criticism) makes people feel proud, or not, to work for their department. What I would hope to see, and I believe when you talk to people in the Department, particularly in the light of innovation and the fact that we are at the cutting edge of a lot of what we do, is that people are prouder and prouder to work for Defra, but it is rather like the old thing. If you go into a pub and you say, "I work for the DSS", do you just keep quiet about it? The kind of criticism that government departments get in the media - foot and mouth, whatever it may be - actually there is a limit to how much we as managers can do about that other than reminding people, celebrating team awards. I am just judging the team awards at the moment. You can make people feel that what they do is significant and worthwhile, but they will still open the newspapers, which for all government departments are relentlessly negative. So I think there is a limit to what I, as the CEO, can do about that.
Q107 Lynne Jones: It is the unpopularity of government, you think.
Dame Helen Ghosh: I think we have probably suffered from the unpopularity of government.
Q108 Lynne Jones: We had better not explore that any further or else we will be on to MPs' expenses!
Dame Helen Ghosh: Any government, I think. Yes, perhaps. It is the departments which have --- I was going to use an adjective, which I will not use. If you take a department like DFID, DFID is regarded highly by its NGOs and, on the whole, does not get much criticism in the newspapers, and it has lots of money, increasing amounts of money, because that is, very rightly, what the Government has decided to do. Actually, they are bound to feel prouder of working for a department where everybody says, "Yeah, great. This is what DFID does", than a department where one is having to cut one's coat according to one's cloth, where things that go wrong are picked up very prominently in the media. It is very difficult to counter that.
Chairman: Before you go on, I think David had a quick supplementary on the point you just raised.
Q109 Mr Drew: Obviously you know that I am obsessed with bovine TB, like some other people around this table, and I am intrigued, being one of the constituencies that has been impacted on by that research study in terms of the wildlife vaccination strategy and, I have to say, I have been under-whelmed by the amount of communication I have received on that. I have asked to follow it up, because we are doing a further inquiry. Is one of the criticisms you would accept that Defra is not the best department when it comes to getting back to people who you might want to influence and you might want to inform: because I found it quite difficult both when we were dealing with MAFF, and also dealing with Defra, to break into what I would call the "information chain". I do not expect to be given a weekly update on things, but it is occasionally useful, as a local Member, to know what is happening on your patch and what the strengths and weaknesses of a particular study are, and that does not seem to happen.
Dame Helen Ghosh: I will certainly take that away, particularly in relation to the TB vaccination pilots. This is something in which Hilary Benn is passionately interested in making sure that he serves Parliament appropriately. If you look at animal disease outbreaks, if you look at the 2007 flooding, we got a lot of very positive praise for the extent of correspondence and feedback to local Members. We did a stakeholder survey - I do not think it included MPs, I am afraid - earlier this year, which is on our website, and that said that, actually, we are getting better and better at engaging stakeholders. We have almost endless, to a fault, consultation groups. I only mean to a fault in that it perhaps means that you do not reach a decision as quickly as you might. Business was the area for us, where it is said that actually business does not feel it understands enough about the various bits of our activity on Business Connect. So that is something that Mike is taking forward particularly.
Mr Anderson: It is, and if you look across our whole panoply of activities, and I used to be in charge of climate change in Defra and then in DECC, they used to look at who the stakeholders were, and it said, "People, consumers, business, the public sector and international", and I used to say, "Well, that is the world, is it not?" which it broadly is. So I think your point on whether you are informed is an important one that we need to take away, but actually what we have to do across this agenda is say what are the key stakeholders in particular, and in that one you have identified where there may be a problem, but it is actually how in each of these we need a proper engagement approach to who is it we are trying to get through to. If it is on the marine area, it is clearly the fishermen and the ports.
Q110 Mr Cox: Did I get my note right that any problems of morale in the Department are the result of relentless and unjustified negativity in the press?
Dame Helen Ghosh: No, I was responding to the
point about, "Are you proud to work for Defra?" and I was saying it is the
question: when you go down to the pub and somebody says, "Who do you work for?"
are you happy to say, "I work for Defra" or "I work for the
Q111 Mr Cox: Morale and being proud to work in a department or for somebody are very allied issues, are they not? If I am proud to work for somebody, I have usually got good morale in what I am doing. Is the answer to my question, yes, or, no? Is it the relentless and unjustified negativity in the press?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Not entirely.
Q112 Mr Cox: What does "not entirely" mean? To what extent is it simply the unjustified and relentless negativity in the press and to what extent is it internal matters peculiar to your Department?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Pride in working for a department is an outward facing quality. It may reflect on your belief about whether it is a well-run department or whether the programmes that the department works on are effective, but it is, I think, as much, or more, to do with what you think the external perception of your business is out there. We work very hard on all the things we described in terms of visibility, engaging with staff, telling the Defra story, town hall events that Hilary and other ministers do. That is part of building morale, pride, making people realise the significance of what they do, which, I think, is very, very important to people. It is not the only thing, but I think when it comes to what you say down in the pub, it is quite a significant thing.
Q113 Lynne Jones: I was pleased that in this year's report there is quite a bit about the importance of scientific research ---
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes.
Q114 Lynne Jones: --- in developing evidence-based policies, although, I have to say, it is laid out rather confusingly and it does not tell a very good narrative. You have got the departmental research after stuff about social research, and it does not really flow in very good order, if I can make that comment, but I am pleased that it is there and it is highlighted as important to your work.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Indeed.
Q115 Lynne Jones: There was also, was there not, a science capability review, and that is not mentioned in here. Is there any reason?
Dame Helen Ghosh: There has been one, but was it not in the previous year?
Q116 Lynne Jones: It was in the previous year?
Dame Helen Ghosh: We came out of it extremely positively. It was good, but I suspect it was in the previous year.
Q117 Lynne Jones: I do not remember it. You make a lot about social research and how that has helped you develop a better understanding of your customers, and I know from talking to Bob Watson that he thinks that is quite important and he is probably behind that.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes, he does.
Q118 Lynne Jones: But what is the difference between that and what we were talking about earlier, which is your Customer Focus and Insight Project? I have to say, your description of it did not sound to me very scientific.
Dame Helen Ghosh: No.
Q119 Lynne Jones: Just dropping off in the supermarket. That would not really stand up to scrutiny if you tried to say that was evidence.
Dame Helen Ghosh: No, that is definitely not social research, and it would not count as evidence.
Q120 Lynne Jones: If it would not count as evidence, why are you doing it? Why are you wasting your time?
Dame Helen Ghosh: It is not wasting our time. Shall I tell you, the insight, for example, that you get if you talk to customers walking around Sainsbury's, the one thing that drove their choices was price. That was the thing that we all found. It was not, "Are you worried about where this meat came from?" or, "Are you worried about the environment?" For that particular group of customers, and it was not necessarily representative. We are not saying that is the same as an evaluation of a programme.
Q121 Lynne Jones: What do you do with that knowledge base?
Dame Helen Ghosh: It makes you think, and then you would use social research.
Q122 Lynne Jones: --- if you can call it knowledge-based? It might help you commission better social research.
Dame Helen Ghosh: It might make you do that. It would make you think at the beginning of setting up a new policy, "Let me think about what customers will think about." A really good example (and it is much more about communications) that the training course that we went on demonstrated is the kind of work that the Department for Transport has done in targeting its road safety campaigns. So why do we get road safety campaigns? That dreadful one about the woman driving her teenage son somewhere. Voiceover: "This woman was killed by someone she loved" - boy in the back does not have his seatbelt on - hits a car - woman killed. That got a 63 per cent increase overnight in the wearing of seatbelts in the back of the car. Because what they had done was a lot of research, done by social researchers, as to what is the one thing that would get teenagers to strap up in the back (because it was mainly teenagers that were there) and the answer was, "I could not bear to kill someone I loved." So it is getting an insight into customers. So we have done a similar programme for farmers. We know there are some farmers who are one-man-bands for whom bureaucracy is obviously a nightmare, we have got the sophisticated family farms, we have got the very big international players at the top. When we communicate with those people to try and get them to do something, the best way of communicating, you know what is the way to press the right button. That is all customer insight is. It is making sure you understand.
Q123 Lynne Jones: Is that the Customer Focus and Insight Project or is that social research?
Dame Helen Ghosh: That is customer focus and insight. What Bob is describing is the kind of thing that we do - again, I will give an example from my previous lives - which is proper social science and evaluation of how you, over a longer time and in a more deep way, can change people's behaviour and, indeed, the social impacts of changing behaviour in a particular way. It might be in favour of recycling or, as I say in my previous lives, it might be around how you turn around a run-down housing estate.
Lynne Jones: Can you give us an example of the project? Again, you are not telling the narrative here about what sort of things you are researching.
Q124 Chairman: I just observe that I support what Lynne is saying, because an awful lot of this report is discursive. What you are looking for is hard examples of what you have actually been doing.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes.
Q125 Miss McIntosh: There is an alternative way, Chairman. If every new recruit to Defra spent three to six weeks with the people that they are there to serve - it could be on a farm, it could be at a supermarket and waste production is exactly the same - seeing every aspect, you would not need to have this.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes, you would still. Defra does, indeed, have programmes exactly like that, and we all get out a great deal and engage with customers and talk to farmers and all those sorts of things.
Q126 Miss McIntosh: When did you last visit a farm?
Dame Helen Ghosh: I last visited a farm two Fridays ago, when I was down on a dairy farm just outside Coleshill in Oxfordshire, looking at, on the one hand, the experiments that ADAS was sponsoring on nitrate vulnerable zones, and then I was down on the farm talking to the young farmer and he was showing me his slurry pits and what the cost of NVZ implementation was.
Q127 Lynne Jones: Can you get back to the point about social science. I have got some other questions, but perhaps it would better - we are short of time - if you could actually give us some examples. Give us an example now, because I think it is quite interesting, but I have got some other questions, which you can perhaps write to us about, in the same vein.
Dame Helen Ghosh: It is a slightly "when did you stop beating your wife?" question, because in a session with Bob and Hilary, Bob was saying we do not do enough social science. We have a small number of social scientists and we need to recruit more. I think the work we have done, and it is not the same as going to Sainsbury's and is not the same as spending the time on a farm, on deep research on the different attitudes that society has to sustainability would be one of those examples. Who are the hard-line greens?
Q128 Lynne Jones: You say "would"; are the projects now being ended?
Mr Anderson: I have the clothing map, for example, on the sustainable consumption production agenda, where we are tracking the whole manufacturing process of clothing. Part of that is the social aspects of what you are saying for people about how they are going to react to different bits of that chain. What happens is our current, rather small social research group of people will be embedded in that particular project and, therefore, on the piece of work that maps that out, their contribution is part of that project. As Bob Watson presented to Hilary today, you do not do it in isolation. You would be completely mad to have a social researcher here, an economist here and a hard-nosed pure scientist here. We have to put it together in projects that are going to make a difference, and that sort of mapping of chains and the milk road map that we have got of what happens along the production line from the beginning is where we are embedding it, because that then ends up helping us make the policy prescription that is going to make the difference to the people at the end of it. So, yes, we have our segmentation models that are mentioned here with the seven categories of people, but I think your real question also relates to customer insight: actually, what do you do with it? What does it really turn into? and it can only be on a specific project that you can do that. What Bob is saying is we have not got enough of those for each of the projects, and I know - because I know some of them work in my team - what project they go to next is a bit of an issue.
Q129 Lynne Jones: Perhaps you could have a word with his colleagues in the Home Office. There are other things mentioned in your report: the Horizon Scanning and Futures programme, Futures Toolkit, Horizon Scanning Partnership Project. It is not clear exactly what it means. You have got the Cranfield University Risk Centre. There is no real information as to how it will help Defra with your risk management. We are short of time, so I will not ask you to answer that, but perhaps you might give us some more information on that, and perhaps you could bear that in mind for future projects.
Dame Helen Ghosh: In fact, we are off to Cranfield to talk to the guys there in a month or two, precisely to say, "What are the projects you are looking at?" so we will do that.
Chairman: Then you will find out what you are spending your money on. We want to talk about plankton.
Q130 Patrick Hall: Dame Helen, at page 150 of your report, indicator 28.4 deals with marine health, and it says: "This indicator has not yet been assessed. The most recent data indicates that both fish stocks and sea pollution have improved since 1990 but that plankton status has declined, largely due to climate change impacts." This Committee wrote to you to ask a question about that and asked: "What measures are available to the Department specifically to address the apparent deterioration of plankton status?" and in the response you state that Defra's scientific knowledge is limited on that question and I think it is fair to say suggest that the approach to dealing with that matter is to rely upon the Government's overall policies to mitigate climate change rather than seeking specific action to reverse the reported decline in zooplankton. I have three questions arising from that. What is your understanding of the science, albeit a limited science, if that is what it is; secondly, what research, therefore, is the Department encouraging, or funding; and, thirdly, if the Department cannot do anything about this particular subject, why is it part of the Department's performance measurement?
Dame Helen Ghosh: That is a complex set of questions. As the response to your further questions says and, indeed, our own assessment of our progress against our PSA 28 (which incorporates a marine element) is, we think overall in terms of the marine environment, there is a reduced incidence of hazardous metals, fish stocks probably just about all right, but plankton a serious issue. Again, going back to the discussions we were just having with Bob Watson, there is a very active programme, which Huw Irranca-Davies is leading, of identifying the marine science we need particularly to take forward the Marine Bill, which is getting, we hope, Royal Assent next week, and so that will be putting forward a set of strategic marine research requirements. What Bob is doing (and that is why we were discussing it with Hilary) is putting together the next version of our Evidence Investment Strategy. We have discussed in previous committees how we structure our research spending around that. What he has been identifying, with a variety of scientific advice, customers and users of our scientific research are areas where we need to invest more, areas where the evidence is quite mature. One of areas in which we know we need to invest more is that interface between the impact of climate change and the marine environment. I cannot tell you precisely what we will be doing on research into plankton, but I can get back to my marine team and ask them for specific examples on that. The question of why it is in our sets of measurement: again, it is one of those issues where it is actually a very good proxy for achieving very big aims, like climate change mitigation, and to omit it would be avoiding the elephant in the room. So that is why we have got it in there. Actually, the way we do it has been highly influential in the international negotiations.
Q131 Patrick Hall: You state in the report that the decline in plankton status is due to climate change.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Indeed.
Q132 Patrick Hall: But the science does not seem to be developed in actually deriving or producing some evidence to back up that claim, or am I misreading it?
Dame Helen Ghosh: I will not busk on it; I will get back to you and tell you what we do, but I think a key thing, which we have discussed with the Committee before, is, of course, the kind of scientific research that you need to answer that question is not research that is just financed by Defra. We are actually part (and I think this has very much come out in Bob's work) of a very complex group of people who are doing research in an area. As you know, there is a big collaborative project going on on the impact of environmental change, which is many government departments - it is NERC, it is EPSRC, it is the Levy Boards, as now named, and it is the private sector. So it may be that that research is not being directly funded by government; it may be happening somewhere else.
Q133 Patrick Hall: Absolutely. I did not take it to mean that. Although your answer to this Committee's question is to talk about Defra's scientific knowledge, I took that to mean the world's scientific knowledge rather than just Defra's.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Indeed; exactly right.
Q134 Patrick Hall: So, presumably, there is an international dimension to this. Absolutely, there must be.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Absolutely, yes.
Q135 Patrick Hall: So have you trawled the global estate of knowledge and research that is going on?
Dame Helen Ghosh: We must have done, because that is what our scientists do. Our scientists are incredibly well plugged into international fora and networks and all those things, and they are always out and about doing it, so we will get back to you with the answer on that.
Q136 Patrick Hall: With regard to your search for an active set of marine research requirements - I think that is the expression you have just used - do you have a programme for that?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes, we have, indeed, a programme, and it is built into the marine programme that we have across the departments. So it is linked into what we are trying to achieve through the Marine Bill and through our fisheries policy, and so on. We have a research programme there. People like CEFAS (Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science), which is one of our executive agencies, is a world-renowned place that does that kind of research, and we use them, among others.
Mr Anderson: Bob Watson will say it is one of our strongest areas. He will say their evidence strategy in the marine area has been fantastic in relation to the Bill, so it will be interesting to see. We do not know the full answer in relation to plankton, but it is one of the areas where they have really thought about what they need.
Q137 Patrick Hall: Is the Department actively collaborating with other countries and institutions?
Dame Helen Ghosh: I am sure they are, yes.
Q138 Patrick Hall: Will you be able to let us have examples.
Dame Helen Ghosh: I will be able to give you examples, yes.
Q139 Paddy Tipping: The wild bird population is not improving, it is declining, and you are spending shovels of money on agri-environment schemes. What is going on?
Dame Helen Ghosh: As you know, our object has been to halt the decline, and in the data, the statistics that came out a week or so ago, as you say (and this is where it gets highly technical and statistical), if you look at the smoothed index (ie you smooth it out and do not take into account the ups and downs) the farmland birds index has gone down by two per cent. If you just looked at the statistics without that smoothing, actually it has gone up a bit. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between. We gave, I thought, a very interesting response to the Committee, who said, "Whose fault is this?" We said there, mainly, that the hit was really in the 1970s and 1980s. We think the agri-environment schemes have done a great deal to halt the decline. Things like the Campaign for the Farmed Environment will give that another boost, and, as you will have seen, when Hilary and NFU and partners announced that, it specifically aimed at the kinds of things that farmland birds want, which is stubble, open areas and things like the skylark plots, of which we have bought a great many. We keep our fingers crossed that that will have a good impact. You are probably an ornithologist, but I read with incredible interest the RSPB booklet that they produced the other day describing all the ups and downs in the various species. What was really striking was that in any individual species what it is that affects numbers varies so wildly. Is it that they simply do not breed? Is it that young birds die? It is an incredibly complex picture, but we are doing what we can.
Q140 Paddy Tipping: It is complex, but it is pretty simple in policy terms. There is loads of money going into agri-environment schemes, and one of the outcomes we want is an increase in the wild bird population, and it is not happening. We can be as complex as we want.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Actually, if you look at the wild bird population as a whole, it is staying broadly stable. I have got it the wrong way round. Sea birds are going that way.
Q141 Paddy Tipping: But the central point here is that we are spending loads of money on this area ---
Dame Helen Ghosh: We are spending a lot of money.
Q142 Paddy Tipping: --- specifically to enhance the environment and it is not happening.
Dame Helen Ghosh: It is happening, because we have stopped that decline. It is not going down. We have more hedgerows, we have more wild flowers; we have all those things. The question is when will it start feeding through into a pick-up - though that is not our objective, our objective is to halt the decline - in those very specific species?
Q143 Paddy Tipping: I am sure we have got more hedgerows and more wide margin strips, but ultimately the bird population is a proxy for the ---
Dame Helen Ghosh: It is, because they are at the top of the food chain.
Q144 Paddy Tipping: Absolutely, but despite all this, there has been no real change.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Again, we have made changes. As you will know - and it is back to the point the Chairman was making earlier - because we wanted to get lots of people to sign up to ELS, and since we made our initial proposals on ELS and got the first people in, we have been refining and refining what we are prepared to pay for, and I suspect that process will have to go on, in the sense of what really works in terms of what has an effect. For example, if I recollect correctly, you used to get points for farm plans. You do not get points for that any more, and things like the Campaign for the Farmed Environment will help us identify very specific things that very specifically make a difference.
Q145 Paddy Tipping: Over the years we have talked a lot about SSSIs. You have told us you are going to reach the targets, you are getting there, but there is still a way to go. Are you going to meet your target?
Dame Helen Ghosh: Yes, we are confident that the work of Natural England will get us in good condition, or improving, by December 2010, which I think is the target. I think the interesting thing thereafter, which I think Helen Philips discussed with the PAC, is how do you then set targets, because improving is not what we want, we actually want it all to be in good condition. I think that is the next big challenge and, also, thinking about the question whether we are notifying the right things in the right places, given the impact of climate change, and that is one of the things we need to think about.
Q146 Chairman: I am going to draw this particular session to a conclusion, because I think we have had a good couple of hours. Just to back up what Paddy was saying, you get spot stories about individual species of bird which give conflicting messages and some of the aggregates in the series in the short-term show, perhaps, marginal changes, but in the long-term we still seem to be in for the long haul in spite of the fact of having spent a vast amount of money in these areas, so I think there is still confusion there. What we are going to do is draw stumps now and, of the remaining items that we would like to quiz you on - do not throw away the briefing because it will come in useful next time - we will tag a few of those on into the RPA session so that we do not lose that, but there may well be some that we will drop you a line about. Thank you very much indeed for giving evidence today. We look forward to resuming our discussions when we look in more detail at the RPA next time.
Dame Helen Ghosh: Thank you very much, Chairman.