Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
1-19)
RT HON
HILARY BENN
MP, PROFESSOR ROBERT
WATSON AND
MS BRONWEN
JONES
13 JANUARY 2010
Q1 Chairman: The witching hour of
three o'clock is with us. May I welcome to the Committee, for
this one-off session on Defra's document entitled Food 2030,
the Secretary of State, Hilary Benn, and he is joined and supported
by Professor Robert Watson, who is Defra's Chief Scientific Adviser,
and Bronwen Jones, who is the Deputy Director for the Food Chain
Programme. You are all very welcome indeed. Secretary of State,
may I just put on record the Committee's appreciation for the
very kind letter which you sent following David Taylor's death.
It was very kind of you to write. The Committee recorded the contents
of your letter on the record last week, together with other appreciations
of David, and a copy of the transcript of those proceedings is
going to be sent to his widow as a lasting testament of our appreciation
of all that he did over the years since 2001 when he joined this
Committee. We were very touched and, indeed, grateful for the
kind words which you said about David.
Hilary Benn: Mr
Chairman, thank you very much. I am sure Mrs Taylor will much
appreciate that. I must confess I find it rather hard to sit in
front of the Committee and to mention that David is not here.
I know you must feel exactly the same way; he was quite some person.
I think the many obituaries and tributes really did justice to
who he was, why people respected him so much and the legacy that
he leaves behind.
Q2 Chairman: Absolutely; I think
we concur with everything that you said. Thank you very much for
agreeing to come along this afternoon. The reason that we wanted
to talk to you about this document is that, so far, Parliament
has not been given the opportunity to scrutinise the fruits of
your many labours over the last, I suppose, couple of years. Perhaps
I could just ask why, for something which had commanded so much
attention from government—both in terms of the work of the
Cabinet Office and, indeed, your own department—you sought
to launch Food 2030 at the Oxford Farming Conference and
subsequently did not choose to make a statement to the House about
it?
Hilary Benn: I did lay a written
statement, as you know, Mr Chairman. I hope very much that we
will get an opportunity soon, indeed, to debate all of these things.
We have had a couple of opportunities in the last year-and-a-bit
to talk about farming and food. Having laboured hard I was keen
to get it out and I welcome very much opportunity of having the
strategy scrutinised by the Select Committee this afternoon.
Q3 Chairman: We are delighted about
that because we said that our own report was really the beginning
of a process. I think, sadly, with the time constraints of the
current Parliament, it will be difficult for us to revisit in
detail many of the areas which all of the work that has been done
in this area has turned up. Your document touches, though, on
the way that some of that work is to be taken forward in the future,
and we will probe that in some detail. Can I just ask you before
we go into the detail of what you have written for what is your
definition of "strategy"? What do you think one of those
is?
Hilary Benn: I must say I was
very much guided by the words of the Select Committee, which were
(if I may quote them to you): "The vision and strategy in
your report cannot be expected to supply all the answers but it
must supply a clear direction and indicate what further work is
needed." I think that is exactly what Food 2030 seeks
to do.
Q4 Chairman: The reason I ask that
question is that I was taken by the contents of a paragraph, paragraph
5, in fact, in the first report from your Council of Food Advisers.
What they said, in the initial part of paragraph 5 of their conclusions,
concurs with what you have just said. They said, and I quote:
"The overall strategy should set out a long-term, overarching
vision that can be shared by all departments and by industry".[1]
It seems to me that what you have produced as Food 2030
ticks that particular box. However, it then went on to say: "It
should define what needs to happen across sectors to help people
make informed decisions. It needs to identify the roles of all
players in the food chain; what changes can be expected and how
success will be measured." I think it is on that aspect that
I found the document somewhat thin. I said this morning on the
radio that it was long on rhetoric and short on detail. Did you
intend it, in overall terms, simply to be a gathering together
of visions and hopes rather than a detailed roadmap as to how
you were going to get from where we are to where you want to be?
Hilary Benn: No, it was intended
to be both, and I have read with interest the transcript of your
interview this morning, Mr Chairman.
Q5 Chairman: And short, so it would
not have taken you too long.
Hilary Benn: Indeed. I thought,
if I may say so, there was a slightly different definition of
"strategy" there to the one that the Committee gave
in producing its report in the summer. The point I wanted to make
was we have done a range of things that are already under way
which seek to answer the question: what are we going to do about
all this? As I have set out, the three tasks are: we have to produce
more food; we have to do it sustainably and we have got to make
sure that our diet safeguards our health. There is, indeed, a
role for everybody. I suppose, in the last year I could have said:
"Right, we will not proceed with anything, we will just save
it all up, put it in the food strategy, announce it and then everyone
will say: `There's lots of detail here; that's very good, thank
you very much'". However, if you reflect on what has been
done, working in partnership with others, the Campaign for the
Farmed Environment and its launch, the fact that we reached agreement
on that, in my view, is hugely significant, because to see the
NFU and the CLA, in partnership with all of the other organisations
that signed up, going out to farmers and arguing the case for
environmentally sustainable farming is, I think, a huge step forward,
and that campaign has begun. The work of the Pig Meat Task Force
has been up and running for some time, and the Fruit and Veg Task
Force. The Committee asked, in effect, for that; you asked the
Council of Food Policy Advisers to look at this, they recommended
we set up a task force and it has already met and has got its
sub-groups at work. You wanted more money for research; well,
an extra £50 million has been announced since we last met
to discuss this by the Technology Strategy Board for investment
in food and agricultural research. There is the action plan on
skills in farming, because without skills how are we going to
do this? I was very struck, Mr Chairman, I had been in the job
a couple of years and I reflected on the fact that the industry
had not come and talked to me about skills. I thought that was
a bit odd, so I convened the round table, and the plan is now
being consulted and should be published next month. We have got
the new diploma, the Healthy Food Mark is being piloted and we
are working with the industry on how we are going to get emissions
down from agriculture by three million tonnes a year by 2020,
and that is the industry greenhouse gas action plan. We have got
incentives around anaerobic digestion. The last thing I will mention
in this list is just before Christmas I announced that we are
extending to farmers eligibility for the Carbon Trust loans to
help them to be more energy efficient—loans interest free,
£3,000 to £20,000. There is a list of things that we
are getting on with. I would say that is quite a lot of detail;
it is quite a lot of stuff being done. The second thing I would
say, on milestones, is in part, if you look at the Food Security
Assessment and the Food Sustainability Indicators, on page 74
and onwards of the strategy, you will see ways of trying to measure
whether we are making progress.[2]
However, on the second bit of the milestones (and it is a fair
point that you raise) if you believe—and I do, and I think
the Committee does, judging by your report—that we need
to do this in partnership with the industry, the sensible thing,
having now set out what it is we are trying to do in the form
of the strategy, is to sit down with those who are going to be
responsible for delivering it alongside government and say: "Okay
folks, what do we hope to achieve by when?" That is the next
stage that we have to do, but it seemed sensible to do the strategy
first and then come up with the milestones, rather than the government
just doing it on its own.
Q6 Chairman: Everything you have
said you could not really disagree with anywhere because all of
it is compatible with what your department's overall objectives
are: if one talks about sustainable agriculture then you are fully
committed and you have been for a long time; you have dealt with
the question of reducing emissions from agriculture in many ways;
you are quite right in identifying that you have not fully engaged
on the question of skills; we have talked about scientific activity
(and we are going to come on and look at that in detail)—all
of that seemed to me to be very sensible extensions of, basically,
what you have been doing up to now. Going back to our own report,
one of the things that we did say in there was that we felt that
Defra should have identified the potential for UK agriculture.
I can remember, I think, you were talking about an exercise within
government to identify the strengths and weaknesses of agricultural
productive potential. Take, for example, the arable sector. In
our report we identified that yields could potentially double.
Now, if the marketplace were to send the demand signals out to
farmers that over the period of time we are talking about to 2030
arable yield should double, the question then falls out: how do
you get there? What are the questions that you have got to answer?
The next question that falls out of that is: what is the role
of government to help the industry achieve that? If you like,
that is what I am coming from, the strategic vision, but in this
document I could not find anything where you identified what,
if you like, the "national" or "English" potential
was for our industry and, therefore, to drop out of that the kind
of strategic approach that says: "What do we have to put
in place by way of building blocks to enable our industry to realise
that potential if the marketplace demands that it should occur?"
Hilary Benn: We thought long and
hard about that particular recommendation that you made. Let us
take wheat as a for instance: what is the potential for growing
wheat? Well, it depends on, partly, price. We saw that in 2008,
and it was a high price for wheat that gave us a record wheat
harvest in the country, which showed, in one sense, what our agricultural
potential is. However, what assumption would you make about how
much land would be devoted to wheat as opposed to oats or barley?
What assumption would you make about how much fertilizer would
be stuck on the land to try and maximise the yield? How much grazing
land might you take for arable in order to up your wheat production?
Would there actually be demand for this product, because, potentially,
you could grow a lot of some product but if people are not going
to buy it is that very sensible? It seems to me there is a practical
difficulty about trying to operationalise the Committee's recommendation.
However, what we are trying to do through the Foresight study
is to look at a number of studies that have been done that do
not quite answer the question in the way that the Committee put
it, covering both the UK and other countries (because it is absolutely
a sensible question to ask). I did not see, on reflection, quite
how you could do it, unless you decided what all those assumptions
were, and quite what it would tell you at the end of the process,
for the reasons that I have tried to set out.
Q7 Chairman: I perhaps could disagree
with you.
Hilary Benn: Of course.
Q8 Chairman: In the sense that, for
example, when the Committee visited Rothamsted they were about
to embark on a very important piece of work to understand, effectively,
what constituted soil. They had also got their long-term plots,
for example, as you have seen from visits I am sure you have made,
which give us a very clear indication, according to the intensity
with which you use land and therefore fertilise it, of what some
of the implications are for things like run-offs, pollution, sustainability
and all of those factors. Bearing in mind that for any set of
assumptions you choose about what UK agriculture might do (and
nobody has a crystal ball to say what the marketplace is), certain
things fall out as requirements. Defra, as the body that can hold
the ring, bringing people together and resources together and
make certain that work is going on in the right places, could
attune, in my judgment, a strategic approach dependent upon the
type of potential that might be there. So that, in other words,
going back to what the NFU told us (which was, I think, that you
could, roughly speaking, double the yield), what would be the
implications if yield were to be doubled? You have implications
over things like water supply, and the question of land use in
relation, also, to the environmental responsibilities that agriculture
has. In other words, all I am saying is that falling out of potential
scenarios come things you have to do without being specific as
such. I think that that is where I found the approach missing.
Hilary Benn: I think my response
would be that I think we are getting on with doing those things,
notwithstanding that we have not taken up that particular recommendation
in the way that the Committee envisaged. You mention water. Absolutely
right. One of the bits of research that we have been funding which
is referred to, as I recall, in the strategy is the research that
East Malling is doing on water use in strawberry growing. We co-funded
that. I have been to see the people doing the work and what they
have shown is that by adjusting when you give the water to when
the plant absolutely needs it you can grow just as good a strawberry
with just as good a yield with about one-seventh or one-eighth
of the water. We are funding that already. So there is one example.
Better skills are going to be really important.
Q9 Chairman: Whilst I think that
is perfectly laudable, I thought that in this document there might
be something that sort of said: "Water: the key resource
to agriculture. We will set up a group to do X, Y and Z to optimise
the use of water across all agricultural sectors, to look at the
different scenarios which could occur if demand goes up by X,
Y and Z, and to plug that into the work that we are going to be
doing over a longer period of time". That was sort of missing,
really
Hilary Benn: It is an interesting
idea, actually, whether you would take a group and say: "Let's
look at water across the piece". Obviously, the demands and
the needs are different for different sectors.
Q10 Chairman: It is such a crucial
element in every aspect of agriculture. If you were looking, for
example, to say: "Perhaps one of the things my strategy might
have addressed is what actually are we good at in the United Kingdom",
there is no analysis in the document that says, for example: "On
the western half of the United Kingdom we have some of the best
areas of pasture for dairy production". So, within the context
of a revised CAP, where we might say to our European partners:
if Europe is going to have to do more of the heavy lifting in
terms of food production, if other parts of the world become challenged
by climate change, for argument's sake, what are the implications
for the UK doing more than is necessary to meet its own national
demand for dairy products? Europe has to take a greater burden
of supplying, if you like, part of the world with dairy. That
is not a ridiculous hypothesis but it is one that says how do
we make the best use of what we have got? That is what I mean
about the potential. There is not any analysis to say, in theory,
UK dairy production, get rid of quotas, what could we actually
do? We produce what is it, about 13 billion litres, at the moment?
Hilary Benn: We do, yes.
Q11 Chairman: So what would be the
implications if the opportunity to go to 15 or 20 billion came
up? What would that mean to us, with all the implications on animal
disease, genetic development, pollution—all of those things?
Those seem to me to be the sort of strategic things that we need
to be thinking about. Again, I did not get the flavour from the
document that that was part of the approach.
Hilary Benn: That is partly because
the Foresight study is, indeed, precisely looking at that. Bob
may want to say something.
Professor Watson: In addition
to the Food 2030 strategy document, there are three pieces
of work that are ongoing that are relevant to this particular
issue. One is John Beddington's Foresight study, which is looking
at the potential for agriculture and the whole food system in
the UK. It is looking at a UK perspective but placing it in a
global context. It is asking the question: how do we feed over
nine billion people sustainably in 2050? There are about 100 papers
being produced for that particular piece of work, which Charles
Godfrey is chairing. We are looking very critically at what degree
you can actually model these systems. Indeed, Defra has already
funded a couple of workshops on how these models can be used to
ask exactly the sort of questions you are asking. So there is
a lot of work going on on the Foresight study looking at these
types of issues. Secondly, of course, we are doing the UK climate
change impact and adaptation strategy using UKCP09. There, again,
we are asking—
Q12 Chairman: Just for the record,
could you just explain CP09?
Professor Watson: Climate projections
that came out at the end of 2009. They are probabilistic projections
of climate in the UK over the next 100 years at a spatial scale
of 25 kilometres by 25 kilometres. We are using these so-called
probabilistic projections which are for three scenarios of greenhouse
gas emissions, low, medium and high, and we are asking what are
the potential implications for those changes in climate on all
sectors—agriculture, water resources, which is absolutely
critical, sea level rising, coastal erosion, etc. The last study
that has relevance here is the National Ecosystem Assessment that
Steve Albon from Scotland and myself are co-chairing. We are looking
back over 50 years to ask, effectively, how have ecosystems in
the UK (not just England—England, Scotland, Wales and Northern
Ireland) changed over the last 50 years, why have they changed
and how have they affected human wellbeing, including agricultural
productivity and human health? Then we are trying to look forward
50 years to ask: what are the plausible changes in the way we
use our land and the way we might want to produce agriculture
as one of the scenarios in the future? So there are three ongoing
pieces of work that are indeed relevant to the exact questions
you are asking.
Q13 Chairman: Do you think, Professor
Watson, you slightly jumped the gun then in producing a document
here which does have sprinkled on the first two pages the word
"strategy" when, in fact, all of this excellent work
is going on which could have provided an element of rigour which,
perhaps, the present document lacks?
Professor Watson: I do not think
so, to be quite honest. I think the Food 2030 strategy
lays out what we know. It has a vision there. In parallel to Food
2030 another very important piece of work which you might
want to talk about in more detail later is John Beddington;s UK
cross-government food research and innovation strategy. All of
these pieces of work are informing each other. The National Ecosystem
Assessment will not be completed for at least another year, potentially
even another 15 months, so why hold up the vision within Food
2030? Equally, John Beddington's Foresight study will take
about another year to do, and the UK Climate Impact Adaptation,
about another year. All of these things will build, and all of
these strategies are adaptive. So I believe, personally, it was
appropriate to move in the way it has.
Hilary Benn: I could not have
put it better myself!
Q14 Chairman: Good. Does that mean
that you will reissue the strategy and have it updated in the
light of the sort of continuing input from all of these different
strands of work that are going on?
Hilary Benn: I think it would
be sensible when we have the benefit of the work that Bob has
referred to. I think it shows that we are on the case on the point
that you raised in asking your question. We then need to reflect
on what the implications of what that work has to say are for
how the strategy is going to be taken forward. This is not one
shot and that is it; we are looking ahead to 2030. It is part
of a process. Work is already under way, we have pulled it all
together, we have set out a strategy and a vision, there is further
work that is going to be done and, yes, we will find a suitable
opportunity to report on progress and update the strategy as appropriate
without covering all of the same ground again. It seems to me
a very sensible thing to do, and we will.
Q15 Chairman: Two of my colleagues
have caught my eye for supplementaries, David Drew and Lynne Jones,
but can I just conclude by asking one question about the process,
about how this document was produced? Did it go for approval to
the Cabinet Sub-Committee?
Ms Jones: Yes.
Hilary Benn: Yes, it did. I am
just trying to remember the last meeting that we had.
Q16 Chairman: Is that a problem?
I was wondering how many times it has met.
Hilary Benn: We were having this
discussion on the way over. I think it is four times the Cabinet
Sub-Committee has met.
Q17 Chairman: Did they involve themselves
in defining the terms, if you like, in broad outline before the
final document was produced?
Ms Jones: Yes. We worked very
closely with departments right across Whitehall, but, particularly,
obviously, with the Department of Health and the Food Standards
Agency, on this. All departments were involved at official discussions.
The consultation that we launched in August was cleared round
DA(F)[3]
and then the final product was cleared around DA(F) just before
Christmas.
Hilary Benn: That is what is quite
new about this; this is a strategy for food that runs right across
the whole of government. The reason we set up DA(F) originally
was very much part of the recommendations that the Committee made,
and it tries to join all of the bits together, because we can
all see that they are interconnected.
Q18 Mr Drew: The strength of any
strategy is how it can respond to crises and all the destabilising
influences. Clearly, we have got one at the moment. We have seen
from the Department of Transport that they have invented this
idea of the salt cell, which you can make various comments about
but, in terms of co-ordination and delivery of vital services,
you could say that is very important. I know we are looking forward
to 2030—but given this strategy was partly driven by what
happened to the price of food and the riots that came on top on
the back of that, can you just let me know, in simple terms, how
would Defra respond if we had, let us say, a continual frozen
period of two to three weeks with some supermarkets with no food
on their shelves and with people beginning to really suffer quite
badly? How would we respond to that?
Hilary Benn: That has not arisen,
and we have had very cold weather for quite some time now, precisely
because of both the resilience of the supply chain, the effort
of a lot of people—not least farmers—and the way in
which both the salt cell and the Department of Transport have
responded in relation to drivers' hours. There have been no reports
of serious problems in terms of food distribution—that is
the first thing. Secondly, the retailers have been liaising with
the local authorities about gritting, because the practicalities
are you need to grit the roads out of the distribution depots,
and you need to think about the delivery routes for the lorries
that are taking the food to supermarkets. There were difficulties
reported in relation to animal feed and milk collection and oil
and calor gas delivery in rural areas (for reasons that will be
obvious). We went to the Department of Transport and said: "Can
you relax the drivers' hours"; they responded very swiftly,
the industry appreciated that, which helped. There had been one
or two problems with milk collection but I think every effort
is being made; farmers are working jolly hard and, obviously,
it is difficult with making sure the livestock have got enough
water. Some problems with harvesting crops have been reported—either
because they are under the ground or they are covered in snow.
The EA, for example, has just relaxed the rules relating to putting
slurry and milk on the land in recognition of the emergency. In
this test it has worked reasonably well, would be my judgment,
if you look at the food supplies, and that is the import of your
question, Mr Drew. However, what it does show is a very good reminder
of precisely why we did the assessment of our food security, not
just in terms of is there enough food being produced but how do
you get it to where it needs to be? Obviously, one of the lessons
I am sure that will be learnt as a result of all of this is, despite
the work of the group that reported in the summer about salt supplies,
and the Highways Agency went in with 30 days, it will be very
interesting, finally, to see how many days individual local authorities
went into this winter with (they had all been advised to have
at least six for heavy snow). No doubt lessons will be learnt
about what is appropriate provision to make in relation to salt
and grit in years ahead given what we have experienced. So I think
it has worked pretty well, myself, but we need to keep a very
close eye on it, and that is what we are doing through COBRA and
through the work of the salt cell.
Q19 Mr Drew: Would you be talking,
not necessarily now but in the future, to the major food distributors
about what contingency they have? Given that we seem to put datelines
on everything nowadays, if you got to a situation where some stores
were, let us say, without most of the vital foods for 48 hours,
would there be a way, as we have done with salt, of taking quite
dramatic action to supply certain places that are at risk?
Hilary Benn: The supermarkets
do have their own contingency plans and the distribution network
is indeed their own distribution network, and that is both the
major supermarket retailers and the companies that distribute
the food for the convenience stores. Having been tested over the
past couple of weeks, as I say, it has worked pretty well. It
would depend very much on what is the reason for the difficulty.
Is it the weather? Is it problems of access? Would it be fuel
and so on? All of these were identified in the food security assessment
that we undertook, and of course we will talk to the retailers
after this period of cold weather is over to say, okay, what are
the lessons that we can all learn? What worked well? What can
we do better in the future? As I say, it is a reminder that a
lot of what we take for granted in our society is dependent, actually,
in particular, on distribution systems. I think they have done
a good job, actually, and we should applaud them for it. Farmers
too.
1 First Report from the council of Food Policy
Advisers, September 2009, p 15, http://www.defra.gov.uk/foodfarm/policy/council/pdf/cfpa-rpt-090914.pdf Back
2
Food 2030, January 2010, http://www.defra.gsi.gov.uk/foodfarm/pdf/food2030strategy.pdf Back
3
Ministerial Committee on Domestic Affairs, Sub-Committee on Food
(DA(F)). Back
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