Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180
- 199)
WEDNESDAY 17 OCTOBER 2007
Baroness Young of Old Scone, Ms Aileen Kirmond and
Ms Hannah Bartram
Q180 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
Still on cross-compliance and coming back to the UK, your paper
suggests that the requirements should be simplified—you
may have already answered that—and their scope extended.
Could you amplify that particular point?
Ms Kirmond: As Hannah said, cross-compliance
in its present form is still relatively young. It is less than
three years old. The good thing is that it has raised farmers'
awareness of statutory standards and made them accountable for
good practice. However, there are two important points to your
question. Cross-compliance is evolving and we have some experience
now. The Agency is now what is called a "competent control
authority" for cross-compliance. We believe that, in the
first case, we can simplify some of the administrative arrangements
around it. Sometimes when you put something in practice you may
over-egg the pudding a bit around some of it, and we are looking
at, for example, how we could look at enforcement and penalties
for things like minor breaches, so that you do not use a sledgehammer
to crack a nut—which is very important. This brings us back
to the principle of proportionate regulation. We need to retain
proportionate penalties where there is serious damage but, where
there is a minor breach of something, look at how we could scale
that back. In the modern world, we need a more targeted mechanism
for regulation and we really need to think about our experience
and other people's experience in risk-based regulation. There
is therefore quite a lot we can do around some of the administrative
arrangements of cross-compliance, to make them simpler and more
straightforward to deal with and not hugely expensive just to
administer, which mops up quite a lot of money. The second point
that you have picked up is extending cross-compliance to include
some other things. Barbara and I were here earlier in the year,
talking to you about the Water Framework Directive and this holistic
picture. On the books, we have the Water Framework Directive and
the Soil Framework Directive coming up, and they are very important
pieces of environmental legislation, both of which can have significant
impacts on agricultural practice, which I think is important.
Taking Barbara's point, Defra's consultation on the new powers
associated with the Water Framework Directive clearly targets
this problem of diffuse pollution from agriculture. The Nitrates
Directive will not paint the whole picture a beautiful green.
That is quite clear. One of the things we would like to think
about, therefore, is how we can examine implementation of the
Water Framework Directive to complement the existing cross-compliance
arrangements in the Nitrates Directive, and to have a look at
whether we can bring in, as Hannah has said, another Statutory
Management Requirement under cross-compliance to embed some of
the Water Framework Directive measures in farming practices. The
other thing is the Soil Framework Directive, which is in its very
early stages but already, under Good Agricultural and Environmental
Condition, there is an element of soil management. We are very
interested in exploring how we could extend the scope of the Statutory
Management Requirements to strengthen some of the soil protection
issues that actually give us multiple environmental benefits around
not just sediment loss but nutrient loss—coming back to
the point that Natural England made about making sure the soils
are in the right place, doing the right thing at the right time.
There are therefore some opportunities to get some multiple benefits
looking at what the basket of EU directives can give us.
Q181 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
You seem to be putting quite a lot of reliance on cross-compliance
to achieve your aims, and yet at the same time you are talking
about moving more money from Pillar I to Pillar II, or your common
rural policy that Barbara was mentioning a moment ago. In your
introduction, Barbara, you mentioned the whole problem of the
fact of, if that does happen, what set of instruments you are
going to use.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Could I comment
on a broader issue, before Aileen comes in on this? We are riding
both horses at once, because who knows what will come out in the
medium to longer term. Also, quite a lot of the changes that we
need to see in land management will need the whole basket of instruments
that we can deploy, ranging from advice, cross-compliance, regulation,
the incentive schemes, voluntary agreements—the whole suite.
We are perming all of them at the moment; we cannot back the winners,
because we do not know what the winners are going to be. The risk
is that we see a diminution in all of them. Ken Clarke once said
to me, "Thank God these levers we pull aren't attached to
anything". But we would rather not be in that position! That
is one of the risks—if we do not get the right sort of cross-compliance
conditions. Just taking diffuse pollution from agriculture and
the Water Framework Directive, my major worry is that the consultation
that the Government is involved in at the moment puts in place
a set of mechanisms which are pretty unpopular with farmers and
probably not very effective. We will therefore have to apply advice,
cross-compliance, the agri-environment schemes, voluntary agreements—the
whole suite—to get that movement, because a single-bullet
solution for a particular issue like diffuse pollution will not
work.
Q182 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
Do you see these levers as being EU-based or would you envisage
some localised, Member State, UK . . . ?
Ms Kirmond: They have to be a mixture. You have
to have both EU level, UK level and, as Hannah has alluded to,
there will be some local issues that are most appropriate for
individual administrations, because each one will have a different
issue. Northern Ireland has a different agricultural picture;
they have different problems with phosphates than we have. I think
that we do have to look at all those levers. It is one of the
things we are looking at and we are involving people like the
NFU, in terms of what some of those powers will look like and
what they might look like for farmers, to try to work out what
the best way of applying them is, and where we can make the best
benefit. As Barbara has said, however, it is a very complex picture.
If, for example, you looked at the Bathing Water Directive, the
best lever to pull to achieve standards in the Bathing Water Directive
is to de-stock the uplands.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: We are not advocating
this, by the way!
Ms Kirmond: Can we have it struck from the record
that I recommended that!
Q183 Chairman:
We will pass the letters on to you!
Ms Kirmond: It gets very complicated, and one
of the things we have to bear in mind is that we have to try to
hit the right thing to do in order to get the right outcomes.
It is about finding the outcome, finding the levers to pull to
get at it, working out whether there are any contra-indications
to that, and then moving towards that. Some of the things we learned
from cross-compliance was that that was not the right mechanism;
there are other things we need to try. We have to be open about
the fact that we are learning as we go along with this.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: One of the issues
we need to draw your attention to—there are two in terms
of the Water Framework Directive—is that Defra has completed
something called the "preliminary cost-effectiveness assessment",
which looks at which of the levers are the most powerful to deliver
the Water Framework Directive outcomes. After setting teams of
highly trained economists to illuminate that for three years,
I think that I would probably be being kind if I said that the
answer is inconclusive—which is a worry, because we do need
a bit of guidance on what are the right levers to pull. However,
it shows the complexity. Now the proposition is that that will
be done at regional level around the River Basin Management Plan,
which could be a rather complicated process. That is one issue.
The second one is the consultation on diffuse pollution from agriculture
and the whole concept of water protection zones being used as
a means of taking a regulatory approach to diffuse pollution issues,
as a backstop if necessary. That will not be a popular proposition
and we do not quite know yet if it would work. We therefore have
to keep stressing that we need this full basket of instruments,
because we do not want to rely simply on the one.
Chairman: Let us change focus now and
go on to budget matters.
Q184 Lord Plumb:
What we are talking about now and the development that is taking
place all happens before the next Budget Review. I think that
you have already said to some extent, with the development of
your Rural Agency, how you would see the determination and the
distribution of funding. As far as we are concerned—and
we would like to see the re-stocking of the hills, not the de-stocking
of the hills—we want to see where we are going and therefore
to what extent you might share your views with the policymakers
in other member countries on the use and the investment in the
various areas.
Ms Bartram: I come back to our overarching,
or under-arching, principle that we want to see behind the spending
of public money, namely that we think that it should be for the
provision of public goods and services. We are obviously particularly
interested in clean water, robust soils, functioning flood plains,
but also the wildlife/access/landscape issues. We feel that support
for these goods is justified when the market does not value them,
and therefore fails to deliver them at an optimal level. The EU
Budget Review will closely scrutinise the CAP budget in totality.
It still receives the single largest share of the EU budget, at
about 43% and so, not surprisingly, they want to look at it. I
think that it is probably unlikely that the Pillar I budget—that
budget which feeds Single Farm Payments—will be amended
before 2013. The Brussels agreement of December 2005 more or less
set that in stone until the end of this financial period. Pillar
II, on the other hand, is much more vulnerable. It is by no means
secure—and therefore of some worry to us, I have to say.
What the situation allows us to do now is to kick-start the debate
on "Where next for the CAP?". If there is a clear policy
position and a direction of travel, that will very much help justify
public expenditure on delivering a high-quality rural environment
which is also a social and economic asset. In relation to whether
our opinions are supported by others, we recently held a conference
in Brussels with the other UK agencies on the future of Europe's
rural areas and there was a lot of consensus on this approach.
Whether or not our view is shared by other policymakers in other
ministries, I think that Defra is probably better placed to answer
that question than us at the moment.
Q185 Chairman:
You seem to be saying, and what you started off by saying, is
that the future of the CAP ought to be to provide public goods
in a context where the market fails to provide. Is that it? Is
that the future of the CAP?
Ms Bartram: If you are looking at 2013 and beyond,
what we would prefer to see, rather than something called the
CAP, is something called the Common Rural Policy or a common policy
which delivers for the rural environment and delivers sustainable
land management. There may well have to be an element of some
emergency food security in that, but the general thrust of that
policy is all about delivering the goods that the market does
not support, or is inefficiently supporting or unable to support
at the moment.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: There are lots
of aspirations for the future of the CAP funding and for rural
policy generally. Certainly Mrs Fischer Boel, when she was responding
to the outcome of some of the work that we have been doing across
Europe, challenged quite hard the vision, as it were, and was
clear that she also had other aspirations in terms of meeting
some of the commitments that they made with the accession treaties,
building a competitive agriculture in a global sense, about releasing
the economic and social potential of the rural areas. She certainly
was outlining the political difficulties that we are all aware
of, of moving radically to a new rural policy. The farming industry
itself, of course, has some strong aspirations for what the future
of CAP funding would be about, particularly when you are looking
at help for bringing new entrants into farming, new methods, training,
innovation, helping with the global competitiveness issue, as
well as with some of the economic and social pressures in some
of the more remote rural areas across Europe, which are quite
different from ours. There are a lot of folk who want a lot of
stuff out of it. My experience of successive CAP reforms is that
we will get something, but it will fall back from whatever radically
that any of us would like.
Q186 Lord Bach:
I can see that you obviously have a short-term and medium to long-term
view, which is very sensible of course. Your long-term view—and
you have expressed it more than once—is that the CAP as
we know it should go. You say that it will not happen until 2013;
that is probably absolutely realistic. You would like to see it
succeeded by an adequately funded European Common Rural Policy.
The question I want to ask you is this. What is your thinking
about what it is that farmers across Europe should actually be
paid for by the taxpayer, under the new scheme that you would
like to see, and whether there is not a danger that you will pay
farmers for things that they do not need to be paid for and that
other people in other occupations, in the same position—not
in exactly the same position but in roughly the same position—would
not dream of asking to be paid for? And whether there is not a
danger that by giving farmers too much money under some new scheme,
under the nice title of Common Rural Policy, you may in fact just
be subsidising them in the same way as, arguably, they are being
subsidised now? I put the question in that particularly direct
way because I think that this is a fairly fundamental point.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: This is always
a difficult one and I agonise about it. You can substitute the
words "miners" or "the British car industry"
for "farmers" and it sounds like madness. The Common
Agricultural Policy sounds like total, utter madness. The reality,
however, is that the difference between the farming industry and
land management generally and any other economic sector is that
they are the guardians, the operators over a fundamental
slice of the environment, probably impacting on all three environmental
media: land, air and water. They are doing something that is contextually
quite different from the miners, the car manufacturers, the chemical
industry, or whatever.
Q187 Lord Bach:
Or a house-builder?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Or even house-builders.
House-builders have an impact on land but they are not managing
the basic resource, as it were. To some extent, therefore, a product
of history and the fact that you can rationalise it in that way
is right. There is no doubt that in Europe there are a lot of
other big pressures that people want to maintain subsidy for.
You have to ask, "Would we be better going towards a completely
free market approach to agricultural production, saying, `The
market will provide', and if sheep cease to exist on the hill
because they are not economic, so be it?". I think that what
we are saying is, as agriculture approaches the market more and
there are downsides that we cannot live with environmentally,
we would want to see the CAP funding move in to make sure that
those downsides did not occur, and would sit alongside advice,
standard-setting, regulation, and all the other mechanisms we
have talked about. The market is becoming more pressing. We have
made the point in our evidence about things like biofuels and
what will happen if we hit £200 a tonne for wheat. We are
deeply worried about set-aside going down to 0%—where I
have a big bet on with Peter Kendall at the NFU as to how much
land will get ploughed up, because it is too tempting if you can
get that sort of money off it. I think that we are talking about
market failure and the need to be protected against that. You
can therefore just about get away with not substituting miners
or car manufacturers for farmers whenever you talk about CAP.
Q188 Lord Greaves:
How on earth can agriculture be economically successful for once—growing
things and selling things that people want to buy at the price
at which the farmers want to sell it—and be described as
"market failure"?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: I think that it
is quite patchy at the moment across the farming economy. If you
are a livestock farmer, you may not feel the same way. However,
I think that market failure does undoubtedly happen. You can have
a very thriving farming economy in a particular sector, but you
can have real downsides in environmental terms, or indeed in social
terms. I live in a part of East Anglia where, quite frankly, the
greater success for the farming industry is accompanied by a reduction
in the number of people employed in it.
Chairman: You could have market failure
in the context of a market success, because it is a failure of
the market to deliver the environmental good.
Q189 Lord Greaves:
Yes, the wider stuff.
Ms Kirmond: It also comes back to the point
that Lord Cameron made about what the measures look like. One
of the measures we are working very hard on is catchment-sensitive
farming. It is not just about a carrot and a stick and it will
either work or it will not work; it is learning about how farmers
can change their behaviour. Regulation is straightforward but
it is a blunt instrument, and incentivisation is a different basket
that costs money; but with something like catchment-sensitive
farming, where you are using advice to try to raise the gain—you
are not beating people up about it but you are not giving them
lots of money for it—we are seeing some quite big returns
in terms of how the farming community is responding to advice
that helps them to help themselves to be more environmentally
aware, and so on. It is also important that that third bit in
the basket is there; that we need to hold market failure back
by saying, "You need to be a bit more in control of your
activities as well. Here are some ways in which you can do it.
It helps you to be more successful and take matters more into
your own hands". That then perhaps gives more opportunity
for them to pull some more levers, go back into the market and
say, "We are being environmentally responsible; we are producing
goods that we believe you want. Where is the market price for
that?".
Q190 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
You quoted the figure of 43% of the total EU budget going on the
CAP. Presumably your Common Rural Policy would not be anything
like that 43%. You are talking about scaling down quite considerably
here, are you not?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: If you get the
finance ministers of Europe together, they will get their shovel
into it somehow, but let us not give it away because, to be frank,
there is not that much money in environmental protection generally—and
this is the biggest single slice.
Q191 Chairman:
Is this not the problem: that environmental protection is riding
on the back of what has been squeezed across from Pillar I of
the CAP? Is not the best thing to say, "Okay, CAP, bye-bye.
Finish, end. Start again. What funding do you need to deliver
environmental benefits?" and do not pretend that it has anything
to do with the CAP?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: If you start with
a blank sheet of paper, you can bet your bottom dollar that the
amount of money in it will be a considerable amount less.
Q192 Chairman:
Is that not a good thing?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: As a taxpayer,
I would probably think that it is a good thing; but you also have
to look at political reality. Like it or not, I cannot see the
French Government believing that it can win an election if it
draws a completely blank sheet and reduces the amount that is
going into the rural economy by a dramatic amount. I think that
we therefore have to ride both horses at once. Also, if you look
at some of the abstruse maths—I do not understand it, Hannah
may—of moving money from one side to the other at the moment,
we just have to make sure that we do not end up with very little,
in whatever form of agri-environment or rural funding mechanism
we have for the future. At the moment, if we look at all the pressures
on the agri-environment schemes—and you heard Helen talk
about her concerns regarding the legacy schemes—if you add
together everything that we need between Natural England and ourselves,
on behalf of the nation may I say, to deliver environmentally
and in terms of recreation, landscape and access, it is a big,
big chunk of stuff. So let us be quite wary about offering up
too much of the CAP budget for sacrifice.
Q193 Viscount Brookeborough:
So really we should be saying that we do not want a reduction
in the overall spending; we want it changed from Pillar I to Pillar
II—and we and the population would not mind.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: If you totted up
everything that everybody wants out of a revised CAP or a son
of CAP, or daughter of CAP—nodding to Mrs Fischer Boel—it
would be a very big bill and there would not be enough to go round.
I think that it will therefore be a complete political push-and-shove
as to how much goes on each of those outcomes in a new rural policy.
Looking at the bill, I do not think that it will fall far short
of what is currently there. The finance ministers can get something
out of it, but let us not encourage them to believe that it is
a big chunk.
Chairman: The trouble is that there has
been a total failure of finance ministers to control the CAP.
Q194 Viscount Ullswater:
Can I take up what My Lord Chairman said about scrapping CAP and
putting in a different policy altogether? I think that Dr Phillips
in her evidence to us gave the impression that she felt that farming,
up to perhaps the Second World War, was done with the environment,
not making too much of an impact on it; but, subsequently, the
environment has been taking quite a knock from the development
of technology, sprays, large tractors, whatever it is, which can
rip through the environment in a way which perhaps the old horse
and cart could not. Therefore, agriculture is now likely to be
acting against the environment rather than with it, and perhaps
we need to move away from keeping it within agriculture and move
towards a rural policy.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: I think that it
is hugely variable across agriculture. Basically, what we did
from about 1970 onwards was wave fivers at farmers and tell them
to intensify, and they did it extremely successfully. We have
some of the most intensive and efficient farming in Europe. However,
that had an impact on the environment, though many people did
work hard, and some sectors in particular worked hard to keep
as much environmental benefit as possible. It is therefore quite
mixed across the farming community. There is no doubt that you
can see quite massive changes in some of the indicators from the
1970s onwards. There are particular ones. The switch from the
spring sowing of wheat to the winter sowing of wheat was like
turning a switch. It had a huge impact on the environment. Little
changes like that which ricochet right across the farm landscape
can therefore make a huge difference. At the moment, we are seeing
it in some parts of the country with the whole debate about sheep
dip. You can kill people or you can kill the environment, but
you cannot do both. It is our organophosphates against the synthetic
pyrethroids. Which would you rather? It is a difficult one, that.
Our belief is that, by a little bit of waving of fivers, a little
bit of regulation, a lot of advice and support and, through the
cross-compliance mechanism, a clear understanding of what is needed
of farmers—farmers want to know what is needed from them—we
can get some of that signal, which was very much about production,
diversified into a whole load of other areas.
Q195 Lord Plumb:
I was a little surprised to read that you said there was a danger
that more demanding environmental standards in Europe would lead
to the displacement of damaging farming techniques to other parts
of the world. I have been learning from some of the WTO people
over the weekend that they are concerned more about phytosanitary
standards than they are about tariffs; that they believe this
will be the biggest problem to trade if they are applied, because
our standards will be that much higher than those countries where
they are producing large quantities; like chicken from China,
for instance, where the standards are very different from the
level here. I was therefore a little surprised to hear that you
were concerned that it had an effect there. I thought that our
job was to try to encourage them to meet similar standards to
the standards that are applied here, on welfare grounds.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: I think that the
business of consistent global standards is quite a difficult one.
Generally speaking, in many places the impact of setting higher
environmental standards is only a small part of the issue of what
does competitiveness look like. Labour market costs are probably
the biggest single factor in terms of a level playing field, as
it were; and of course they do vary hugely across Europe and across
the global economy. We therefore have to regard environmental
standards as part of that, but not necessarily the single, distorting
feature, as it were. Our concern is that we do need to make sure
that there is a degree of recognition in our negotiations in the
UK, and in Europe's negotiations in the World Trade Organization,
that environmental standards are important and that competitiveness
has to take those into account, because they will have an impact
both here and globally in environmental terms, and they are interconnected.
We also need to make sure that, if there are specific measures
coming in in European policy, they do not have unexpected consequences
elsewhere. For example, the biofuels target for Europe—which
clearly cannot be achieved within the European arable area, unless
we put the whole area under biofuels. We are pretty sniffy about
biofuels anyway, because we think that certainly first-generation
biofuels are not exactly the most effective way of reducing carbon
and that we need to move to second-generation biofuels; but that,
even so, probably biomass for energy is a much more effective
way of using the land than to provide biofuels, in terms of both
cost and environmental impact per unit of carbon reduction. However,
if we are to have a biofuels market globally, we do need to see
some sort of accreditation process or certification scheme, because
the risk is that we will simply see biofuels being grown elsewhere,
on areas that should still have been under primary forest, or
savannah, or whatever else that is being ploughed up for biofuel
production. We have already seen a dramatic example of that in
the world, which is palm oil production. The damage that palm
oil has done globally is huge. We are down to the last 50, or
even fewer, Sumatran tigers. I do not know about you, but I get
pretty outraged when I think about a species as unique as that
being driven to extinction so that you and I can have soap—which
is the reality of it. I do not think that we should be repeating
that with biofuels. We have to find a way of getting the benefit
to climate change without screwing up the rest of the environment
in the process. The timber standards through the FSC are one example
of a voluntary scheme. It may not be hugely well policed globally,
but the organic standard is an accredited standard and it is policed
globally. I do think that we have to start pressing for some of
these global certification processes.
Q196 Chairman:
On that note, I think that it is time to bring in Lord Palmer.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: I could see you
shaking your head, Lord Palmer!
Lord Palmer: I know that we do not always
see eye to eye on biofuels, but perhaps I could go back to the
question posed by Lord Bach. I am sure that the five of us around
this table who are farmers would reckon that his question merited
at least a three-day conference on what the future could be! You
are concerned that EU targets of biofuel production will add to
the pressure on natural resources, notably water quality. If global
biofuel production leads to higher food prices, can additional
pressure on natural resources really be avoided? Perhaps I could
add this supplementary. To what extent could mandatory environmental
and carbon reporting requirements ensure compatibility between
biofuel crops and Pillar II funding? Could you elaborate on what
you perceive to be the environmental benefits of focusing support
on the infrastructure for processing fuel rather than for growing
bio-crops? I do absolutely agree with you about this ridiculous
thing of cutting down the rainforest in South America and shipping
ethanol halfway across the world.
Q197 Chairman:
That is just to remove a competitor!
Baroness Young of Old Scone: What we want to
see is a kind of tiered thing. We want the UK and Europe to be
pretty robust in the World Trade Organization discussions about
the environmental impacts of production—agriculture, food
production and biofuel production. We want more informal things
to happen. In development assistance, a policy, for example, where
we have the ability to promote good practice, to provide training,
and all of those things. In overseas aid policy, we want to see
getting higher environmental standards put into agricultural production
built in as part of that kind of process. We would like to see
certification play a role. We believe that what we should be seeing
through Pillar II funding is not necessarily funding farmers to
produce a particular crop, because that seems to fly in the face
of the whole trend of CAP. If we are moving away from funding
production, we should not be helping fund biofuel production particularly.
In our view, the carbon market ought to be the thing that funds
biofuel production, by putting the right long-term price of carbon
into the carbon market, which drives the right sorts of signals
to people to introduce new technologies, whatever they are. Then
we need these mechanisms in place to make sure that the new technologies
do not have an adverse environmental infrastructure. What we are
saying might happen from Pillar II is to pay support for infrastructure
to produce biofuels, particularly from wastes—in the way
that I described with the pig slurry and the Marks & Sparks
sandwiches. Until the long-term price of carbon is right, it is
actually a big leap of faith for a smallish farmer to engage,
even in a consortium, in setting up an anaerobic digestion system,
because it is not yet clear whether this wobbly price of carbon
will ever lift off. Until that happens, it is worthwhile seeing
Pillar II as a source of pump-priming of technology introduction,
so that we can begin to get people using these systems—until
the price of carbon is sufficiently strong and robust for the
future, so that people see just a simple return on investment
in this sort of alternative fuel structure. If we were looking
at the hierarchy of the most environmentally effective and least
environmentally damaging ways of impacting on carbon, we would
see energy from agricultural and land use wastes at the top of
the hierarchy. Next, growing crops for biomass, providing all
the environmental impacts are taken into account. We have a very
useful tool, where you can put your biomass production methodology,
what it is replacing, how it is transported, how it is grown,
how it is processed, into our computer; you can turn the handle
and it gives you what the environmental impact is and allows you
to tweak the parameters to reduce those, and then get the best
outcome possible. The hierarchy would be energy from waste; energy
from biomass; and biofuels coming quite a long way down after
that—unless the second-generation biofuels really start
to come through.
Q198 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
Sticking with the climate change issue, as you said earlier, the
floods over the summer caused considerable concern around the
country. You identified in your evidence that the rural development
funds could be one way of addressing that issue. Going back to
our earlier discussion, you could say that is quite a long way
from the CAP and what was originally envisaged with all of this.
However, how would you see using the rural development funds in
the, rather urgent, short term to assist with some of the river-flooding
issues that we are being confronted with?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: The Higher Level
Stewardship scheme already has a flood management option in it.
Although obviously, with the meagre amount of money that is in
the Higher Level scheme, it is not doing much yet; but it is there.
We therefore believe that that is an accepted proposition and
could increase, but I do not think that we should hold our breath
too much. There is quite a lot of loose talk about the benefits
of land management for holding back floods, and I think that we
need better research and evidence. There are two sorts of propositions.
One is quite well tested, and that is where we pay farmers to
manage their land as normal and then, once in a blue moon, we
fill it up with water. In the recent floods, for example, Lincoln
has two huge washlands, about which we did a deal with farmers
17 years ago. For the first 14 years they managed away like mad
and had a perfectly adequate farm business. On the fifteenth year,
when we had to open them up for the floodwaters, they were none
too thrilled. We had to remind them that we had been paying them
all this time, and so we needed to get our quid pro quo.
Q199 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
Were you paying them out of the rural development fund?
Baroness Young of Old Scone: No, we were paying
them from our own flood risk budget on that one. That is a proven
technique, and we assess that with every flood scheme that we
go to. As well as building defences, therefore, we will look at
a land management option to see whether it would work. That absolutely
has to be on "Will it work or not?". The second sort
is a kind of generalised belief that if the land was managed in
ways that made it more absorbent and to hold water back for longer,
that would help reduce these peak flows down rivers, flash floods
and run-off. That is true to an extent, but I do not think that
it is a panacea. We therefore need much more evidence about where
it will work, and that is more amenable to being built into things
like the Entry Level scheme and the Higher Level scheme—particularly
where you have a big flash flood issue that has been demonstrated
in the past. We have just come back from seeing a farmer who grows
potatoes on the top of a hill in Dorset where, every time it rains,
the top of the hill runs down the road and into the river. We
are worried about it on a pollution basis, as well as on a flood
risk basis. There are therefore changes in cropping; changes in
crop management; the increasing use of buffer strips; there is
work on whether woodland is good for holding water back, though
that is not yet clear. Clearly, anything that increases the absorbency
and helps provide a barrier to water just running straight through
will be worth thinking about in terms of flood alleviation. Therefore,
if it means that we do not have to build another two feet of sheet
steel further down the river, you can just do the simple cost-benefit
there.
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