Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260
- 270)
WEDNESDAY 24 OCTOBER 2007
Mr Ian Woodhurst and Mr Tom Oliver
Q260 Viscount Brookeborough:
It might be retaining employment in the countryside. Secondly,
if I wish to convert farm buildings because I have no other use
for them and tourism will not fit in and I had a good business
opportunity even though it did not change the outlook of that
building or whatever, you would not necessarily like to see it
happen.
Mr Oliver: I would not necessarily like to see
it happen, but one has to regard quite carefully what, for example,
planning policy guidance note 13 says about transport policy in
relation to this sort of question. There is clearly a need to
discourage substantial private transport dependency in rural areas
which is not very sound from the point of view of carbon as well
as tranquillity. The point remains that there are occasions where
rural diversification, particularly where it offers local employment
to people who already live locally, should be strongly encouraged.
There are good examples of that in England, in Cumbria for example,
where post foot and mouth, very substantial progress has been
made and that is very welcome.
Q261 Lord Plumb:
You say that cross-compliance does not necessarily represent good
value for money for the public and you anticipate the phasing
out of the single farm payment and it will decline in importance.
I am sure most people are accepting that there will be a phasing
out as, hopefully, there is the move from Pillar I to Pillar II,
giving the advantage of course for more environmentally friendly
farming, et cetera. Cross-compliance means that the occupier of
that land or the farmer of that land can see clearly what goes
to Pillar I and what goes to Pillar II; that is the benefit I
think that he gets from it, so it is very much an exercise in
itself of determining those areas. Every farmer is very conscious
of it if he has applied for entry level schemes and the rest of
it. Therefore, how do you see this ultimately benefiting the public?
Pillar I has gone; Pillar II will be there. That surely will benefit
the public. It is going to happen gradually and what you are suggesting
is that there is no benefit at the moment. I would have thought
there was, if you are getting more into Pillar II and therefore
greater use of Pillar II which is what the public themselves surely
want.
Mr Oliver: If I understand your question correctly
you are asking whether the trend towards Pillar II is not so beneficial
that one should not worry about the view on Pillar I.
Q262 Lord Plumb:
Yes.
Mr Oliver: It is important to remember that
the proportion of funds in Pillar II is still very, very substantially
smaller than that in Pillar I. It is also important—I think
the CLA make the point correctly—that the transition from
a long inheritance of very substantial funding (now called the
single farm payment) will need very careful management because
most of our businesses to some extent or other have planned over
the years for that level of support or something like it. It is
unrealistic to expect that not to matter in the future. For all
the reasons that we subscribe to in terms of protecting the ability
to produce, the capacity to produce and protecting the interests
of farmers in managing their land, a transition from Pillar I
needs to be made carefully and predictably. Then the question
arises as to whether the scale of the Pillar II increase and any
new agricultural public benefits fund might come along to replace
it will be adequate to deal with the scale of obligations that
society would like to see farmers implement. As my colleague has
pointed out, there are very substantial sums of money attached
to the Water Framework Directive outcomes, to bio-diversity targets
and to landscape management beyond those already funded. Should
the new agricultural public benefits fund be of the same level
and scale as the present single farm payment or something like
it, then the question is answered in the sense that the public's
benefits are paid for successfully and then one gets into the
question of how one frames that fund and access to it to encourage
as much as possible interest in it. The risk is that on the one
hand we fail to recognise the value of the single payment in retaining
continuity of farming and, as we take that away, fail to replace
it with substantial enough funding within Pillar II to do other
things which will carry farm businesses on and allow them to compete
in world markets to the degree that they wish to. That is the
problem. We would identify lack of realism on the part of the
Government at the moment—and probably on the part of all
political parties—as to the scale of the funding needed
to do the things the public really want and the risks associated
with not meeting those.
Q263 Lord Plumb:
Would you accept that cross-compliance therefore should continue
until such time as we see either the elimination of or lowering
of the payments in Pillar I?
Mr Oliver: Indeed, and I think it is important
not to take from our evidence the implication that we disapprove
of cross-compliance. We approve of it, we simply take the view
that it is very difficult to justify paying very large sums of
money per hectare to farmers to do what amount to quite meagre
environmental actions. It is entirely possible that cross-compliance
could be expanded in the future, but then we reach the question
which was being discussed earlier with the CLA when they were
giving evidence which is: to what extent is it effective to incentivise
people to do good things and to what extent is it effective to
regulate them to do so? Our strong feeling is that it is much
more effective to incentivise people than it is to regulate them
into doing things.
Q264 Lord Plumb:
I think farmers might argue with you that if the implementation
of some of these schemes is not meagre. The six metre strips round
every field, for instance, has changed the method of husbandry
to some extent and similarly with all the hedge planting and so
on that is going on which I encourage and we do ourselves is great,
but it must change the attitude I think of farmers apart from
the way they run their business.
Mr Oliver: I think there is an unwelcome problem
which arose during the negotiations of the exact terms of cross-compliance
in England which was a division that opened up between the farming
lobby and the environmental lobby of whether, for example, fields
of under two hectares should be exempt from the two metre rule,
two metre for hedges and one metre for ditches. I think CPRE took
the view that this was too assiduous a lobbying by some of the
farming lobby on its own behalf, but the important thing is that
the payment of £200-odd pounds per hectare is a very substantial
one by comparison with the £30 per hectare for entry level.
With the best will in the world one is looking for much more substantial
benefits from much more substantial sums of money.
Mr Woodhurst: I think it is important to remember
that cross-compliance is supposed to be a base line through which
farmers can then progress into higher tiers of environmental management.
Without that base line you immediately add on quite substantial
costs before you can leap into other sorts of management which
might be an Environmental Stewardship scheme option. I think our
view has always been that it forms a management base line for
which there might be costs in a reformed system, those costs would
have to be recognised as part of a new payment system, perhaps
in a tiered way, so that there would be representative payments
for the outputs that one required for these sorts of management.
Mr Oliver: Perhaps it would be convenient to
talk about Set Aside now because it fits closely with what my
colleague has just said. One of the great debates this summer
has been whether the environmental benefits of Set Aside which
were entirely unintended at the time (and which organisations
like CPRE did not foresee and in fact CPRE opposed Set Aside in
1988—or whenever it was—when it was originally discussed)
should be recognised. I think there are various lessons to be
learned from this. The first is that it is very important to deal
with what is going on on farms rather than what was intended.
It is also very important to recognise that it is important to
reconcile farm planning which is something which is a mixture
of capital and management planning over very long periods of time
and competence and investment with political decisions that sometimes
can be imposed, if you like, at very short notice. I think it
was unrealistic to expect the Government to respond to what happened
so far as the Commission was concerned for this cropping year.
However, we are faced with a distribution of land in fallow, either
rotational or permanent, which is not related to the willingness
of farmers to participate in environmental schemes and there is
some value in some of the distribution of that land management
which we inherit now that Set Aside is set at zero rate. The need
is to recognise a transition from, if you like, an untargeted
but nonetheless quite substantial area of land in Set Aside to
an addition to the present entry level scheme which manages that
land which is valuable environmentally from its status as Set
Aside land to its status within environmental stewardship. That
needs a transitional mechanism which recognises that some people
did not regard themselves as environmental enthusiasts but happened
to put land in Set Aside to great advantage for bio-diversity
or water quality for example.
Q265 Lord Plumb:
Would you see a difference between rotational Set Aside and non-rotational
Set Aside?
Mr Oliver: A great difference because the virtues
and dangers of losing both are different. Interesting work by
SAFFIE (Single Arable Farming for an Improved Environment) which
includes sponsors such as RSPB and LEAF suggests that how you
manage both rotational and permanent Set Aside makes a great difference
as to whether it has public benefit or not. In fact, for example,
opening up the sward of permanently Set Aside strips can greatly
help their usefulness for barn owl feeding. It is important to
recognise that there is more work to be done on how you manage
that permanent Set Aside just as there is work to be done on where
you locate the rotational Set Aside. There is interesting work
by the Game Conservatory Trust as it used to be called which suggests
that the exact location of rotational Set Aside makes a great
deal of difference to its usefulness for some bird populations.
Q266 Viscount Ullswater:
When Dr Phillips gave us evidence last week from Natural England
the thought was that you could only rent environmental improvements
from farmers by paying them some form of subsidy for agri-environmental
schemes. It looks as if the test is now going to be on Set Aside
as to how much environmental benefit will be left after a lot
of farmers will be ploughing up rotational Set Aside in order
to benefit from the prices of corn at the moment. Are there some
further structures that you think should be in place in order
to effectively buy into environmental improvements which are going
to be permanent? We have got SSSIs, we have SPAs; is there some
form of other permanent improvement which then will not be dislodged
if the payments cease?
Mr Oliver: There are two ways of answering your
question, one is in terms of the designation of land and the other
is in terms of the scale and length of an agreement with a land
manager. In terms of the scale and agreement with a land manager,
as I have just said, we would argue for a mechanism to bring Set
Aside—whether rotational or permanent—which is of
environmental value into environmental stewardship, recognising
the fact that its origins are not that and that farmers have some
justification for resisting a de facto environmental status for
their Set Aside land, but also recognising that some Set Aside
land is of no environmental value at all because it was never
meant for that purpose and is not located in the right place.
There we would recommend extension of the environmental stewardship
scheme. Depending on the degree to which you want outcomes you
can put that into the entry level scheme or the higher tier scheme,
but either of those requires expansion of the funds for that scheme,
recognising that Set Aside will no longer going to be doing that
job for us by mistake, as it were. In terms of designation of
land, there is something to be said for pursuing the catchment
management analysis of the Environment Agency in terms of the
location of cultivation and indeed intense livestock farming.
There it might be that some development of the Nitrate Sensitive
Zone approach might be worth looking at. I am very conscious that
that system is, to some extent, disliked by farmers for its lack
of targeting and lack of clear outcomes. It is very important
and incumbent on the environmental movement to come up with coherent
reasons why it wishes to target land which should be cultivated
more carefully or with greater restraint because of water quality.
There is a very strong argument for it but at the moment it is
not clear that the argument is being made successfully to the
farming community as a whole. That would be one area where you
could have territorial designation. I think there is a third one
which is whether the public benefit of land close to settlements
should be subject to some form of designation for a future agricultural
fund from Europe. We feel frustrated that the debate about the
Green Belt, for example, often invokes the lack of enrichment
and good management of land which uniquely in England is permanently
protected. The idea that it should be possible to target land
close to settlements for long term good management to increase
its diversity and its attractiveness and its access is a strong
one. Under any guise of a further form of the CAP it would be
very welcome if nation states could have a greater say in why
they wish to target land for particular kinds of management. The
urban fringe and Green Belt is a clear candidate for that. There
has also been an interesting debate about whether the Thames Gateway
would be a place where that would be important because of the
need to reinvigorate the vast majority of that land which will
remain farmed after the development has taken place.
Q267 Viscount Ullswater:
I take your point that this is an awful lot of land round settlements—whether
it is towns or villages—which is impossible to farm because
of vandalism, because of animal cruelty and all sorts of things,
so that does need to be protected in a way which is better than
it is protected in the moment, which is covered in tin shacks
and a few ponies. I call it equi-culture rather than agriculture.
I think you have a real point there which would increase the beauty
of the landscape hugely.
Mr Oliver: And make it very visible to the vast
majority of tax payers and their children who would be paying
for it. To address the core desire to increase the focus on a
future CAP fund, that is an important point. At nation state level
and possibly at a more localised level than that we can do a great
deal to focus the public benefit if we are given that ability.
The fact that we are able to identify heathland, for example,
as an important landscape and habitat but not identify the urban
fringe in itself as an important landscape and habitat is a frustration
where the sorts of situations prevail that we have just been describing.
Q268 Chairman:
If my memory serves me right, the Forestry Commission either has
or had an urban woodland scheme.
Mr Oliver: The Community Forests Initiative,
yes. Community woodlands along with country parks which tend to
be owned by local authorities have advantages, but the problem
is that they are subject to budgetary vicissitudes and restraints
which very often reduce their quality and reduce their attractiveness.
The history recently of country parks—I am not sure if this
is true of community forests—is that the local authorities
seek to divest themselves of the responsibility to manage them.
It seems to be much, much wiser to let farmers manage them for
production within the context of providing public benefits while
retaining the form of the land as a productive unit.
Q269 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
I wondered whether, in your list of public benefits, food security
played any part. Also, where do you stand in the debate we had
earlier with the CLA in connection with the Government's role
in managing the risk involved with all of that?
Mr Oliver: I think the CLA were right to distinguish
between self-sufficiency and food security and we would subscribe
to that distinction. For us the principal question is the perpetuation
of the capacity to farm competently and this is whether it is
livestock farming or arable farming. It relates to all the other
subsidiary but crucial services that surround farming—for
example abattoirs, large animal vets and the marketing and technical
support for farmers—and in a world where technical ability
and development is going to be increasingly important that support
is also necessary. We subscribe to the view sometimes characterised
as critical mass analysis which is that there needs to be a strategic
view taken by government on what farming can take before it ceases
to be effective as a system overall. That requires more research
into the resilience of farming to world competition. That is something
we called for some time ago in our evidence to the House of Commons
EFRA Select Committee and which I think we would renew now, in
particular as part of that process the revising of the agricultural
land classification system to take account of the resilience of
land to climate change. The system we have at the moment was set
up in 1966 and it takes no account of the versatility of land
in response to climatic change whereas that is going to be a crucial
question when it comes to food security in the future, whether
land can produce even if we do not need to produce from it in
the next few years. We would strongly call for the Government
to review the agricultural land classification system and to recognise
in planning policy the value of protecting land which has great
versatility in an era of climate change as well as increasing
demands for food and commodities.
Q270 Chairman:
Thank you very much indeed. If you think there is something you
want to say that you have not had the opportunity to say, now
is the time to say it. If not, then that is fine.
Mr Woodhurst: I have nothing to add, thank you.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed
for your evidence.
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