Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Lord Clark of Windermere Excerpts

Tuesday 21st December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Clark of Windermere]

I am pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Newton, because I want to pick up some of the themes which he touched on which I thought were worthy of further reflection. I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for introducing the debate and for the manner in which he did so. It was very reasoned, trying to tease out answers. Indeed, he has probably posed most of the questions which I would pose.

I also want to take this opportunity to add my tribute to Stuart Burgess. I worked with him very closely in the days when I was chair of the Forestry Commission. We met regularly, and I found him a tower of strength. He was a most admirable individual, a very knowledgeable man and, above all, a real champion for the countryside—not for any particular vested interest in the countryside but for the people in the countryside, especially the disadvantaged. It is interesting that the report which is imminent, probably the last report from the commission, will be on that issue.

I am a little surprised that the coalition is proposing that action. I read the local papers, as does the noble Lord, Lord Henley. We probably read the same local papers, after we have read the back page, where we share a common interest. I am always finding the coalition partners, whether it is in Penrith and the Border, Westmorland, or wherever, appearing to champion the rural areas and saying that the Labour politicians from the west of the county—although they represent huge rural areas—have no concern for the rural areas. That could not be further wrong.

Indeed, as we have heard, it was the Labour Government who established the Commission for Rural Communities, which I believe did a great deal of good work. The great advantage was that I frequently met Stuart Burgess on the train going on a fact-finding visit, or going to hold a public meeting, a public consultation, in some village hall on housing, broadband, or whatever. Like the noble Lord, Lord Newton, as a Minister I certainly found it incredibly valuable to be able to call in experts, especially people who were as independent as the chair of the Commission for Rural Communities. It was very useful for a politician to be able to call these people in aid because one of the things I found was that—this is just a fact of life in a sense—any politician has a certain struggle, not only with his opponents across the Chamber but, inevitably, with his own department. His own civil servants may have slightly different interests in certain respects than he may have. Indeed, they may be right, because they are there for the long term and most politicians are there for the shorter term.

What I found interesting, and the issue that I would pose to the Minister, is this. I cannot imagine civil servants in a unit in Defra going out into rural communities on winter or even summer evenings, going to village halls, meeting ordinary people and listening to them, bearing in mind that, because of the nature of the occupation, the overwhelming majority of those civil servants, most of the policy people and the people with the real authority are based here in south-east England in the Greater London area. I simply do not believe that they will be going out and collecting the information for themselves. I believe that if the Government really want the big society notion to work, they are really going to have to engage with people and to communicate with them. Quite honestly, I believe that members of a commission are much better at doing that than civil servants in Defra or in any other department.

That brings me to the second point that the noble Lord, Lord Newton, made. It is a killing point. It is about who is the lead authority. Let us take broadband, which has been mentioned several times. Broadband in rural areas is difficult, but it can be piggybacked on the school network. In Cumbria, the Member for Penrith and The Border has led a campaign in the north of the county to try to get broadband, quite rightly, into these rural communities. Defra will actually have very little authority when the execution of this plan comes to the fore because, quite frankly, it is not Defra’s responsibility. It is another government department’s responsibility. We heard about the power of the Under-Secretary of State, but it is more than that, it is the power of the civil servants, with their pecking orders, as well. I believe that rural communities will lose out by this abolition.

I think it was my noble friend Lord Knight who made the point about listening. I hope that the Government will listen especially to people such as Geoffrey Lean, who for many years has been the finest environmental journalist in this country and for the past 40 years has been prepared to take unpopular stances against Governments of all political hues. I thought the quote that my noble friend used was most telling, and I hope the Minister will not dismiss this and will listen to some of these points of view.

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[Lord Grantchester]

I shall speak also to Amendments 35, 36, 38 and 48, which are grouped with this one. Amendment 29 is in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, who apologises to the House that she cannot be present today. I declare my interest as a farmer in Cheshire and I apologise to the House for it having slipped my mind to mention this interest on the previous amendment.

The public bodies within the government department of Defra are what we are discussing today. Some, as the previous amendment showed, go to the heart of the Government’s strategic vision for the countryside. I concur that we may well need to look at those issues later as this legislation goes through the House.

One could probably describe the bodies that I shall refer to in relation to this batch of amendments as not of strategic importance; this is more of a tidying-up exercise. Nevertheless, it is important to bring them to the attention of the House and to ask the Minister to try to clarify what he thinks will be the work of the department, how it will be structured and how the activities undertaken by these bodies will be done within the Government, either by independent experts or within his own department as advisory committees.

Amendment 29 concerns the Committee on Agricultural Valuation. As the Minister said, it is recognised on all sides of the House that the deficit that has been created is consequential on the banking situation, and all sides of the House have proposals to tackle the deficit. We on this side were looking at that committee as a key one to tidy up and abolish in this period. It has not sat for over 10 years and, when it did so, it was largely made up of members of the Central Association of Agricultural Valuers, which has been instrumental in providing advice to Defra and indeed does so now as part of the Tenancy Reform Industry Group, which has been carrying on the work of that committee to great advantage. I understand that the group is looking at draft replacement statutory instruments to be brought in on the end of tenancy valuations, concerning such erudite matters as residual manurial values—before all eyes mist over in a glaze of appreciation—and the volatility of fertiliser prices that make this job so important to the nation.

Amendment 35 is on environment protection advisory committees. On these, we understand that the aim is to establish more flexible non-statutory engagement arrangements at a more local level. The Environment Agency must be able to engage more actively locally with society, the public and business. Effective stakeholder engagement and partnerships are key to successful delivery on the ground. With these amendments, we are seeking to engage the Minister to clarify the successor arrangements that will be put in place. We understand and agree that the design of the detail of this new approach is an important next step. The Environment Agency will be working closely with the chairs and members of the current committees to develop thinking on how best to maximise future local community engagement and to ensure smooth transition with partnerships and local stakeholders. Can the Minister tell us what stage these discussions have reached and clarify that, as this Bill passes through its stages in this House and is enacted, these new arrangements will be programmed to come into being in parallel with these committees being wound up?

Amendment 36 concerns Food from Britain and is a tidying-up exercise, as the body has already been administratively wound down. However, once again, it would be instrumental and helpful to be told what headway the successor arrangements are making with the activity that was carried out by Food from Britain. Looking to my interests in the farming industry, I know that that body has been very important in the past in promoting food from Britain both within this country and overseas. It would be helpful to understand how the successor bodies are being taken forward.

Amendment 48 concerns regional and local fisheries advisory committees. Will the Minister advise the House on the successor arrangements in that regard? I beg to move.

[Lord Clark of Windermere]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 38, which concerns the Home Grown Timber Advisory Committee. I do so in the same spirit as my noble friend on the Front Bench in that I seek to ascertain whether the Government have the right processes in place to take over any jobs that this body may have undertaken. It would be foolish of me to oppose the abolition of this committee, as we stopped it meeting under my watch as chair of the Forestry Commission. I remember it well because we reviewed all our advisory committees and considered that there was no real justification for the Home Grown Timber Advisory Committee. According to the Minister’s Answer to a Parliamentary Question, it has not met since September 2005 and fell into abeyance in June 2006 when the members’ terms of office expired. In the second part of the Parliamentary Question, I asked what the cost of the body was. The Minister replied that it had cost £625 since November 2005, which is about £125 a year. I suspect that it does not cost that much and that most of that money was incurred in winding up the body in the latter part of 2005 and in 2006, so in essence it is a no-cost body. That is an important point.

I spent this afternoon looking at the Second Reading of the Forestry Bill on 5 August 1919—I was able to do so in view of the delays incurred when another matter was being discussed in the House—which set up the Forestry Commission. It is interesting how much wise debate took place when the Forestry Commission was being established. One thing that was debated at great length was whether Scotland should have its own, separate Forestry Commission. That has not changed. Almost 80 years later devolution took place to a certain extent and great powers were given back to Scotland and to Wales, as well as to England, to run their part of the forestry estate. Flexibility was also built into that legislation, which was then carried forward into the subsequent Acts affecting forestry. There was no Home Grown Timber Advisory Committee; it was simply a central advisory committee. I have never been quite sure why the Government are so intent on abolishing it.

I come back to my other point about the big society, which seems to be the Government’s underlying philosophy. This committee was a radical proposal for the time, in 1919. A very radical and progressive Liberal Prime Minister, Lloyd George, was trying—

[Lord Henley]

In a coalition Government.

[Lord Clark of Windermere]

Perhaps the coalitions in those days were a bit more radical than the current one. But we will let that lie.

That advisory committee was a link in the new concept of state forestry—forestry belonging to the citizens—being challenged by and running side by side with the private forest interest. The Act said that between six and eight members of the advisory committee would be appointed after consultations with forest owners—who I suggest were not exactly supporters of the Labour Party or the Opposition—and that six to eight would come from the timber merchants and allied trades. It was a genuine attempt to try to draw in expertise and to be aware of the interests not so much of those who were involved in state forestry but of those who had great knowledge of the industry. It certainly served the state forest service very well, helped to build up the Forestry Commission and also helped private forestry. That is one reason why, even today, a large body in private forestry wishes to retain the state forest service. However, we will come back to that in later amendments.

I am simply suggesting that this is perhaps a little more than tokenism. Perhaps it is just tidying up—I concede that straight away—but if the committee does not cost anything, why abolish it? Interestingly, the Home Grown Timber Advisory Committee was not set up until 1939, when there was the threat of war and the need for timber. It was established to try to ensure that that need was met. It resonates today that the first edict that it set out, facing the demands of war—it sounds obvious now—was that one should go first for the mature timber, then for the semi-mature timber, and, lastly, for the timber which should be used only in dire emergency. It classified the various parts of the country as to where the main felling should take place. It is relevant today that the two areas that the committee singled out for more or less immediate felling, because the trees were mature, were the New Forest and the Forest of Dean. I was interested that the Business Secretary in the other place, Dr Cable, who I think has a cottage in the New Forest, said recently that the New Forest certainly would not be privatised. I know also that the Forest of Dean is of great concern to my noble friend Lady Royall. We should bear in mind that forestry is a long-term game. It is many years since the end of the war, and those trees that were replanted just after it are now coming to maturity.

I will make a further point about tokenism. When the 1919 Bill had its Second Reading in this House, much of the discussion was about devolution. The term was not used then, but that was what the discussion was about. One of my early tasks at the Forestry Commission was to devise a system of governance that allowed us to have a devolved forestry enterprise, yet at the same time keep a GB entity. We did not have a sufficient critical mass of timber in the three separate countries to sustain a viable body. We had a lot of difficulty with this until we discovered that, just as there was a central advisory committee, it was possible under the original Act to establish three national advisory committees. By reviving these committees that were there in statute, we were able to form a system of governance that has withstood almost a decade and, depending on this Bill, will probably stand the test of time for a while longer. My overall point is that if you have a system of governance with a certain amount of flexibility, it will allow you to deal with contingencies that are unexpected at the time, but which occur in long-term businesses.

I will make two or three further points. The reason why the Forestry Commission and the Home Grown Timber Advisory Committee were established was that in 1919, after the war, only 4 per cent of the land in Britain was covered by trees. That figure was almost the lowest in Europe. Over the past 91 years, it has increased to 12 per cent. One may not think that is a huge rise. However, bearing in mind the long-term nature of forestry, it is true that Britain is one of the few countries in the world—if not the only country—that has reafforested. It is quite remarkable, and is recognised by bodies such as the United Nations and by countries such as China that are trying to move into the reafforestation process. Bodies such as the advisory committees have been very helpful to the Forestry Commission in developing that expertise.

My next point concerns the flip side of this, which is timber. We still use a massive amount of timber, even in this world of plastic and synthetics. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Agriculture in 1919 told noble Lords of the day in this House that Britain imported 92 per cent of the timber that it used. The situation has got better—but not a lot. We now import in the region of 85 per cent of the timber supply of this country. This is an important reason why we need advisory committees. We are trying to establish timber and wood-using industries in this country. These are often very labour-intensive. When these companies are considering establishing themselves in the UK, their first question is: can we guarantee a sufficient supply of timber? They almost always come to the Forestry Commission—often through its advisory committees—and say, “Will you guarantee us that supply of 30 or 40 per cent?”.

I cite as an example the quite large wood-using power station that was built on Teesside. People would not have gone ahead with that if there had not been a sufficient supply of timber from the state forest to guarantee a critical mass. One might ask, “Why just the state forest?”. The answer is simply that the elasticity of supply and demand very much applies. Timber prices go up and down. When they fall, any private owner thinks, “I am not going to put my timber on the market. I’ll withhold it and, when the prices rise, I’ll put it on the market then”. I accept immediately that that makes sense to the forest owner. However, it does not make sense to the timber and wood user, whether it is someone making pallets, chipboard, paper or whatever. Therefore, we need that critical supply. Is the Minister confident that without advisory committees—we should remember that this is only an advisory committee—there will be sufficient advice for government?

My final point relates to one that I made earlier and it concerns the amount of forest cover. Again, when I was at the Forestry Commission, we decided to look at carbon sequestration and the question of meeting our carbon demands. I start with a couple of statistics which I have used in this House before but which I think are worth repeating. Twenty per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are due to deafforestation, and that is equal to the total emissions from the world’s transport industries. Reafforestation is a win-win situation and, because we have reafforested our country to a certain extent and are acknowledged as having done so, we believe that we have a role to play. However, that role is effective only if we have advisory committees.

In order to challenge ourselves on that premise, we established an eminent advisory committee to look at the issue under the chairmanship of Professor Reed. The committee was composed of foresters, climatologists and scientists. We basically came up with the recommendation that a great deal of carbon capture was involved in afforestation. The committee came up with the second statistic that I shall cite to your Lordships. A 4 per cent increase in tree cover in this country would allow us to capture 10 per cent of our carbon emissions. It is something that the previous Government committed to do and I hope that this Government will pursue it. However, without advisory committees, it would not have been possible to come to that conclusion.

I simply ask the Government to bear these points in mind. Instead of abolishing the Home Grown Timber Advisory Committee, which I view as tokenism, why not leave it as an advisory committee and it can be used for some unforeseen contingent problem that may occur in the future?

[The Earl of Selborne]

My Lords, I defer to no one in my admiration for the noble Lord, Lord Clark, for his distinguished period as chairman of the Forestry Commission. He has made a very powerful case for the role that forestry plays, whether in the public or the private sector. However, the question for the Committee today is whether the Home Grown Timber Advisory Committee will contribute to carbon sequestration and whether it will add to the contribution that forestry makes in this country. A moment’s thought suggests that a committee that has not met for quite a long time is perhaps past its sell-by date.

Having said that, I do not want to denigrate in any way the contribution that forestry makes to land management and to meeting some of our essential needs. It is very important that the forestry estate be increased. Whether the Home Grown Timber Advisory Committee has a role to play, I rather doubt. Looking at this group of amendments, we recognise also that the Committee on Agricultural Valuation, as the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, reminded us, has not met for over 10 years. I think that we can assume that that is a committee that has also met its sell-by date.

I speak, very briefly, to draw attention to Food From Britain. I have enormous admiration for the work of my late friend Lord Walker, who created Food From Britain when he was Minister of Agriculture at a time when he was appalled by agriculture’s inability to react to the markets. We had been used to the socialist concept of marketing boards. The farmers—I have to declare an interest, as a farmer and an apple grower—were lamentably incapable of reacting to the needs of supermarkets as those were evolving and to the demands of the market. He pointed out that, unless we had an organisation within Government—within the Ministry of Agriculture, as it was then—that could relate the farmers’ priorities adequately and make farmers more aware of the realities of the market, we would lose out to our competitors. That was very successful.

I am sorry that my noble friend Lady O’Cathain is not in her place because I remember vividly that she was one of the five advisers that Peter Walker—as he was then—appointed. While recognising that all good organisations have to recognise the realities of time, I would not wish this provision, which will consign Food From Britain to history, to go without record. I am personally enormously grateful for the contribution that it made.

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[Lord Clark of Windermere]

I just want to make myself absolutely clear. The Home Grown Timber Advisory Committee was not set up until 1939. The original Act did not include such a body, but it did include an advisory committee that could be used for different purposes. My point is: if it is not costing any money, is it not useful to have in your armoury an advisory committee that can change its interest to face the problem that you may have to deal with? That is the thrust of what I am arguing.

[Lord Henley]

I see things differently from the noble Lord. If it is not doing anything, if it has not met since 2005, if it is what I have described in Monty Python terms as a dead parrot, why do we not get rid of it? We do not need to have it in our armoury. Should we need such a thing again, we can set up an appropriate panel as necessary. It is not necessary to keep it going as the noble Lord wishes.

We have dealt with quite a few dead parrots. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, would accept that they are dead, dead and very dead, particularly the one that has not sat since 2005.

I now turn to the two remaining bodies: the environment protection advisory committees and the regional and local fisheries advisory committees. They are statutory committees that advise the Environment Agency. The Government's aim in proposing the abolition of those committees in Schedule 1 is not to remove that advisory function. Indeed, both committees have provided valuable advice to the agency, and it will continue to need that advice. However, having two sets of committees on a regional, statutory basis creates a degree of inflexibility and inefficiency that is now proving unduly restrictive.

Defra now wishes the Environment Agency to establish more flexible non-statutory arrangements that will enable better local engagement of all interested parties at the catchment level, including in delivery, together with a more integrated approach between environmental protection, conservation and fisheries. Such a structure will have the flexibility to evolve as needed, without the constraints of a prescriptive statutory remit at the regional level, and will better address local priorities while working with partners and communities to deliver improved local engagement. That will enable civil society to take the lead where appropriate, rather than continue the current focus on advising the Environment Agency.

I hope that noble Lords will accept that. I appreciate that those two bodies are slightly different from the earlier ones, but I hope that the noble Lord will accept my basic premise that certainly three out of the five are very, very dead parrots indeed. I therefore hope that he will feel that he can withdraw his amendment.