Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Lord Newton of Braintree Excerpts

Tuesday 21st December 2010 Lords Chamber

I say finally to the Minister, listen to the voices that I have read out from newspapers and the media, listen to other Members of this House, listen to the countryside and at least retain an independent voice for rural-proofing. If at some point down the line the Minister wants to reorganise functions, it is set out in the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act, in Part 8, “Flexible administrative arrangements”, which allows Defra functions to be transferred between Defra and Defra bodies and gives the Government the legislative freedom to do what they want to do without rushing at it here and now.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

My Lords, I shall join in briefly, even though I am far from being an expert on this commission like my noble friend Lord Greaves and, from what he has just said, the noble Lord, Lord Knight. What I do have is some 18 years’ ministerial experience, man and boy, continuously from 1979 to 1997, at every level of government, including several years as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary, before becoming what was, in terms of nomenclature, rather more grand. In that, I share some experience with my noble friend on the Front Bench: we overlapped each other at the old DHSS, or was it by then the DSS? It might have had yet another title: they change more or less every week. I want to contribute a priori from that, picking up a couple of the points that have been made.

First, I just do not understand the general arguments that are being put forward for the proposition in the real world, as distinct from some hypothetical world. It is said that there should be greater direct accountability by Ministers within the department and that the department should be the champion. We all know that if the Ministry of Justice decides to abolish magistrates’ courts, another department cannot act as the champion for anything. We all know that what happens is that, by and large, these matters are settled at meetings of relatively junior Ministers, where you may or may not carry the day, but you cannot then go round outside that Cabinet committee saying, “I championed this but the rest would not agree”. You cannot say, “We lost on this, but we will now campaign to have it reversed or to make people think again”.

Equally, when I was such a junior Minister faced with those difficulties, I welcomed having an authoritative external body to which I could point as a support for what I wanted to get my colleagues to agree to. Far more convincing than saying, “My unit in the department tells me that this is what we want”, is to say, “We have this great and good body of external people who really know what they are talking about and who have done some research, and this is what they are advocating”. Some of this thinking does not connect with the real world. I would be most grateful if my noble friend would comment, if he feels able. The only other thing that I would say is that I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, will not press his amendment, because I think we could have a much more productive argument when Ministers have had a chance to think about just what it is that they want to do.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Henley)]

My Lords, I shall now address the amendment and put things into an appropriate perspective. I welcome the remarks of all noble Lords who have spoken about the CRC. The noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, described himself as the midwife of the body, but he was then described as its father by the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester. We are getting our metaphors a bit mixed up on this occasion. However, as I said, I want to put this into perspective, so I shall start by reminding the Committee, as other noble Lords have done, that we announced our intention way back on 29 June that, subject to the passing of legislation, we would abolish the Commission for Rural Communities along with its statutory functions as just one part of the Bill before us.

I think I can speak for all my fellow Ministers and future Ministers once my time is up when I say that the decision to abolish the commission does not reflect in any way a reduction in the Government’s rural commitment. On the contrary, the Government are committed to improving the quality of life for people living and working in rural areas and intend to put the fair treatment of rural communities at the centre of government. There are already many rural organisations and commentators who will continue to hold the Government to account, as happened with the previous Government. I think that noble Lords might remember one faintly rural community, the Women’s Institute, which I seem to remember a former Prime Minister going to address but not coming away from that occasion exactly unbloodied. However, I think he enjoyed the experience.

I remind the Committee of what the name Defra stands for. It is the department responsible for the environment, food and rural affairs. It is the department that works to promote the interests of rural people within all government policies. I can speak for all my colleagues in the department—I am sure it will be true of all future Ministers and, dare I say it, those like the noble Lords, Lord Knight of Weymouth and Lord Clark, who have served in similar departments in previous Governments—by saying that we will continue to push for rural affairs. Many of us have a strong rural background. The noble Lord, Lord Clark of Windermere, comes from my part of the world and I was grateful for his reference to the fact that we support the same football team and read the same newspaper. We will continue, as he and the noble Lord, Lord Knight, and others have done, to champion rural issues across the Government.

I must make it clear that we as a department will continue to work with a vast range of departments on issues of importance to rural people. This will include working with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on broadband. It is an important issue and I am glad that noble Lords mentioned it. The noble Lord, Lord Clark, referred to what my honourable friend in another place is doing in Penrith and the border region for north Cumberland in trying to bring the project forward. He has had long discussions with both the DCMS and my colleague, Richard Benyon, who has responsibility for these matters in Defra on that issue. We will continue to work with the Department for Communities and Local Government on housing and planning and with the Department for Transport on rural transport issues.

My noble friend Lord Newton kept emphasising that he was a junior Minister, but he was actually the first Secretary of State I served under in the Department of Social Security, and I hope that I learnt a great deal from him in doing so.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

I am tempted to intervene. I am grateful to my noble friend because I now remember. He was War Pensions Minister, if I remember rightly, and I am willing to bet that he found the external campaigning of what was then called COBSEO—it may be called something else now—very useful in trying to get money out of me for war pensions.

[Lord Henley]

My noble friend touches a sore point: I remember many issues relating to war pensions and other matters that caused him and me a great many problems. I can also remember taking social security Bills through this House for my noble friend when he was the Secretary of State and that I suffered a number of defeats which ran into millions, billions and trillions of pounds and which my noble friend then had to overturn. The point I am trying to make is that what this House and another place can do is equally important. I always used to feel that any Secretary of State from another place with whom I worked needed two or three defeats in this House before they understood its importance. My noble friend learned that and we dealt with the problems.

We talk to a large number of different departments; we will continue to do so and we will continue to be the rural advocate. As part of our changes to rural policy, Defra’s rural capacity will be significantly increased to create a new rural communities policy unit. That unit will expand on the existing policy work of the department, moving to a single organisation to act as the rural champion within government—and that rural champion is Defra. This will remove duplication, improve efficiency and improve our focus on priority issues for rural communities.

In moving the amendment, my noble friend Lord Greaves asked about staffing issues and the transitional period. This is very important. I can assure my noble friend that 14 staff from the CRC have already transferred to Defra as they are connected to work which will be undertaken in the rural communities policy unit. This will assist in building upon the relationships that the commission has built up. In addition, any vacant posts in the new unit—and we expect there to be at least some—will be advertised so that commission staff without an automatic right of transfer can apply for those positions.

The noble Lord, Lord Knight, asked about the RDPE and whether the CRC was responsible for that network. That function has been transferred to Defra and the three CRC staff undertaking the work have been transferred; they are among the 14. I must make it clear to the noble Lord that the CRC was not responsible for the full RDPE programme, which is a wider matter.

One of the most important issues to address is costs. What we are doing is not only about saving money, but we expect significant savings to come from this action. This is important in terms of our contribution to reducing the deficit. We, as a Government, inherited a very large deficit from the party opposite when they were in government and we all have to do our bit to reduce it. Obviously there will be up-front costs as a result of the change and redundancies, and those are estimated at less than £2.5 million. These will be far outweighed by the long-term savings, estimated to be in the region of £4.5 million a year. That is a significant sum. There are very good reasons for wanting to continue to attack the deficit and we will continue to do so. However, as I have made clear to the Committee, that is not the sole reason for our doing this.