Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

One thing that this debate has achieved is to remind us of the great breadth of DEFRA's responsibilities: the environment, food and rural affairs. Unfortunately, farming is not mentioned in the title, and yet it is essential to so many of the Department's activities. In that context, I remind the House of the interest I have declared in the register. I want to start by referring to some of the Secretary of State's remarks. There is no contradiction between recognising—rightly—the expertise, knowledge, enthusiasm and commitment of individual members of his staff, and our overall concerns about the lack of co-ordination, direction and management that have given rise to the perception, which so many of my hon. Friends have referred to, that the Department is, as my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Moss) said, not fit for purpose. I thought at one stage in the Secretary of State's litany of what he claimed as successes that he was going to claim credit for the non-flooding of eastern England, following the surge that did not quite happen a few weeks ago. I can just remember the 1953 floods—I was a very small child living on the Suffolk coast—and they were horrendous. However, we should not do anything other than thank goodness that they were not repeated. The Department cannot take the credit—or criticism—because thankfully the defences and the plans were not properly tested. I also want to refer briefly to foot and mouth. We have already had an Opposition day debate on that subject so I do not intend to spend a great deal of time on it. In response to the hon. Member for Carlisle (Mr. Martlew), in that debate I said that of course the Government had learned the lessons of 2001. God forbid that they had not, because, as he and others have said, it is almost impossible to imagine the situation being any worse than it was at that time. The Secretary of State made no reference to the £50 million overspend on administration, which the permanent secretary described to the Select Committee a week or so ago. When it comes to cutting the number of staff, the Secretary of State referred to meeting the head-count targets, but said nothing to explain why those staff were taken on in the first place if they are supernumerary to requirements. If they are required, why are we getting rid of them? Most importantly, having to make in-year cuts demonstrates the incompetence of management. Invariably, those cuts can be met only by cutting expenditure at the front line, not letting contracts that have not yet been let, and not carrying out front-line functions, because we all know that cutting staff does not save money in the year that one does it, because of all the associated costs. My hon. Friend the Member for North-East Cambridgeshire and my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr. Cox) made it absolutely clear that the perception of DEFRA on the ground in farming is very different from that which the Secretary of State described to the House. They both described cases in their constituencies where incompetence and bureaucracy got in the way of the farmers going about their business. The hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs. Moon), for whom I have a lot of respect when it comes to environmental issues, rightly talked about the importance of biodiversity; I agree with a great deal of what she said. I thought that she had to scrape the barrel to find a criticism to make of the previous Conservative Government. It was that Government who introduced the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981—a major trail-blazing piece of legislation on which much legislation has recently been based. That Government also introduced environmentally sensitive areas, and the pilot environmental stewardship schemes on which the right hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley) built when he took up ministerial responsibilities.