Spending cuts will test Defra to its limit

Farmers and civil servants are not natural bedfellows.

Ask anyone who has been on the receiving end of an RPA inspection or who has been subject to an Environment Agency investigation.

For many, the very mention of bureaucracy and inspections is enough to bring on a feeling of impending doom. So, is it any wonder that the story most commented on this week at www.farmersguardian.com is headlined Defra spending cuts will be bloody.

There were precious few people on our website willing to stick up for Defra, and even fewer who were positive about Natural England and the Environment Agency.

Defra’s £700 million question

Last Wednesday at a press conference Defra Secretary Caroline Spelman was asked how her department would save £700 million over the next four years. She got to £316 million before running out of answers. The worrying thing is she either doesn’t know where the rest of the savings will come from or she doesn’t want to tell us.

Ominous either way.

£700 million is equivalent to a 29 per cent cut in her department’s spending and it was the figure outlined by Chancellor George Osborne in his Comprehensive Spending Review to help Britain reduce its crippling debt.

Mrs Spelman announced the following savings to our huddle of eager journalists:

• £66 million in rural development money
• £61 million in flood defence spend
• £174 million by reducing staff numbers and making administration efficiencies
• She cobbled together a further £3 million saving by stopping 7 waste PFI projects and £12 million by reforming the Environment Agency’s staff lease car scheme (whatever that is)

That is a total saving of £316 million over the next four years.

But despite repeated questioning from the bemused hacks she failed to divulge where the remaining £384 million savings would come from. 

Nobody denies the need to make savings but farmers want more answers on where. Will it be found down the back of a Defra sofa?

The day of a thousand cuts dawns

IT IS the day reality bites – for the Coalition Government and its public.

The pre-election debate, between Labour and Tories in particular, was defined by the age old left-right debate how to drag yourself out of recession – spend or cut.

The Tories, with a little help from their Lib Dem friends, won and today – October 20, 2010 – is the long promised day of reckoning. The day that will change people’s lives and, even at this very early stage, could define how long David Cameron stays in power.

The Comprehensive Spending Review, set to be unveiled at 12.30 today, is as the NFU’s Martin Haworth said yesterday going to be ‘bloody’, with the aftershock felt across Government and society.

London’s tremendous array of farmers

I am a Farmers Guardian reporter and I live I London.

Every morning I leave my flat in Vauxhall and peddle my trusty bike to work.

I speed past some major landmarks including MI6, the Houses of Parliament and the London Eye before arriving at FG’s plush (ish) London office on the Southbank.

It is a route laden with long lens tourists, sharp suited businessmen and aggressive bendy busses. An altogether urban affair.  

But scratch the surface and there is a hive of bizarre farming activity to be found.

Take this week.

Monday – I receive a call from Defra and am diverted off my normal cycle route to Savile Row, the world’s premier tailoring street. I arrive to find 50 sheep grazing on grass which has been laid across the entire street. Farmers in flat caps are talking to the astonished public about why British wool is so great.

Tuesday – I am led out of a meeting in the House of Commons to find a hot air balloon has landed. Who is there? The Renewable Energy Association telling a gaggle of excited MPs why they must defend the Renewable Heat Incentive, which will pay farmers a healthy subsidy for every unit of heat they generate from a renewable source.

Wednesday – As I return from a meeting I overtake a vintage Nuffield Tractor which is driving along the Mall towards Buckingham Palace. I have no idea what it was doing. It could have been the Queen.   

Thursday – I awake to the familiar lowing of a cow. It all feels a bit Bethlehem. I look out of my window to see two Jersey cows grazing in the park. My flat may be in deepest darkest central London but it is also next door to a city farm.  

Friday – That’s tomorrow. I am excited. Cows riding on the underground perhaps.

The Defra honeymoon continues…but for how long?

Defra is still honeymooning, walking in a farmer wonderland. But how long will it last?

At last year’s Conservative Party conference Jim Paice, the then shadow farming minister, said if he got into Government he would to cut red-tape, tackle badgers, ditch unhelpful quangos and put British farming back on the Government agenda.

Eyes in the audience lit up, but the farmer next to me had a four word riposte, and while I can’t repeat the first word, the second three went: “Talk is cheap.”

Now Jim Paice is the Farming Minister he has a lot to deliver on, and he knows it more than anyone.

“We were out of power so long I got to make a lot of promises over the years,” said a rueful Mr Paice when he addressed the NFU fringe event at this year’s party conference in Birmingham.

But the positive atmosphere from a packed audience of over 100 people at the fringe event (admittedly mostly party faithful but also many farmers and industry representatives) was a good signal that Mr Paice has made rapid progress in a short space of time in power.

Putting the ‘F’ into the General Election

THE Tories want to put the ‘F’ back into Defra. It was, after all, the present government that took it out in a highly symbolic gesture in 2001. Actually, it was the letter ‘A’ but the effect was the same.

In a post-election departmental revamp, Tony Blair replaced the disgraced Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Maff), with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). ‘Agriculture’ out, ‘Environment’ in.

The NFU had to fight hard to even get the word ‘food’ onto the Nobel House nameplate, it is said. MAFF, long seen as an agent of the industry, had paid the price for the foot-and-mouth disease calamity.

Defra arrived with a new agenda. It placed the environment at heart of all it controlled, including food and farming policy – all-too-often, farmers maintained, at the expense of their ability to produce food.

The Conservatives pledge to put ‘Farming’ or ‘Agriculture’ back on the Nobel House nameplate, if elected on May 6, is a neat ploy to state their farming credentials against this backdrop.