Farming in the Uplands - ARCHIVE: Defra

Ev 46 Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee: Evidence
17 November 2010 James Paice MP, Jeremy Eppel and Dan Osgood
Mr Paice: We can in terms of agreement with Europe.
Yes, we could go to Europe and say, “Yes, we want
to change the split.” The reality, given that we’ve just
been through the CSR process and all these
programmes have been under immense scrutiny, is
we’re not going to try. We’ve already had to cool
down spending across the piece, and I don’t think
there’s any real scope now, for the remainder of these
three years, to change the picture, as much as I might
like to.
Q212 Mrs Glindon: Minister, can I just go back to
what you were saying about post-2013 and the
localism issue? You said LEPs are a possible way of
distributing funds. If that didn’t happen through LEPs,
the thing with the RDAs now is that they use local
knowledge, which is important. I have an example in
my own constituency, where the local abattoir just
received £200,000 through One North East. It’s
managed by Natural England, and the Forestry
Commission has also okayed that money. That means
we’re now going to have an EU-standard abattoir, and
animals won’t be slaughtered out of the area as they
have been for a while now. It’s about that localism
issue. Is that not really an important part of
distributing the funds to farmers? If LEPs aren’t the
people to manage it, how will you hold on to that
very local knowledge for the production industry as
a whole?
Mr Paice: LEPs may very well be the right vehicle.
All I’m saying, or meant to say—I hope I did say it—
was that we haven’t made those decisions yet, because
that will be for post-2013. We can’t do it at the
moment because, as Mr Blenkinsop was saying, there
aren’t LEPs in every area. As I say, because of the
relatively small amount of money left unallocated, it’s
just not worth the huge investment that would be
involved in setting up new structures. Post-2013, yes,
LEPs are clearly in probably the primary position. All
I’m saying is that we haven’t given a definitive
answer, but they may well be right.
Your point about an abattoir is extremely valid.
There’s been one in Suffolk helped by the eastern
region one in the last couple of years, from the same
funding. They are very important and very relevant. If
anything, I have a concern that LEPs may almost be
too small in some cases. Some LEPs are going to be
huge and some are going to be very small. You then
face the issue of how rural individual LEPs are. One
of the criticisms of even RDAs has been, in some
areas, that they have frankly not faced up to the rural
aspects of their region. That could be even worse with
smaller LEPs. As I say, no decision has been made. I
certainly haven’t come to any personal view on the
subject, and LEPs are clearly a major opportunity.
Mrs Glindon: What I wanted to clarify was whether
local knowledge will be an important factor. RDAs
have local knowledge and can work with local
communities. Will that be a factor? I think it’s
important to upland communities—to any
community—to know that the people making the
decisions have the local knowledge. That’s the key
thing I was trying to hint at, Chair.
Mr Paice: That’s the big achievement of the Leader
programme, which I referred to. Leader programmes
are where funding is allocated sub-RDA to a
partnership in a particular area. That may involve
local authorities, the local agricultural societies in
some cases, all sorts of local groups—parish councils,
etc. They will then be allocating. That really is driving
localism right down to a very, very small area—much
smaller than a LEP area. That’s working now. That
system is there and they’ve already got large sums of
money out of most RDAs, and they are spending it
locally. I used the example of the agricultural society,
because I happen to know that, in the North West
RDA, there are some agricultural societies,
particularly the Cumbria Agricultural Society if my
memory serves me right, which are leading the Leader
programme, and actually making the really local
decisions that we all think should be the basis of it.
There is a lot of it already happening under Leader.
Q213 Tom Blenkinsop: The NFU’s Head of Policy
Services, Andrew Clark, said, “Reading through the
initial proposals,” regarding LEPs, “it is apparent that
farming and food are recognised as key sectors by
only a handful of LEPs.” You were talking about inscope
issues of RDAs being equally applicable to
LEPs; I think you alluded to that in your comments.
Given that the minimum threshold for bids to the
Regional Growth Fund is £1 million, and given the
small size of upland farming enterprises, realistically,
how will upland farmers benefit from the fund,
especially now as we also know—
Mr Paice: Sorry, what fund are you saying is a
minimum of £1 million?
Tom Blenkinsop: In order to tap into the Regional
Growth Fund via the LEP, you have to put in a
minimum bid of £1 million. That was supposed to be
for England excluding the South East; we now know,
since Vince Cable’s recent announcement, that South
East companies can apply for that fund as well. Do
you think that will lessen the amount of money that
farmers and agricultural businesses can tap into?
Mr Paice: I’m not going to pretend to you that I’m
an expert on the Regional Growth Fund and how
much money is in total available to it. Obviously it
stands to reason that the wider any fund is spread or
potentially spread, the slightly lesser chance there is
for individuals. If your point is about a threshold of
£1 million, clearly the agricultural industry—as I find
in doing this job and going around the country—is a
vast range of things. There are some cooperative
ventures that are spending millions of pounds. For
them to put up a million pound application to the
Regional Growth Fund wouldn’t be a big problem.
For the small guy who wants to put up a £30,000
slurry store, clearly it’s not going to be appropriate,
but then maybe RDPE is.
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Q214 Tom Blenkinsop: The point I’m getting at is
that originally the Regional Growth Fund was
supposed to be for areas excluding the South East. It
now includes the South East. It’s been increased to
£1.4 billion but, as you said or alluded to, there are
bigger businesses or corporates that have the capital
there to apply for that fund, but the small- and
medium-sized businesses are getting excluded,
especially as that Regional Growth Fund has to pay