Farming in the Uplands - ARCHIVE: Defra

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56 Farming in the Uplands Exmoor National Park Authority Ev w23 Federation of Cumbria Commoners Ev w1 Friends of the Earth Ev w19 National Trust Ev w11 North West Upland Farming Forum Ev w2 Pennine Prospects Ev w28 Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) Ev w14 Rural Development Agencies Rural Affairs Network Ev w6 South West Uplands Federation Ev w5 List of Reports from the Committee during the current Parliament The reference number of the Government’s response to each Report is printed in brackets after the HC printing number. Session 2010–11 First Report Future Flood and Water Management Legislation HC 522 First Special Report The National Forest: Government response to the Committee’s Fourth Report of Session 2009–11 HC 400 Second Special Report Dairy Farmers of Britain: Government response to the Committee’s Fifth Report of Session 2009–10 HC 401 Second Report The Marine Policy Statement HC 635 EMBARGOED ADVANCE COPY: Not to be published in full, or part, in any form before 00.01am GMT Wednesday 16 February 2011
Oral evidence Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee: Evidence Ev 1 Taken before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee Thomas Docherty George Eustice Mrs Mary Glindon on Wednesday 27 October 2010 Members present: Miss Anne McIntosh, in the Chair Neil Parish Dan Rogerson Amber Rudd ________________ Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Dr Stuart Burgess, Chairman, Commission for Rural Communities, and Professor Mark Shucksmith, Commissioner, Commission for Rural Communities, gave evidence. Q1 Chair: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Could I formally open the session? I’m delighted to welcome Dr Burgess. Thank you very much for joining us. I know you have a close connection to North Yorkshire, so it’s a particular pleasure. Would you like to introduce your colleague for the record, Dr Burgess? Stuart Burgess: I will indeed, if I may. Thank you very much for this opportunity. This is Professor Mark Shucksmith, who is from the University of Newcastle and is a Commissioner with us in the Commission for Rural Communities. Q2 Chair: You’re both very welcome. Have you had any indications yet from the Government in response to your report? Stuart Burgess: No. Q3 Chair: Have the Government pledged to introduce an upland and hill farming strategy, in conversations with you? Stuart Burgess: Jeremy Eppel is the person who’s promoting this at the moment on behalf of the Government. I met Jeremy yesterday and had a very useful conversation with him. He helpfully mapped out where his thinking was going. He’s been around the country, et cetera. With others, he is formulating a response, hopefully by February. Q4 Chair: How would you define “uplands”? Stuart Burgess: This is a very interesting question. We’ve struggled with that. I’ll bring Mark in, if I may, in a moment. If, for example, you focus on Yorkshire for a moment—a familiar territory to yourself and, indeed, to myself, having worked in that space for about 15 years—and if you go to the North Yorkshire Moors, it’s pretty obvious the uplands are there. If you go for example down into the South West, then people may say, “Where are the uplands here?” Mark, I think you, better than I can, will help answer that one. Professor Shucksmith: Thank you, Stuart. It was a really difficult definitional point. We decided to take a pragmatic approach, in terms of the report that we produced. We defined the uplands in terms of the lessfavoured areas, including both the disadvantaged and the specially disadvantaged areas. Of course, when you do that, you include quite a lot of urban areas as well as rural areas. We were able to differentiate between different sub-areas within the uplands very much in the meetings that we held, and the evidence that we had from people in the different regions. Quite a lot of the evidence we were given at meetings was people talking about the more upland uplands, if you understand what I mean—what we might imagine in popular imagination to be the uplands. The formal definitions and the statistics we included in the State of the Countryside Update: Uplands cover the Less Favoured Areas in general. Q5 Chair: Are you hampered by the fact that there’s no statutory definition of “uplands” or “hill farm” generally? Stuart Burgess: I think that it would be rather nice to have a particular tight definition over all this. The only problem with that is there needs to be some kind of flexibility. Mark rightly talked about the sparsely populated areas or the Less Favoured Areas, but it’s also to do with remoteness. We struggled with this for a long time in our reports. We couldn’t come up with a tightly defined definition, but Mark may wish to comment on that. Professor Shucksmith: I could refer you to page 26 of our report, which sets out the agonising we did, and we defined the uplands in the end. We talk about the many ways of defining the uplands, and the severely disadvantaged areas. In terms of hampering us, we were just trying to understand the problems and use this for the purposes of an inquiry. We found, pragmatically, a way through it. The question looking forward is whether it would hamper Government in terms of formulating policy. I think the Government will need a definition of the uplands, if they’re going to have an uplands policy, whether they take the same line as us or a more narrowly drawn one. In the context of reviewing the Less Favoured Areas in general anyway, I guess it’s one of the things we’ll look for in their response. Stuart Burgess: There’s also sheer diversity that is around in the upland areas. Obviously we gathered evidence from Northumberland and Yorkshire, and in Cumbria and the High Peaks, and down to the South West. The sheer diversity that is around in those upland areas is enormous. EMBARGOED ADVANCE COPY: Not to be published in full, or part, in any form before 00.01am GMT Wednesday 16 February 2011
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