Farming in the Uplands - ARCHIVE: Defra

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.
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Not to be published in full, or part, in any form before
00.01am GMT Wednesday 16 February 2011