All change at Defra – not quite

And so we say farewell to Liz Truss and Rory Stewart – both of whom were promoted in Theresa May’s reshuffle.  Truss remains in the Cabinet and got the bigger job in Justice (never has a promotion been so unjust) and Rory Stewart is made Minister of State at International Development. Only George Eustice, the only Brexit-favouring minister in Defra, and the one who knew a little about his brief and did a little too, remains. It is easy to see why the minister who knows a little had to remain to prop up the new Secretary of State, but quite why Truss and Stewart should have been rewarded with promotions is unclear.

Truss was a complete disaster in Defra and Stewart was a nonentity despite the great hopes invested in him by some wildlife NGOs. Stewart delivered nothing for nature and now he’s gone.  Wildlife NGOs should learn from this and not give the incoming ministers too much of a honeymoon period and not be so fooled by smooth talking.

You might think that no-one could be worse than Truss as Secretary of State but the incoming Andrea Leadsom (be honest, had you heard of her a couple of weeks ago?) might be actively awful rather than passively awful. We’ll have to see, and every incoming minister deserves a period when they can get their feet under the desk, their heads around the subjects and their views straightened out for public consumption.

However, the signs are not too good.  As a climate minister Leadsom asked whether climate change was real, and as a candidate for Leader of the Conservative Party she promised a vote on fox-hunting. She is said to be in favour of flogging off our forests too.  Leadsom’s grasp of agriculture (she suggested there should be sheep in the big fields and butterflies up the hills) appears to be at Ladybird Book level – which may mean that she hasn’t yet been completely nobbled by the NFU or CLA.  Her South Northants constituency is a rare oasis of fairly mixed farming.  Also, worryingly, Leadsom is known to be close in thinking to Owen Paterson who was a close supporter of hers in the leadership contest. Crikey!

One of the very biggest jobs she has to do over the next year – for it cannot take much longer than that without confidence in farming and land prices dribbling away – is to set out a path for English farming.  There are two questions that need to be answered: how much should the taxpayer give to farmers in a post-CAP world and what conditions should the nurse in Newcastle and the builder in Brixton expect to see imposed on farming in return for their dosh.

The instincts of the Tory Right are to remove all the subsidies and let the market deliver a wonderful future for us all because individual action for profit is so likely to deliver public goods – they believe. This is, generally, a pretty discredited view anyway, but particularly in agriculture where the public goods we want from farming are non-market goods such as Skylark song, insect-rich meadows, flood relief, carbon storage and clean unpolluted water.

There has been a clear out of brains and experience in Defra civil servants and Natural England and a killing off of environmental think-tanks and quangos – so Defra is looking very exposed on the issue. Leadsom needs to read the Curry report back from 2001 days, and maybe ought to call on some of its authors to help her come up with some clever stuff. Or will she just take Opatz’s advice as good enough because he owns a bit of land? We’ll see.

Potentially, there is a lot to play for, and the wildlife and environmental NGOs need to form a coalition to present a strong and convincing case to Defra and to dispel the self-serving views that may come from the NFU in particular.  We’ll see how keen the Tory Right is to see subsidies removed and to face the (rather low) electoral consequences now they have the chance to do what they have always said they wanted to do and would do.

The future of agriculture policy is also a good test of PM May’s promise that her government will act for the many and not the powerful few. Defra needs to appeal to the public over the heads of land owners to deliver a fairer and more effective agriculture policy and to do that they need NGO help too.

Personally, I’d like to see less money going into farming from my taxes but that money being spent to much better effect. Ignore the vested interests and that is surely possible.

We must all hope that Mrs Leadsom does a good job because the job is an important one.  However, it would be a great test of anyone’s ability to produce something cogent, effective, efficient and popular in the next few months using the few assets left at their disposal after the pillaging of Whitehall’s environmental expertise by the last six years of government.

This is not a time for dogma, nor is it a time for dithering.  You can see why Truss would have been completely unsuited to this task and Stewart would not have been much help either. I don’t rate Eustice that highly, but at least he knows a bit – he may know enough to know that he and his new boss need a lot of help from a wide circle of people, and not just vested interests. Their new colleague, Therese Coffey (185 signatures), at least has several RSPB nature reserves, including Minsmere, in her constituency.

These are interesting times, and although there is much at stake in other areas too, the future of the farmed landscape of England will probably be set on its path in the next 18 months.

 

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