Is this the way to run the Environment Department?

The new SoS at Defra, Angela Eagle

I wish Angela Eagle well in her new role as Secretary of State at Defra. She has the experience of being a junior minister in Defra and a range of other departments that will equip her for this important role. The eagle has landed.

Not that most Prime Ministers seem to regard this as an important role dealing, as it does, with the whole of the natural world, the food we eat and the countryside that still makes up about 90% of the UK land area (and responsibilities for some of what goes on offshore too).  As usual, most of the Cabinet positions had been announced before we reached Defra (and Energy Security and Net Zero) as it is regarded as a junior department – the place to house people on their way up as a test (often failed) or those who deserve a last chance at a Cabinet position before being thanked and sent off to the back benches or the upper chamber.

It’s far better when someone good (I hope Ms Eagle will be one of them) has it as their last hurrah because they will want to leave a meaningful legacy. John Gummer was a prime example, and as a minister of state in John Prescott’s enormous department, so was Michael Meacher.

Previous environment secretaries

How often have we heard that we are on our sixth PM since David Cameron departed almost a decade ago. How many Environment Secretaries have we had in that time? Go on – how many? And what were their names? Angela Eagle will be the eleventh following in the largely undistinguished footsteps of; Liz Truss (awful), Andrea Leadsom (too brief to tell), Michael Gove (good in many parts), Theresa Villiers (came and went), George Eustice (good, if you are a Tory, which the government was), Janil Jayawardena (six weeks, thank the Lord it wasn’t longer), Therese Coffey (awful), Steve Barclay (barely eight months and I can remember nothing good or bad), Steve Reed (poor) and Emma Reynolds (who?).

Very few of the above were interested in any of the things that Defra has to do – many of them wished they had a different job, or would have a better job next. Defra is judged not on financial outcomes but on whether towns flood, diseases of livestock or crops spread, farmers protest, greens moan weakly in the background and the shelves in supermarkets are empty. It’s akin to the Home Secretary role where successes will not be cheered by all parties but failures will be lambasted by all. Tough job! A particularly tough job because budgets have been cut, civil servants are dispirited and it is complex. Somebody might come into your office and want to know what you are going to do about the decline of some species you’ve never heard of (and care little about) or why you aren’t allowing farmers to use cutting edge chemicals (wildlife poisons) with less red-taped gold-plated regulation.

A period in office of less than a year (true of half of Angela Eagle’s predecessors above) is not enough time to get your head around the issues even if you really want to. Gove was a good Secretary of State because he is very clever and he was well-advised, and he was in the job for just over two years. Eustice was good (judged by what a Tory ought to be doing) because he was a farmer by profession, had served in Defra for years before becoming Secretary of State and had two and a half years in the job (a job which he relinquished by resigning on a matter of principle)).

Let us hope that Angela Eagle gets a fair crack of the whip in the job as in a government with a large majority there is always the temptation to promote from the back-benches to keep the mass of MPs toeing the line.

The ministerial team

The Defra website, as of this morning, does not seem to have caught up with the fact that Mary Creagh has left the government, at least according to No 10 but nor yet has Ms Creagh’s own website which, you can see (at least at 06:49 this Thursday morning), has much information about her role as Minister for Nature. She will be missed as an experienced and committed environmentalist who chaired the Environmental Audit Committee in former times. Her loss of experience from the ministerial team must be a blow.

Sue Hayman, also experienced, remains as Defra’s minister in the House of Lords.

Emma Hardy who has been at Defra since Labour came to power, is now a Minister of State (promotion).

Stephen Morgan was appointed over a month ago by Keir Starmer when Angela Eagle moved out of Defra to the Cabinet office for a few weeks. No 10 thinks that Morgan is a Parliamentary Under Secretary whereas Defra thinks he is a Minister of State – they can’t both be right (was he demoted overnight?).

Jenny Riddell-Carpenter is a new arrival at Defra and she has a tiny majority in Suffolk Coastal. Apart from being photographed at a CLA event I know very little about her. Between her, Hardy and Morgan, Riddell-Carpenter has all the farmland across the three constituencies in her patch and most of the nature reserves too.

Hardy, Morgan and Riddell-Carpenter have degrees in politics.

There’s not a lot of visible interest in Defra’s roles in their backgrounds as far as I can see. That doesn’t mean that they won’t be competent or brilliant ministers, but it does mean they have a lot to learn as most newly arrived Defra ministers do. What is an SSSI? How does the public subsidise farmers’ living standards? What would food security really look like? What does our Land Use Framework look like? What is our strategy for farming?

Defra management board

The top civil servants and non-exec directors of Defra retain grouse moor owner Heather Hancock as lead non-exec (for previous mentions on this blog click here, here, here, here and here). Ms Hancock’s own personal interest in the hobby of shooting birds for fun and owning a grouse moor on which to do it appears to be, from their biographies assembled by Defra, almost all of the experience of the countryside and nature that the board of non-execs can muster amongst them. I’m just going by the environmental content of their biographies supplied by the Department of Environment – I haven’t gone any further, so far, than that.

Is this the way to run the Environment Department? Or is it the way to ruin the environment?

 

 

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