TUESDAY 21 JULY 1998

MRS HEATHER HANCOCK and MR CLIVE KIRKBRIDE

  100.  So it is a very, very small fraction of that 7,500 kilometres you have?
  (Mr Kirkbride)  Yes.

  101.  We have an acute shortage in the number of trained and skilled people to ensure the protection of field boundaries. What can we do about this shortage? What would you like to propose?
  (Mr Kirkbride)  What the Authority has been involved in is trying to get off the ground this idea of an apprenticeship scheme working with farmers. We would call it something like the Dales Countryside Apprenticeship Scheme, which is put forward as a possible project for ESF funding through Objective 5b. We have had to pull back from that a bit because we are working with the education sector as well to deliver, but they are more interested in getting students on courses; and as we heard this morning from a dry stone waller, he would much rather have an apprentice working for him on-site for perhaps up to 12 months. This is certainly a scheme in which we would like to get involved in if at all possible.

  102.  We have heard from other witnesses up to now that there is dissatisfaction with the current professional regulations, and that perhaps they should be scrapped and something else should be put in their place. I would like to ask either of you, which do you feel is the most appropriate, and if you could outline what ought to be there instead.
  (Mr Kirkbride)  If we are looking at protecting what we have from damage and disturbance and removal rather than maintenance, if we have to have regulations we need something which is simple to operate, both by the landowners and by the local authorities who have to administer it. One of the suggestions that we made to the Review Panel, looking specifically at that, was that a prior notification system might be an answer along the lines of how we deal with trees in conservation areas. In other words, it would not be planning control. The farmer, at no cost, would notify the authority that he wished to carry out work to a hedgerow or dry stone wall. The local authority would then look at it, using their judgment as to whether or not it was locally important and whether or not it ought to be protected.

  103.  Who would be arbiter there if it was still a fairly informal thing?
  (Mr Kirkbride)  The present trees in conservation area regulations work very effectively. We have found from our experience of using those regulations over a 20-year period that there has not been a need for arbitration.

  104.  Why cannot the system simply be brought into the planning system?
  (Mr Kirkbride)  It would be very cumbersome. I think the planning system to control something like this is a bit of a hammer to slam the nut, if you like. It is too small an issue to be dealt with by planning control. We need something which offers adequate protection but is more informal, certainly user-friendly. Farmers would find themselves in a very awkward position if they had to pay a planning fee to consider an application to remove a wall, which they may consider was fully justified in agricultural terms.

  105.  You could have a very low fee, could you not?
  (Mr Kirkbride)  You could, yes.
  (Mrs Hancock)  But that would require a change in the planning regulations for that to happen. There is a standard fixed fee across the country at the moment.
  (Mr Kirkbride)  It would be more bureaucratic as well.

  106.  I notice you mentioned enhanced notifications, but there have been suggestions that you could actually turn that round and have consent as the key element, i.e. a request for consent rather than notification, when the local authority then has to take a view. Assuming that there will be a view, as it were, before you have started to make the change, would you be in favour of that process? That is, moving towards getting it in the planning system.
  (Mr Kirkbride)  I cannot say I have any particular view point about that. At the end of the day what is important is whether the local authority knows whether or not that field boundary is important by whatever criteria it is operating. One system essentially requires a survey of all boundaries to be done in advance so you know what you have. The other system allows you to look at each field boundary as you get a notification to do the work to it. It is a question of resources and priorities.

  107.  Where the National Park is investing resources, how do you find persuading farmers? Is it easy to persuade farmers and landowners?
  (Mrs Hancock)  It is one of the easiest things to tackle in the National Park. It is far easier than persuading them to renovate a redundant barn or plant woodland. That is a reflection of the fact that in the Dales we are still seeing largely traditional farming practices, so these walls do still have a value. They are often on very long-held tenancies or family farms, so they have some cultural importance as well. We do not know whether that is going to be as easy in the future with increased pressure on farmers in the uplands and potential changes in farming practices; and whether we will find it is as easy in the future to persuade farmers to maintain their field walls.

  108.  What about internal boundaries? I can understand the position of a boundary where it relates to a road or a boundary between holdings, but we have certainly heard evidence from other people that one of the problems relates to a farmer's internal boundary and the extent to which a farmer will consider that worth preserving.
  (Mrs Hancock)  There is a bigger issue in relation to internal field boundaries, but even there I still think that those boundaries are largely being used for stock management and farm purposes, so we are still pushing at an open door.

  109.  Would you favour any system of cross-compliance in terms of putting conditions on grants for your purposes?
  (Mrs Hancock)  We would be very, very strongly in favour of that.

  110.  How do you think that might work? What sort of requirements would you be in favour of putting on?
  (Mrs Hancock)  Ideally we would like to see ourselves and other agencies involved able to take a more consistent whole-farm approach on this issue. This also helps us deal with problems of the wall resources, the actual stone we require and various other issues there are surrounding the built landscape on this agricultural land. So we want to tie more closely together in the way we are already doing with our Farm Conservation Scheme, in the way that Countryside Stewardship already does to an extent; to tie all these schemes together and require a maintenance of existing boundaries, particularly internal boundaries, which do not necessarily have large gaps in them. It is a short-term maintenance issue which is avoiding our getting to the large grant situation in future because of dereliction.

  111.  Is that not unfair? What you are saying is that the farmer who has most features has to spend most money maintaining those features in order to get the same grant as his neighbour, who has less features on his farm, would get.
  (Mrs Hancock)  You can have a level of graded support to cope with that. Also, possibly in the Dales we do not have such a wide range of holding sizes to have the same disparity that you may have in other parts of the country.

  112.  Could you take me a little further into your idea of a whole-farm approach. Do you consider that current intensive schemes are perhaps missing the point in terms of the extent to which they could incentivise, for their own good perhaps, to undertake field boundary protection.
  (Mrs Hancock)  Our feeling as an Authority, from our experts involved in this, their work in the field, is that the new Countryside Stewardship Scheme is getting much closer to the really workable scheme which is going to deliver the kind of benefits we are looking for. Mistakes have clearly been made in the past with some of the ESA type schemes which have been put in that, and cross-compliance was not as clearly thought out or as well tied together as it might have been. However, certainly the feeling we are getting from our officers is that the new Stewardship Scheme is moving in the right direction on that.

  113.  Even with the relatively long timescale involved?
  (Mrs Hancock)  Yes.
  (Mr Kirkbride)  Where the whole-farm approach has an advantage over many other schemes is that you can actually look at the whole farm and decide a range of conservation, environmental, recreation benefits or whatever, that you can build into that agreement at the point you sign it with the farmer, as opposed to missing out on a number of other issues. So we have a much wider range of benefits in our relatively small pilot Farm Conservation Scheme, we believe, than the ESA, for example, which can only take a farm approach on the basis of the land within the boundary of that scheme. So we can tackle other issues which we think have wider environmental benefits. That is the beauty of the whole-farm approach.

  114.  The Stewardship Scheme. It was started by the Countryside Commission as an experiment. It took quite a lot of time to get people interested in it. It now appears that there are more farmers interested in it than there is money to go round. What ought to happen? Ought it to become much better funded, or has it served its purpose as an experimental system and ought to be put much more into the mainstream of agricultural farming?
  (Mr Kirkbride)  If one is looking at swapping money between various agricultural support systems one could certainly argue that. As far as whether Stewardship has lost its purpose, I would argue strongly that it has not. In fact, it is getting better year by year. We have noticed a steady improvement both in the way it is operated and also in the range of incentives it can offer, and the range of environmental issues that it is tackling on the farm. Once it moves into the whole-farm phase we will really begin to see its virtue. However, it does come back to the point you made about funding. It does need to be funded to satisfy the demand for it. There is no point in having a scheme where you have a large proportion of farmers and landowners wanting to take the benefit of them, therefore benefiting the environment, and being told that there is not the resources because "your scheme has not met the priority scoring this time and we will defer it for next year or no time ever." It needs to be adequately funded as part of the whole agricultural support policies.

  115.  So you think funding is the key to it?
  (Mr Kirkbride)  Yes.

  116.  What about the points system within it? Does the points system correspond with the priorities that you have listed above?
  (Mr Kirkbride)  In the Yorkshire Dales, where we have delivered the scheme on behalf of MAFF, we were very much involved in the whole process of targeting and prioritising; so certainly in the Dales, where there has been this local involvement in the national scheme, we feel that the points system corresponds with the priorities. Clearly I could not answer for elsewhere in the country.

  117.  Right, but it is tending to have one farmer here and one farmer there. Often the best ways of passing on information is for the farmer to look over his wall and see what his neighbour is doing. Would it not be better to try to build up six or seven Stewardship patches all together rather than have them scattered all over the Park?
  (Mrs Kirkbride)  Again, this is essentially through the targeting process as it happens in the Dales. In fact, we would actually do it. Most of our Stewardship applications do tend to be clustered because of the targeting approach that is being taken.

  118.  Fine. How far is Stewardship in conflict with all the other systems of support?
  (Mrs Hancock)  There does not seem to be any particular evidence that this is a problem in the National Park area. Farmers might be confused where to go first, but most of the schemes we are operating or involved in or see operating in the National Park do not tread on each other's toes too much. The information point is much more difficult for farmers.
  (Mr Kirkbride)  So the schemes are very much complementary, building on strengths rather than competing in the same business.

  119.  How do you react to the charge that is sometimes levied, that if you are a farmer and you have the misfortune to be close to an area which is visited very often with tourists coming to the National Park, you will be persuaded to comply to a much greater extent than if you are in the middle of nowhere and no-one comes to see you? Is that a policy which you, in any way feel, accurately describes what you do?
  (Mr Kirkbride)  No.
  (Mrs Hancock)  No.

  120.  When we visited Malham Cove there was a debate, for example, about a dry stone wall which ran alongside the beck, that this might be restored. This certainly seemed to me to be a suggestion which would be very expensive per metre, would perform no function as far as the field boundary was concerned, and yet it was a possibility that a lot of resource would be put into that when perhaps a farmer elsewhere might say, "I would like to take part in the Stewardship Scheme and it is over-subscribed."
  (Mr Kirkbride)  That is a good instance to raise but it is not something we would force on the landowners. We have the option, if the landowner is willing—remember, we are dealing with a grant scheme—but a landowner still has to make that contribution. Unless we are going to say, "We think it is so important that we will give you 100 per cent and we will build it for you," and the landowner says, "I'm sorry but I can't find my 20 per cent for that particular project," or, "I think it is a waste of time," we are not going to force him to do something which he may not wish to do. We are not in the business of confrontation. We want to go with the farmers and not upset them any more than they often appear to be in the National Park.

  121.  Cross-compliance again. Should it be on all agricultural support or merely within the Environmentally Sensitive Areas?
  (Mrs Hancock)  I think the view of the Authority is that it should be on all agricultural support. That is actually the direction we would like to see agricultural support increasingly moving to in any case. It comes back to the point about what does the wider public, which is effectively voting money for agricultural support, want to see? They want to see a maintained landscape which meets their expectations of the countryside.

  122.  On that note, over the last 24 hours you have had an awful lot of opportunity to answer our questions. Is there anything else you think you would like to get on the record at this point, as opposed to the informal information that you have given us?
  (Mrs Hancock)  One of the things we would like to get on the record is that there is a common misconception about being a National Park Authority, that there is a great deal of extra protection to landscape features, to investment in maintaining those features, etcetera. That is not actually the case. As you have heard, this National Park Authority is only able, with a lot of competing resource demands on it, to put a very small amount of its budget into walling schemes. We only have one small scheme covering a small proportion of the National Park, which actually tackles or partly tackles walling issues alongside wider Park conservation issues. For the rest of the National Park there is no extra protection; no extra measures that this National Park Authority has in relation to field boundaries which could not be used anywhere else in the country. We are lucky that we do not have a bigger problem with walls and hedges. The reason why we do not is because of what we referred to earlier, largely because of traditional farming practices, but there is no special protection in this Authority which is going beyond that.

Chairman:  On that note, may I thank you very much for your evidence.