TUESDAY 21 JULY 1998

MR PAUL WEBLEY, DR BRIAN JONES, MISS VALERIE GREAVES and MR J J WILSON

  140.  What is the cycle for laying a hedge?
  (Mr Wilson)  40 or 50 years at least.

  141.  So you lay it and then it will last for 40 or 50 years?
  (Mr Wilson)  Provided it is cared for.

  142.  Before you have to lay it again? This morning, when we went round, it was being suggested that perhaps a hedge ought to be laid every ten or 15 years.
  (Miss Greaves)  There are two ways of doing it. One way is that you lay it and then trim every year, afterwards because if you go chopping it every third year or so it is too strong and it is smashed. You cut it every year and the hedge will last you 40 or 50 years.

  143.  You let it grow out and you then layer it again?
  (Miss Greaves)  More-or-less after the 50 years. The other method is: say you want shelter of a very tall nature. You go round the farm all the time laying hedges, so by the time you get back to the beginning of the farm you have some which are very tall and are getting gappy at the bottom; some which are quite good bushy boundaries; and eventually you get ones that you have just laid and are 4 feet to 4 feet 6 inches high.

  144.  That would be your 12 to 15-year cycle?
  (Miss Greaves)  Not necessarily 12 to 15. It depends on how far you go round your farm, how much labour you have whether you trim annually, and how much distance you have got to do.

  145.  I presume the missing element in all this is the next generation of people who know how to lay hedges or know how to build dry stone walls. What steps are being taken, or might be taken, to ensure that in addition to the desire to lay hedges we have hedge-layers, for example?
  (Mr Wilson)  I laid my first hedge in the winter of 1951. That was in the Midlands which is a different style from the south. I taught hedge-laying in Cheshire when I moved there in 1980. When I moved to the South of England, there was what is called the South of England style, which is completely different. Hedge-laying was taught at quite a few agricultural colleges. There used to be quite a few young farmers' courses amongst farmer organisations, which became less so numerous as they had been, just because not as many young people were joining the farms any more. Since I have been down in the south of England, the South of England Hedge-laying Society has now produced its own video, (indicating)  which has only just been produced. We do four training days a year with about 30 to 35 people on these training days. We have a membership of 140 paid-up members. This may be members across from Oxford to Essex to the south of England, apart from one member who lives in Yorkshire. In the south of England we have quite a network of training for hedge-laying.

  146.  What happens when it comes to competitions? Is the standard improving in competitions or is it in decline?
  (Mr Wilson)  Competitions in the south of England, I have the figures from one of my older colleagues. 1970: in the local ploughing matches there were about five competitors. Now the local ploughing match has round about 15. Our own competition attracted about 20 in 1984 when we started. We are now up to 40, 42, 44. The national gets over a hundred competitors.
  (Miss Greaves)  They have to be qualified to enter the national. You cannot just say, "I want to compete in the national." You either have to have a proper proficiency certificate from the Agricultural Training Board or you have to have been placed in competitions in other parts of the country.

  147.  Most of the areas of the country that have good hedges, almost every village would have a hedge-laying competition.
  (Miss Greaves)  In the old days, yes, but you do not now have so many. We lost a lot of hedge-layers in war-time simply because they were killed. When it came to after the war people would say, "Ah, Bill, can you lay us a hedge?" Bill would say, "I am very sorry, I have two years' work on my books. I cannot book you until then." In the meantime somebody had invented flails which did a good job if used properly, so the farmers simply put the flail across the hedges and kept them neat. It was not until about 40 or 50 years later, which is about now, that people began to find that the bottom of the hedges had nothing left in them and animals went in underneath but the top was thick and bushy. The only answer to that is laying. There were not the number of people to lay. So those of us who do lay hedges try and help youngsters to do it. The conservation volunteers do quite a lot of this in various groups.

  148.  Do they do it well?
  (Miss Greaves)  Do they do it well? Yes and no. If they have a good instructor they do a brilliant job. But occasionally you get an enthusiast in a group who goes on a one-day hedging course. They come back and they start to teach the rest of the group. That, I am afraid, is where that group will fall down because you do not give a beginner a horrible hedge to start with. You give them a nice easy one. They take a look at one which is nasty and say, "You can't do that." Mr Wilson and I have both put down 30-foot high hedges. In other words, we have put down trees. We know what we are doing.

  149.  Turning now to the stone walling side, skills shortages?
  (Mr Webley)  Skills shortages are being addressed largely by our Association. We started, back in the early 1980s, a craft certification skills system, which enabled people to climb a ladder eventually to reach master craftsman status. We have had a good uptake on that, although it is not to say that all the good dry stone wallers are within the Association's craft scheme. There are many outside and they exist on reputation within their particular area. For a period up until maybe the last few years, we have had a lot of people coming in and wanting to get involved in that sort of thing; competition numbers have been rising but which have now levelled off to a degree. We involved ourselves with various bodies with regard to NVQs. We hit a problem there because we are not prepared to put our name to a system whereby someone can gain a NVQ and do a top of a wall over there, and then a week later gets accredited on putting foundations in somewhere else, and never has to build a full wall in one go against, say, time and be properly examined. So we stood aside from that. We felt that our reputation was at stake. We have not found a body which was able to accommodate us in terms of developing a suitable NVQ to cover this area.

  150.  Are there too many different styles across the country anyway for people? Watching someone doing a wall, you can do it to whatever standard is locally required.
  (Mr Webley)  Most walls are built in much the same way. Most walls, with variations I would agree, are so built. The main backbone of the country has a doubled-skinned wall, held together by "throughs", topped off with top stones, capstones, whatever people care to call them. So for the standard wall that tends to be very much the same wherever you go within the British Isles. Therefore, you can develop quite a high skill working on what is bread and butter walling. Then, of course, the individual concerned will have to adapt his technique to use the local stone. That is where you get variations developing to ensure that they grip together well and that the load is transferred, effectively to ensure that the stone actually stays in place. After all, it is the simplest thing going. It is stones being held together by their own weight. It is the skill of the placement of those stones which makes the things stand maybe for 80 to 100 years.
  (Dr Jones)  On skills, may I enforce that. My impression from the north west—I do not know whether is it general—is that the schemes in the training and agricultural colleges and the ATB, the Agricultural Training Board, seem to have declined over recent years. There was a good source of training for a farmer. The other thing, as well as training the skill, we are particularly concerned about training assessors because there are now assessments of the work being done. There are now grant schemes and in order to get good value for money it must be that the work done on these grant schemes must be assessed. We are a little bit worried that maybe the quality is not being kept there. We would like to see quality assessment as well.
  (Mr Webley)  If I may, it is perfectly possible for somebody like myself to build a wall to £30 a square metre or build a wall to £15 a square metre. Without wishing to suggest that you do not inspect things extremely carefully, I think you would find it extremely difficult to know the difference. When you have a grant scheme, if you do not have people who are skilled in the actual craft, then it is very often possible to put up those walls using public funds and to skimp the things that you cannot see. The waller should spend at least half of his time filling the bit of the wall. A few big stones will probably do the same and will hold the wall for a short time, but within two years we get a lot of complaints coming in—luckily, very few from our own members; they get short shrift if this happens within our own Association—whereby the wall actually starts to come down. You think of cowboy wallers sometimes, one holding up the wall while the other draws the money. But that is possible. If it is public funds being spent on that, you are far better making sure that it is very, very rigorously inspected. We feel we have nothing to fear from very, very rigorous inspection schemes.

Chairman:  We have spent quite a lot of time on that, and we have a fair amount of questions to get through. Christine Butler.

  151.  I would like to ask the National Hedge-laying Society: if you have figure work on the estimates, can you let us know what lengths of new hedgerows are being planted each year.
  (Miss Greaves)  We do not have figures but I do know that until recently I used to go out to displays all over the country and I used to get lots of people—and obviously there are many big landowners with long lengths of hedges—they would be coming and saying, "How do we set about planting a new hedge?" We would supply the answers. Then we also had another lot coming along and saying, "We have a newly planted hedge. When do we lay it?" So we answered those. Last year, when we had our competition, we were laying Norfolk hedges that had been planted and were just about ready to lay; long lengths of those.

  152.  Are you saying, both of you, that there are not any figures or actual estimates for lengths of new hedgerows being planted?
  (Miss Greaves)  Very seldom.
  (Mr Wilson)  I do not think anybody is recording nationally, although the media will always do so if a bulldozer pushes a hedge out.

  153.  That is why I asked the question, whether you had feelings on that. You would have to research further to get more figures?
  (Miss Greaves)  Yes.

  154.  Do you think that new hedges are equal value to the traditional hedges which are now falling into decay or being removed?
  (Miss Greaves)  Yes, as long as they have grown big enough to be a hedge and are visible. They start from this (indicating)  high.

  155.  To the Dry Stone Walling Association: how significant a problem is lost walls?
  (Mr Webley)  There is a major problem, particularly around the development of urban areas, where there is very much a case of the traditional dry stone walls disappearing in quite scenic areas and being cemented back up, or they disappear completely. In terms of farming practice there are walls which are removed. In the survey which I referred to, we had to put in a category G, which allowed for walls on the map which had actually disappeared. In many cases this is due to larger implements needing more turning space and central walls disappearing.

  156.  There are records of walls on maps which no longer exist but there seems to be some written evidence coming in which suggests that survey work, which has been done recently, does not reflect the detail of some of these.
  (Dr Jones)  My feeling is that some of the walls which you thought were on the map may not have been walls. They may have been hedges, for example. In agricultural practice rather than redevelopment, as in the National Park, the farmers will find a wall which they do like but do not need and reuse the stone. There are very little new walling stones produced. It is all reused, otherwise there will be a shortage. Stone does decay in some areas, so you do need to reuse stones from redundant walls.

  157.  What would be the benefits and problems of bringing protection of field boundaries under the planning system?
  (Miss Greaves)  No, because the local authorities are ordinary general public and most of them are urban and they do not have a clue. A prime example: a Devon gentleman had a combine 14 feet wide. His gateways were 12 feet, so he applied to widen the gateways of his corn field to 15 feet. However, they said, "No, under the planning regulations you cannot do it." How is he going to harvest his crop?

  158.  What about the Walling Association?
  (Dr Jones)  We do not have that protection on walls. There is no formal protection.

  159.  Should there be?
  (Dr Jones)  There should be, yes. I have been looking at the representations from other organisations and I notice that the English Heritage say that there should be a holistic approach. Thinking of all the reasons why there should be protection, that is very good. There should be primary legislation. The CPRE has a very good list of more detailed suggestions.