TUESDAY 21 JULY 1998

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

  160.  Could I ask you, you know what the present status is for farmers in relation to the notification of the Parks Authorities. Do you think we should be moving on from there? They do. They say it would be better if there was notification to consult with them before anything drastic happened to a hedgerow, for instance, or to a wall.
  (Miss Greaves)  In this instance they do not know what they are talking about. You would not mind if they did, but they are people who do not.

  161.  They have experts and officers.
  (Miss Greaves)  They have officers but they do not send out experts. One was sent out to a friend of mine to put a preservation order on a tree. She got three pages of saying why this marvellous holly should be kept. She has no holly trees, it is a bay, and the woman actually looked at it. I am sorry, but that is the level we get from local councils all the time.
  (Dr Jones)  We have better experience of both local authorities and national parks, especially where there are more skilled and more trained people, and also now that we have the agricultural grant officers who are also more skilled.

  162.  You mentioned, Miss Greaves, the fact that the removal of hedgerows overwhelmingly occurs where developers pull them up for supermarkets and what have you. How do you educate those people and indeed the Highways Agency, the general public, farmers, that these things should be maintained?
  (Miss Greaves)  It is rather difficult. Mr Wilson would probably agree. We do what we can. We talk to these people. But generally speaking when we say, "Would you like us to come and talk to you?" they say, "We are far too busy, we have other things to do." They are town people and they really do think they are doing the right thing but they have no knowledge whatsoever.

  163.  Obviously your efforts rely very considerably on your goodwill and the goodwill of your members. Is it something that you consider the DETR or English Nature ought to be putting more effort into?
  (Miss Greaves)  It might be if they are going to say, "Don't use compulsion and put people's backs up." When they first started talking about hedgerows being removed and punishment if you did without permission, a lot of people said literally, in as many words, "I was going to leave a couple of old hedges down there for the birds, etcetera, but if they are going to bring in this silly, stupid nonsense I am going to whip them out before the Bill comes into being." So you have lost a few hedges which would have been kept because they knew that the council would come along and say it was a historic hedge when it was not. I have some maps here, which you might like to see, of hedges that somebody is going to call ancient. They were never originally hedges. They were banks. I walked over them as a child and have cleared ditches and rebuilt banks. Some of them have now been flattened and look like an ordinary hedge but they were originally banks and ditches. In the way our area was divided: they are shown on the map as a boundary, yes, but they were not all hedges, they were banks, not bushes at all. Therefore, they were sometimes moved. You can move banks and they did. You had the case where the Lord of our own area was taken to court by his own tenants—this is way back—because he simply removed the bank to give himself more room and them less. It was a Royal Manor so he could be taken to court by his own tenants. He had to put them back again.

  164.  So removing banks from local communities is not a new phenomenon then?
  (Miss Greaves)  No. Nor is destroying hedges. They had hedges first built round villages as a protection. Then they used them for cutting for firewood, using the branches to feed the animals. If it had been today, somebody would have been screaming that they had destroyed that hedge. They were simply chopping chunks out of it whenever they wanted to. When they had got enough out of it they would let the thing grow up again and they would move to another piece of hedge.

  165.  Could I ask the Dry Stone Walling Association about grant aid and the extent to which continuing grant aid for repair and maintenance encourages a better media of willingness to repair and maintain.
  (Mr Webley)  You mean on-going grant aid to ensure repair rather than a replacement and renewal?

  166.  Indeed.
  (Mr Webley)  Yes, it is a fair point. We actually have a contract which requires maintenance for walls. As I said earlier on, a few toppings put on at exactly the right time will save an awful lot of problems later on. This is certainly something which ought to be seriously considered where there is an on-going contract for maintenance.

  167.  Do you think there ought to be a more flexible system of maintenance?
  (Dr Jones)  Yes, particularly for walls where if you do let it go it rapidly decays. A very small standard payment for maintenance per length of wall would be a very good grant scheme. This could be checked once it was got up to that standard and was continuing.

  168.  On our visits we heard of walls being cannibalised and the stones were then being used for the maintenance of the more obvious walls. How could you make sure firstly that this does not happen and secondly where, for example, a wall has been accepted as no longer existing, that those stones are recycled within other walls rather than sent off to rockeries or garden centres or whatever?
  (Dr Jones)  This is a big problem. There is not much new stone so one must reuse walls. If one has a grant scheme which is a whole-farm grant scheme, it can be decided which are the important walls and which are redundant, whether the stone can be reused. This is one of the advantages we have seen in the whole-farm grant schemes; in particular, the ESA in the Lake District has been very successful. I do not know whether that helps.

  169.  Yes, thank you. Finally, for both witnesses, do you think that cross-compliance, which is getting people to do something in return for grants under other purposes, might be a way of encouraging better maintenance and better replanting?
  (Miss Greaves)  May I make a suggestion on that one. One of our people down south has Devon banks. They are very steep and difficult to repair. If you have to keep one of those banks for the benefit of the general public why not call it a compensation scheme, not a grant, as if you are getting money for doing it? You could say, "You want these walls repaired," or, "these hedges repaired." "You want these Devon banks repaired so we are being compensated for keeping something that we do not necessarily require." This is a very different meaning. The general public sees something like a grant as getting money for old rope. However, if instead they are told: "This is compensation paid for work that we would not wish to do if we were left alone. We are keeping these for your benefit. We need paying for doing the job for you——"
  (Mr Wilson)  Going back to your previous question about grants, what minimal amount there is available for hedge-laying is usually stipulated. It has to be on a roadside or the side of a bridlepath or somewhere like that, whereas the rest of the farm hedges can be forgotten. The second point is that the Stewardship Scheme is so complicated for farmers that a lot of them will not join, simply because just trying to get a little bit of financial help to do hedge-laying there are so many complications within it. I will not go into detail but they do not want the paperwork. They will not do this paperwork and then they say they do not want the hedges done.
  (Dr Jones)  Cross-compliance. The whole-farm approach is the way of doing it if there is enough money. It is better for the environment as a whole. However, we have a lot of comments from our members in the areas where there are not very good grant schemes; where the ESAs do not bear out and the Stewardship is not very intense. There is a need in some farms only for walls and there is no wall grant scheme at the moment. So if we cannot have a blanket whole-farm scheme, an all-embracing thing, we really do want some form of wall scheme.

Chairman:  I am afraid I am going to have to stop this session. I must say we are very grateful for the written submissions. We are very grateful for your coming to answer the questions. One of the problems for the Committee is that we are required back to vote in the House of Commons at 7 o'clock so we must finish this session. May I say thank you very much indeed.