WEDNESDAY 17 OCTOBER 2007

Baroness Young of Old Scone, Ms Aileen Kirmond and Ms Hannah Bartram

  Q200  Lord Moynihan: In a sense, the issue of set-aside is a microcosm for some of the wider points you have been making on your journey from the CAP to CRP—though we probably need to pay more attention to the acronym! If set-aside is abolished, there will clearly be a number of environmental benefits that you want to attain—the biodiversity of soil and water protection, which you outline on page 3. What we do not have a clear picture of are some of the more specific measures, which you refer to at the bottom of your list, that might be taken to achieve this. I wonder if you could expand on that and give us some of your thoughts. You talk about new measures that are needed, but what do you have in mind?

  Baroness Young of Old Scone: We have been talking to Defra and working with Natural England on the whole issue of post set-aside measures, because we are very concerned. I think that the evidence is fairly clear that it will have a huge environmental impact. Taking that amount of land and doing something differently with it is bound to have an impact. It remains to be seen whether or not in fact lots of people do plough up their non-rotational set-aside; but I find it a bit risky, waiting to see whether that happens because, once you have ploughed it up, it is gone and it takes about another 15 years before it gets back into any sort of condition again. What we have been doing is working with Natural England, with the farming unions and also with the NGOs, to try to produce a sort of five-point plan of simple things that you can do as a farmer to mitigate the loss of your set-aside. I am hoping that Hannah knows what the five-point plan says!

  Ms Bartram: The five-point plan focuses more on the permanent land that probably will not be put back into production, so the more marginal land. It is looking at things like buffer strips: having wide buffer strips along watercourses. It talks about focusing on in-field options, which are particularly important for countryside birds like the skylark, which do not like hedgerows, do not go anywhere near them and prefer the middle of the fields; so whether one can do anything along those lines. It tries to pick up the resource protection and the biodiversity in wildlife aspects of managing this land. That is the outcome of the 0% rate of set-aside, which was recently agreed by the European Union Farm Council. Then there is the longer-term issue, the abolition of set-aside as a policy through the Health Check.

  Q201  Lord Moynihan: As this work progresses, could you let us have some further information on it and maybe a copy of the five-point plan as well?

  Ms Bartram: Yes, of course.

  Lord Plumb: My Lord Chairman, can I add a word—

  Lord Moynihan: Lord Plumb is going to talk about skylarks!

  Q202  Lord Plumb: Afterwards or before? I only wanted to say on set-aside that I was brought up under a father who used to tell me that we had to take ten acres of every hundred out of production every year and fallow it, and that was the way to farm. When we talk about fallow land, I think a lot of people will understand the better why that is being done in today's diversification of cropping. My other point, which is much more relevant, is are you are prepared to tell us what your bet is with Peter Kendall?

  Baroness Young of Old Scone: Absolutely. It is germane to your first point, actually. I think you are right that the whole fallow issue is not one that is talked about very often, though there is a lot of fallow land as part of natural rotations. We have looked with Natural England, and they have assessed the evidence right across the rotational and the non-rotational set-aside. With rotational set-aside the monitoring that Defra has put in place to see (a) what farmers do and (b) what impact that has will, over a period of time, tell us what the impact of set-aside has been. If there are issues to do with rotational set-aside, you have the opportunity of putting them into place because, being rotational, it is not fixed to one particular set of land; you stop doing it for two or three years but then you can start doing something different that would have the same impact. The worry I have is with the non-rotational stuff. Some of it is now 15 years old and is beginning to develop the sort of biodiversity richness and the sort of ecosystem-established service which, once you have ploughed it up, has gone. That is the worry I have on the non-rotational aspect. To go on to my bet, Peter Kendall's folk did a rather modest survey of farmers as to what their intentions would be and the Defra economists—I seem to be against economists, and it is probably true—had a look at what they thought the economics of farming would drive people to do. They came to the conclusion that not everybody would plough up all of their non-rotational set-aside. So we know how much there is; we know how much the NFU survey said would not get ploughed up—

  Q203  Lord Plumb: So do I!

  Baroness Young of Old Scone: . . . and, when people make decisions in the spring about other crops rather than winter crops, we will know who was right and who was wrong. I would be delighted to let you know what the outcome is.

  Q204  Viscount Brookeborough: Schemes such as this which, when they were brought in, we looked on as being rather more permanent have been taken away at the stroke of a pen. There are other schemes. At home, we have some grassland habitat improvement that is not going, or at least not for another ten years. Are you worried that in future they will bring in more schemes, which at the time look great and then, just because the price of products has gone up and there has been climate change, will be taken out at the stroke of a pen?

  Baroness Young of Old Scone: That is why it is really important to get schemes that are focused on an accepted environmental outcome. One of the problems with set-aside was that it was always a production control mechanism that happened, because it was so large-scale, to have some good environmental benefits. So really the Health Check has to focus on getting a clear set of environmental outcomes that will be delivered through policies, because then they are less easy to move away from without saying, "Actually, we are moving away from that environmental outcome as well".

  Ms Kirmond: It has to be underpinned by some evidence. Warm and rosy ideas—as long as you have evidence you have some power to retain a thing and advance it or change it over time; but—and it is something we are very interested in—we have to ensure that we have evidence-based policies.

  Baroness Young of Old Scone: For the record, can I say that we want two things on set-aside? One is that, if it is not working, we do want a cross-compliance mechanism to deliver the benefits that set-aside would have delivered, starting from next season. The second is that we need Defra to press, through the CAP Health Check, for measures that will replace the impact of set-aside.

  Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. It is always a delight to have you as a witness, and thank you to your colleagues as well.