Oral evidence: Local Nature Partnerships, HC 858
Wednesday 4 March 2015
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 4 March 2015.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Members present: Joan Walley (Chair), Peter Aldous, Martin Caton, Zac Goldsmith, Mark Lazarowicz, Dr Matthew Offord, Mrs Caroline Spelman, Dr Alan Whitehead, Simon Wright
Questions 1–61
Witnesses: Dr Dominic Hogg, Executive Chair, West of England Nature Partnership, Liz Newton, Director, Landscape and Geodiversity, Natural England, and Rupert Clubb, Chair, Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning & Transport, gave evidence.
Q1 Chair: Thank you to the three witnesses for coming along this afternoon. The Environmental Audit Select Committee just wanted to make sure that we had covered the issue of local nature partnerships before, with the prorogation of Parliament, we are prevented from looking at this in some detail. We wanted to try to get evidence about how local nature partnerships are progressing and what the issues are that perhaps need to be addressed, if not by ourselves in this Parliament, then at some stage in the future. I thought it might be appropriate, given that I personally have no great knowledge of your organisations, if I invited you each to give a very short introduction to the reason for your being here and the work that your organisation does. Ms Newton, you are sitting in the centre—would you like to start?
Liz Newton: I am Liz Newton. I am the Director for Landscape and Geodiversity in Natural England. Natural England is the Government’s environmental organisation, so anything to do with the natural environment is what we do. My particular role and why I am here in relation to local nature partnerships is because my team oversees our input to local nature partnerships and supports our area teams in working with them at a local level.
Dr Hogg: I am Dr Dominic Hogg. I chair the West of England Local Nature Partnership, WENP, and we are here because we have submitted evidence and we obviously are central to your inquiry. I have taken the liberty of trying to sound out some of the other LNPs who made responses and, indeed, some who did not, so I will try to call on that as I can. There is a mixed picture, clearly. In my day job, I work as the chair of an environmental consulting firm, so this is what happens in what little spare time I have. Not an uncommon story, that one.
Rupert Clubb: I am Rupert Clubb. I am the Director of Communities, Economy and Transport for East Sussex County Council, but I am here today representing ADEPT, the Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning and Transport. ADEPT represents local authority directors and chief officers from county and unitary authorities on matters of environment, planning, transport and economy.
Q2 Chair: Is the environment high up the agenda? Sometimes planning departments traditionally are more civil engineers rather than environmental enthusiasts.
Rupert Clubb: I am not sure whether I should be offended by that as a civil engineer myself. The environment ebbs and flows in relation to planning work and I have no doubt that some of that will come out today.
Q3 Chair: Thank you very much indeed. You have mentioned the local nature partnerships. We wanted to have some idea of what progress has been made in setting them up. Are they there right the way across the country so that no matter which part of the country you are in everybody would immediately know the work of the local nature partnerships, or is it a bit patchy? Is there a steady progression of them being set up? Let us start with that first of all.
Liz Newton: I think there are 49 of them.
Q4 Chair: How many do you think there should be altogether?
Liz Newton: I think there were invitations put out by DEFRA inviting people to set them up and the Natural Environment White Paper suggested there might be about 50. I think that is more or less the number that there are.
Chair: So there are in existence exactly the number that were envisaged in terms of the proposals?
Liz Newton: Yes.
Q5 Chair: Progress: are they all as advanced as each other? There seems to be quite a lot of difference between them. Dr Hogg, I can see you want to come in on that.
Dr Hogg: It feels to me—and this is not a complete survey—that it is patchy. We have some nature partnerships. One of them sent me a response before I came along and they were very much at the point where there is virtually no money left. There is very little in terms of resourcing left and it is a struggle, a struggle indeed to respond to your inquiry. On the other hand, we have been fortunate enough, for example, to have some core funding from the local authorities. Indeed, one of the local utilities, Wessex Water, has a forward-looking view of this, so we have been quite fortunate. Generally, one of the things that comes across is it has been a struggle to get the resources that the LNPs would like. I suppose we look somewhat jealously at the LEPs. The other thing here is if any LNP becomes successful, shall we say, at what it is trying to do—and remember one of the things DEFRA asked us to do was to embed the value of nature in decision making—the more successful we get at that arguably the more resources we need to discharge the sorts of functions we might need, indeed on matters such as the ones you are perhaps coming on to around planning and so forth.
Q6 Chair: Is it envisaged that the funding is going to come from existing resources and a reconfiguration of the way people go about doing the work that they do? Is that contributing to the progress that is being made with them?
Dr Hogg: It is not entirely clear to me that there is a model. There is no defined way in which LNPs would necessarily secure their funding.
Q7 Chair: Should there be a model?
Dr Hogg: If we are to play a role in, for example, doing what was envisaged in generating a step change around provision of natural capital, biodiversity and so forth, then I cannot see how we can do it in the absence of some form of resourcing. There have been cases where I think DEFRA, trying to help by boosting the credibility and role of the nature partnerships, has suggested that we take on certain functions, for example in respect of the pollinator strategy. That is all well and good, of course, if we have the resources, but if we do not have the resources and we are effectively committing ourselves to some aspect of delivery, then we are potentially setting ourselves up for a fall later on.
Q8 Chair: Can you think of any other initiatives that have been suggested or proposed that have not had designated resources attached to them? Has the way in which these have been set up had a similarity with other initiatives? Would you like to compare them possibly with the LEPs and the way that they were set up?
Rupert Clubb: It is quite interesting, 49 LNPs and yet 39 LEPs. As has been stressed earlier on, the progress with LNPs is patchy. There is evidence across the country of some really good practice, strong partnership work in particular with LEPs, but there are other examples where it would probably be fair to say that the LEPs are not clear about the existence of LNPs. There is very much a mixed bag. Undoubtedly, the LNPs face challenges in relation to resources and funding, and certainly from local authority officers across the country, and that is a common theme, a common thread that comes out. We underestimate the importance of the environment and natural capital at our peril. From ADEPT’s perspective, growth is important but it should not be growth at any cost. Some of our concern relates to the weight that is put on environment in its widest sense in relation to growth. Certainly, from ADEPT’s perspective, there should be a greater resonance with BIS and CLG in relation to LNP functions.
Q9 Chair: How would that come about? What would need to happen for that to be in place?
Rupert Clubb: Going forward, the LNPs fundamentally are a good thing and the relationship that they should have with LEPs going forward is going to be of increasing importance, not least in terms of growth and house building but that wider question about sustainability and the links into economic and social aspects that factor into growth. We know that our natural capital can help with the health and well-being of people and I think we need to make stronger linkages into that. Fundamentally, the feedback from some of my members has been that funding and resourcing present a challenge to LNPs getting a real foothold in both LEPs and helping to drive economic growth.
Liz Newton: From the information I am getting from our area teams, we are working quite closely with all the LEPs. We sit on some of the boards and we are working very hard to support them to build up their evidence base and get information. We hold lots of information that is useful to them, but we are also helping them with things like funding bids. Advice from our staff is enabling them to do some of those things and some of them have been very successful. There is a sense that that sort of public-private partnership that has evolved around many of the LEP boards is working quite well. Some of them have been very successful in getting funding and are lucky enough to have project co-ordinators and things like that. It is a mixed picture and I think a lot of it will depend on the local circumstances, but they are playing a very valuable role in a whole range of different things. They are very valuable, as you say.
Dr Hogg: One point I would draw that reflects on what Mr Clubb has said is the linkage. We are tasked as bodies fundamentally with trying to emphasise to decision makers the links between natural environment and economy and the benefits of the natural environment to the economy, yet the SIF money coming through from ERDF/ESF money and the growth fund money was money where CLG was suggesting to LEPs that the criteria should be based around gross value added and employment. From the point of view of organisations trying to demonstrate the value of the natural environment to the economy, that is almost like kicking one leg away from us before we have even begun our task. We need better metrics than that. You have had evidence in previous inquiries from, for example, Dieter Helm from the Natural Capital Committee, and he has made it clear Government gets it. I think Government does get it but it is the actions that will speak louder than the words. We need proper metrics that allow the local nature partnerships to make their case, because at the moment the metrics that we are using are almost antithetical to the demonstration of the case for the benefits of the natural environment to the economy.
Q10 Chair: Are there two issues there? Is one of the issues about right now, for example, we have this new European funding that is going to be coming forward, as you say, ERDF money? Are you saying that the presumption is that there would not be the likelihood of the local nature partnerships being able to apply for and benefit from that funding stream?
Dr Hogg: We will wait and see because I think the operational programme that is to be agreed between UK Government and the Commission is in the process of being finalised. It may be being finalised.
Q11 Chair: Sure, but what I was getting at is this: is there a part of that process that is capable of being influenced right now that could end up with local nature partnerships being in a stronger position to benefit from funding that might then be available and be applied for come July this year?
Dr Hogg: It would be nice to think that was the case. My predecessor in my role, Bevis Watts, sits on the growth board. He has backed the group of LNPs—
Chair: Sorry, sits on which body?
Dr Hogg: It is the growth board. It is with the local enterprise partnerships and so forth around how growth fund money and EU money is distributed. One of the issues that I know came up in the previous draft of the operational programme that the Commission raised was that the metrics that were being put forward for the SIF money by UK Government were gross value added and employment. I think the Commission itself said, “That is not very helpful to us in adjudicating on how successful our programme has been.” The cross-cutting theme in those funds, or one of them, is sustainable development. Metrics that are purely focused on, shall we say, somewhat outdated views as to what matters in terms of growth are not helpful to us. We are often addressing things that are not internal to the economy or the prices in the economy.
Q12 Chair: If the criteria for that funding are going to be signed off some time very soon and there are discussions under way, if your colleague wished to provide us with any comment on what might be a helpful proposal to make, we would be very interested to receive that.
Dr Hogg: Yes. I think as well it is something that applies equally to the funds under UK control that are given out to the local enterprise partnerships.
Q13 Chair: The other thing I wanted to ask you very quickly was how the work has progressed in respect of specific issues that might be coming up, so relating to fracking applications or HS2. Well, HS2 probably in local authorities around the country. Is there an issue there about local nature partnerships being able to be a voice for environmental safeguarding concerns?
Rupert Clubb: Across the country, it is, as we said, a bit of a mixed bag. Some LNPs have a stronger voice than other LNPs. It is interesting hearing the discussion about the European structural and investment funds. Surrey, for example, has had very good input from the LNPs into the ESIF process. Some of the environmental issues have been picked up within that bid and that is a very positive example. Elsewhere around the country, some of our LEPs may not be familiar with the work of LNPs. I think the risk is that for business and organisations historically some have seen the environment as being a block to growth and we need to turn that around and help people understand that the environment can be a plus for growth and, considered in the right way, can enhance and ultimately add value in terms of GVA and jobs created. Some LNPs are ahead of the game and others are not.
Q14 Dr Whitehead: Could I briefly get a little bit of clarification on the coverage of LNPs? The process was done on the basis of groups that wished to become LNPs. That presumably means that there are places in England that do not have an LNP covering them, or has the amount of coverage expanded to fit the number of groups that have become LNPs?
Chair: Can anyone help us on this?
Dr Hogg: I confess I am not completely au fait with exactly what areas are covered by the LNPs and whether there are gaps that exist there. I suppose, going back to what I was saying earlier, though, even where there are LNPs, because of the variance in the level of resourcing and what they are able to do, it is not necessarily the case that coverage by an LNP means the same thing in all places.
Q15 Dr Whitehead: I also assume because LEPs were set up on sort of the same basis then there is no coterminosity between LNPs and LEPs necessarily?
Rupert Clubb: That is correct. In instances you might find that one LEP is covered by a number of LNPs or, indeed, one LNP has feet in a number of LEP camps. The boundaries are not coterminous.
Q16 Dr Whitehead: In terms of clarification, the identifiable resources, as far as I can see, that have so far gone into LNPs are that there was a capacity grant of I think £924,000 that started LNPs off from the Department, some money from Natural England and some money from the Environment Agency. That comes to just about £1.5 million all in all, which comes to £32,000 per local nature partnership. Is that about it or does that disguise it—you have mentioned the ability of local nature partnerships to raise other money, but presumably the overhead money that is available for LNPs is in that range?
Liz Newton: All I can talk about is that Natural England contributed to that capacity fund of £920,000-something.
Chair: Sorry, the acoustics are really bad in this room.
Liz Newton: Sorry, I know, I am struggling to hear. We also have put in probably about another further £500,000 in small grant support over the last few years. Some of the LNPs are now getting quite considerable amounts of money through LEPs. I understand Gloucestershire has just received around £3 million from the LEP. We helped them put a bid together to help them put a green infrastructure plan together. Some of them are beginning to bring in quite considerable amounts of funding from elsewhere. Others are getting seed corn funding from local authorities to help them have project officers and what have you. Some of them have membership funding type arrangements where people pay membership to be part of the LNP. It is a very varied picture and I would not have the complete picture of all the funding.
Rupert Clubb: The Lowland Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire LNP is quite an interesting example. They secured money from Toyota. They also secured money from the University of Derby and from Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire themselves. While the figures you quote are undoubtedly accurate, it does not necessarily take account of some of the contributions from both private and public sector that has helped keep the LNPs going.
Q17 Dr Whitehead: I am just seeking a picture of the basic capacity from funding that may be there as far as LNPs are concerned. I think that the points that you have made indicate that there is potentially an enormous difference in capacity between LNPs, pretty much depending on the extent to which they have been able to seek additional resources elsewhere but the basic seed corn/overhead resources appear to be very slim. Would that be fair to conclude?
Dr Hogg: Both our experience and what we have heard from some of the other LNPs would support that. It is by no means the case that people have not been able to get money, but it is uneven. It is also worth drawing something of a distinction between the resources to run a local nature partnership to do arguably what we are trying to do, which is influence things in a strategic sense, but also what that means. Hopefully it will also mean that LNPs become the conduit for project-related funding, which is much more around trying to increase connectivity of natural ecosystems and so forth to enable biodiversity to flourish where perhaps it is compromised at the moment.
Q18 Zac Goldsmith: I apologise if this has already been answered, but it would be really useful. You have already made the point that there is a great diversity in terms of each LNP’s output and what they strive to do and each one has its own identity. Is there a particular example of best practice, a really good LNP in terms of what it has achieved and how it has managed to galvanise action in its area?
Rupert Clubb: His.
Zac Goldsmith: Have you already answered that?
Chair: Can we give Dr Hogg the floor?
Dr Hogg: A lot of people think that we are doing a good job, but for me it feels like the potential is so much greater. What have we done? We do have a good relationship with our local enterprise partnership. We have managed to secure some funding from the local authorities and from Wessex Water, which we are very grateful for. We have managed, therefore, to fund a full-time co-ordinator and I get a small honorarium. I was told the job was going to be about five days; I can tell you it is not five days.
What are the other things we are doing? We have a number of working groups. One we are hoping to announce soon is a new nature improvement area, which is one of the things local enterprise partnerships were set up to do. We are going to launch that at our conference on the 10th. I would welcome you all down to Bristol for the launch. We are also developing, with Wessex Water support, a state of the environment report that we hope will help in terms of feeding into the planning process. We hope that we will be positively engaged through the duty to co-operate, which is something where we have a role to play. We have put forward a funding bid for what we have called the Natural Capital Trust, which is in the strategic economic plan of the LEP. Unfortunately, that did not get funded. The funding decisions that the local enterprise partnerships made with UK money were quite interesting ones. I think the decision became much more centralised than the LEPs themselves had imagined, so we did not benefit from the funding. We have, shall we say, buy-in in the principle but we have not yet managed to achieve anything by way of having had the £3 million success of Gloucestershire, for example. We have a really good and interesting partnership with private and public sector and the NGOs and we think we can do a lot. We have a lot to contribute. We have a good story to tell and we just want to help to deliver that.
Q19 Dr Whitehead: This will, I promise, finish my clarification. There are a couple of local nature partnerships like Morecambe Bay Local Nature Partnership and Humber Nature Partnership, which then sit entirely within the territory of other local nature partnerships. Humber Local Nature Partnership is entirely within Hull and East Riding and Greater Lincolnshire Local Nature Partnerships. Do they have territorial battles? How does that work?
Chair: How does that link with the governance arrangement as well?
Liz Newton: The way that they were asked to set up was that the idea was that it was up to them which areas they chose to have. There was no mandate from DEFRA or Government about that, so they set themselves up as they think fits the local circumstances. I know that some of them are working very closely together. I was going to say something about the Northern Upland Chain LNPs because they are working very well sharing experience and good practice across each of those LNPs. So, in some places that is happening very well. I have not heard of any territorial battles, I have to say.
Q20 Chair: Can I just ask very quickly—because I should have asked this by now—about the nature improvement areas? We have not really talked about nature improvement areas. What is the progress on them and what are the links between the two initiatives of the NIAs and the local nature partnerships?
Dr Hogg: There used to be funded NIAs. The NIAs are not actually funded any more but we have a working group called the iconic wildlife and landscapes group. We task that group to look at whether there was an area that would be sensible to designate as an NIA within the West of England region. Why did we think it would be a good idea? Although there is no funding attached to it and there is not a very official and formal designation around it, we felt that that designation might help to secure funding in future where we were looking forward to doing interesting things. It is also the case that under the national planning policy framework the local planning authorities are required to take note, effectively, to work with the nature improvement areas.
Q21 Chair: Is that a statutory requirement?
Dr Hogg: It is explicitly referred to in the NPPF so I guess it is material to planning decisions. It is interesting; there is not a huge amount of guidance. The way things are at the moment is that the board of the nature partnership has the right, effectively, to make that designation or to do that. It is one of the things that the LNPs can do. We have, as I say, taken on to do that and we are going to designate the area around the Severn Estuary going into the actual estuary, which we feel has particular significance for wildlife both in the marine and in the terrestrial and, importantly, on the estuarine boundary between the two. We are about to do that and we hope that it will help projects going forward in the future to gain financial support.
Q22 Mrs Spelman: Do you mind if I come in on this? The Government was overwhelmed with demand for nature improvement areas. I think there were over 80 applications for NIAs. The funding allocation of £7.5 million had to be focused on a certain number of NIAs that I think Natural England, as a result of a competitive process, deemed you get the best return for natural capital for your buck on, so to speak. I certainly went to see one of them, but I was very struck by the appetite for more of these. Twelve were designated, they received a portion of the £7.5 million, but there was a big appetite among those that bid to do it anyway. What has happened to the rest?
Liz Newton: From my information, there were 12 that were being funded until March this year. There were another eight, I think, that set themselves up fairly quickly after that.
Q23 Mrs Spelman: Does the money run out at March this year?
Liz Newton: It does, yes. That money comes through DEFRA.
Q24 Mrs Spelman: What happens after that?
Liz Newton: There won’t be any central government funding. It was always planned that that funding would run out this March. Natural England will continue to support the national steering group and input our staff advice and help to support the NIAs that exist. The LNPs, as Dominic has been saying, have been looking at potential for other ecological networks of a similar nature and there are some that are beginning to set them up. They will have to find ways of funding those through various routes.
Q25 Mrs Spelman: The reason I am wanting to go back down this route is that essentially it is a capital allocation for a one-off step change in the recovery of previously neglected or damaged sites in terms of natural capital. The intervention, overseen by Professor Sir John Lawton at the time, I think, was to try to achieve the step change and assist nature in recovering in a place. The location I saw was former industrial workings that essentially need to be cleared, restored and corrected. One would expect that it was capex rather than opex, if you know what I mean, in the distinction. What I am quite interested by, just to push you on, is are you suggesting that the 12 that were chosen will in some way go backwards because there is no operational expenditure for them or have they found a modus vivendi with volunteers to keep the regeneration process going? Could you elaborate on how that works so we gain a better understanding of their sustainability?
Liz Newton: I will try. They have been very successful; we consider them to have been very successful. The volunteer side has been quite spectacular. Over the last three years they have got something like 24,000 volunteer days of people engaged with NIAs. Compared with us, Natural England has about 2,000 a year for all our national nature reserves, so that is a big figure. I think they have managed to gear their money up from central government and elsewhere successfully where it is something like for every £1 they get in they gear it up to £3.50-odd. A lot of the money has come from NGOs and the private sector as opposed to Government, which I think is interesting. So hopefully that will continue. That is the sort of aspiration.
Q26 Mrs Spelman: Do you mind me going down this line of enquiry, because I think this is the whole point of us asking?
Liz Newton: No, by all means.
Mrs Spelman: The patchiness that is a feature of the local nature partnership network is probably not unrelated to the availability of partners in the partnerships strong enough to carry the project. Do you think there is anything Government could be doing to assist with those gaps? If you take the wildlife trusts, for example, some of their branches are extremely strong and they provide the analysis of natural capital and to some extent the volunteer workforce or some co-ordination for it, but that too is a patchy network, with no disrespect to wildlife trusts for whom I have the greatest regard. That would be their own self-critique. What could the Government be doing about these gaps? What I am driving at is if Dieter Helm was here, the Natural Capital Committee would tell us objectively where the greatest impact could be made to improve the natural capital but that might not correlate with the bids that have come into you for funding or the availability of partners to carry the project.
Dr Hogg: I think the points you are making are really important ones. One question is about the fragmentation of those who might have a role to play and you could argue that local nature partnerships in principle could be stacked full of organisations, many of whom have their own little groups of volunteers and so forth. We have tried to address that in our partnership through having a connection with wider stakeholders and our annual conferences, the way we try to reach out to them, and we will be doing that, as I say, on 10 March.
On the identification of the priorities, I also am extremely interested in that. There is a recognition in the LNPs that the Natural Capital Committee reports can be very helpful to us, particularly the latest one, as you point out, on the broad prioritisation of the types of investment where we are most confident that the benefits relative to the costs are significant, and there are areas where we are less confident. One thing that is really important in our links to the Natural Capital Committee is that the reports of the NCC don’t make strong references to the local nature partnerships, but a lot of value when you are talking about the natural environment is that it is very much locally contingent and it is difficult to take a top-down view and say, “This type of thing works everywhere.”
That speaks quite strongly to the role that LNPs could play in doing things the NCC is talking about, like a 20-year plan for regenerating natural capital. I think it is that sort of co-ordination that we could do with. I have had some discussions with the secretariat of the NCC—we haven’t gone far, I have to say—about this thinking that arguably the NCC is trying to do at the national level what DEFRA has asked the LNPs to do at the local level. In principle there should be a stronger tie-in here and it would be good to be looking at whether we can get some core funding, for example, to look at those investment cases. I believe one of the uplands nature partnerships has been given a small amount of funding by DEFRA and has been inviting views from other LNPs about how we could develop investment plans, but it is not going to do them. There is a difference between understanding how we might do them and what they might ultimately contain. You need the type of information we are trying to get, and have been fortunate to get funding from Wessex Water for, to do our state of the environment work. We are very excited about that. It is not yet finished, but it is a mapping of all of the natural capital in the west of England.
Rupert Clubb: I think the key for me is getting that focus on growth that encompasses environment. Growth can sometimes be focused on housing or commercial floor space or transport infrastructure and not often enough on landscape, land use, access, conservation, habit, species, and mitigation of course. It could be argued that the LEPs could play a much greater role in relation to this. For example, you could mandate a seat on the LEP for the chair of local nature partnerships. Sorry to add to Dominic’s workload, but I think the risk historically is that we can be quite fearful of the environment in relation to growth and we don’t need to be because if thought through correctly it can enhance growth, housing, the infrastructure that you need to create jobs and add GVA. That is the bit that sometimes I think gets missed.
Q27 Chair: We have got some debate going. Liz Newton, first of all, and then I will bring in Dr Hogg.
Liz Newton: We have been trying to help bring these two, the economic and the environment, together. Ourselves, the Environment Agency and the Forestry Commission created something called the local environment and economic development toolkit and 15 of the LEPs and the LNPs have used that to help them start thinking about how they can create more of a positive win-win approach to what is going on in their area. Those sorts of partnerships are working well and we need the LNPs to share that experience and to do that more, probably.
The only other point I was going to make was that we have been trying to help the local nature partnerships make that engagement with the LEPs and we have been facilitating that relationship because that is quite key. There are other partnerships out there and there are good examples of that happening, so I think the LNPs can probably help themselves to some extent.
Dr Hogg: I think that makes a lot of sense. In some of the conversations I have had recently with the chair of our local enterprise partnership I have been saying to her, “Do you think people really get it here? Are we getting our message across?” which is the positive one that Rupert was discussing about no longer being a blocker. Bear in mind that there are plenty of parts of the United Kingdom that are at flood risk, as you in this Committee well know, and we have choices as to how we address that flood risk and we can do it in different ways.
Some of our local authorities are designating enterprise areas and so forth. We have one in Avonmouth and Severnside that is at risk of flooding. What should we do in that area? If we want to develop that area out, how will we do it? Will we just build everything 4 metres higher off the ground and maybe just shunt the problem somewhere else, or are we going to think, “Let’s design this intelligently and think how can we work with nature and use the services that are provided by nature to address this problem intelligently”? In that way you are using the prospect of developing out land, which is attractive to the local authority. Maybe that is not the perfect way to sell what we are trying to do but if we are going to not say no to growth then it is a way of us demonstrating a means to accommodate it in a manner that works with the natural environment and builds it in at the start.
Q28 Chair: But isn’t that part of the issue about, for example, the work of the Climate Change Committee and the Adaptation Sub-Committee about what mechanism there is at that sub-regional level or local level whereby decision-making about investment in infrastructure long term is balanced and thought through in respect of not just economic but social and environmental as well? The question is: how do you measure what good the local nature partnerships are doing? Does anybody have a sense of what progress has been made? You are smiling at that. Is there any audit of them?
Dr Hogg: It is just when I solicited responses, one of the LNPs—I forget which one and I apologise to them—made the point you are making that there was no obvious measure of success for an LNP. You could say, “Should there be one, because what is the role of an LNP?” It is not formally a delivery body and yet it is being looked at to provide a step change in what is going on in the natural environment. We LNPs have a slightly limbo status. We are sometimes referred to, we are part of the duty to co-operate so that is a lever that we can use, maybe through the planning system, and we start to try to use those levers strategically.
But also if we are lucky we have member representation from local authorities on our board, so planning becomes quite an interesting issue. On the one hand, we want to operate at a strategic level to work to build the natural environment into development but where planning is concerned there is the potential for the perception, if nothing else, that there is some antagonism between what the local authorities do as planning authorities and what the local nature partnership does. We have Natural England representing DEFRA on our board and we are very grateful to them for that, but they are also statutory consultees anyway into the planning process. We have an interesting issue as to how we address the role of LNPs vis-à-vis planning in that process.
Q29 Mrs Spelman: Isn’t one of the points that the local nature partnership’s geography is chosen from the bottom up and it may not be contiguous with one planning authority? The importance of that is you will have statutory consultees to a local plan in a local planning authority but sometimes the development exceeds the boundaries of one local authority. If you take High Speed 2 as a worked example, it has a very significant impact on the environment. There will need to be a major biodiversity offset for the loss of natural capital, but because it extends over several counties, several districts, several metropolitan authorities there is not actually anything other than the local nature partnership structure to help advise the local economic partnership structure on how that biodiversity offsetting should be done. One of the big prizes is to get that kind of cross-boundary achievement. We already know from our inquiry on High Speed 2 that one of the problems is the ambition otherwise for biodiversity offsetting is pretty low. It is, “We take out four trees here and we put in four trees there”, which all of us know straightaway is not the right answer. Isn’t the opportunity one of your chosen geographies being able to play a different role from statutory stakeholders and achieve something better in the long run?
Dr Hogg: Birmingham and Black Country was one of the LNPs that said, “We’ve got a whole range of health and wellbeing boards, a whole range of this and that that we are trying to influence in our one LNP”, but I think you are talking about almost the other way round. My own view is that when we as local nature partnerships are looking at what things we would ideally change in order to facilitate the better integration of the natural environment and the economy, we are probably all going to be facing similar problems. We are there as a group working somewhat piecemeal with our limited and varied resources, depending on how fortunate or otherwise we have been. There is definitely something to be said for understanding what issues the local nature partnerships are raising and bringing them together as a group and trying to confront them and harnessing their collective influence in that way.
In terms of your more immediate one, which is a specific project, we do not have the structure yet or the ability to co-ordinate in that way to do that. We had a meeting at Wessex Water last month to look at working in a catchment area that spans, effectively, the West of England and the nature partnership in Wiltshire. We brought everyone together to look at that as a problem.
Q30 Chair: I was going to ask about water catchment areas as being a more viable basis to work on.
Dr Hogg: It is definitely one. The thing is that you can cut it in many different ways. What would you do with HS2?
Liz Newton: I think a number of the LNPs were involved in the offsetting pilots, which is good. DEFRA have a central team that works with LNPs and I know that DEFRA is encouraging them to take a lead on particular themes. I think offsetting is one of them, which may help them look across the boundaries in the way that you are suggesting for some of those very strong themes, which I think would be very helpful.
Chair: As you would expect, we had quite a few questions, but it might be helpful if I say to the Committee that we have covered some of the issues that we were going to raise. I think we will try to pick up where the gaps are in what we wanted to raise and have not done so far.
Q31 Peter Aldous: I was going to look at your working relationship with three organisations or three approaches, first, with planning authorities and, secondly, with LEPs. I sense we have covered those in quite a lot of detail, but Dr Hogg did just mention health and wellbeing boards. The Government did envisage that LNPs would liaise closely with health and wellbeing boards and I would be interested to knowing how far that has happened and what the impact has been.
Dr Hogg: From our experience, it is early days. It is definitely an area we are extremely interested in. One of the areas that the Natural Capital Committee looked at in its third report as being probably of high value but knowledge not quite good enough at the moment was around the effect of green infrastructure on air pollution. We think that is important in urban areas. Bristol, for example, has a problem with various air pollutants so we would like to see whether we can use urban green infrastructure to address that. We recently submitted a concept to Horizon 2020 for a major project with Wessex Water and a few others, so fingers crossed.
But I believe some of the other nature partnerships have had quite good success at attracting funding from health and wellbeing boards to support their work. That is really positive because it is definitely an area where the natural environment and the economy go well together. It is a good example as well, I would suggest, of where the GVA metric is a bad one for us to be using to assess what we could do. What are we doing? We are effectively hoping that through these projects we are going to reduce expenditure by the health service on prescriptions and so forth. So what are we doing? What is the effect on GVA? In the short term it might be negative. It is an economically sensible thing to do but we are using the wrong metrics to tell us that it is.
Q32 Chair: The RSPB did a lot of work, didn’t they, and the wildlife and countryside groups as well, on access improving wellbeing. Is that factored into your work, as Mr Aldous is suggesting?
Dr Hogg: Access is definitely part of that as well. It is better understood, I suppose, in terms of its impact on health and it is well understood that there is a benefit from improving access to the natural environment. We are very interested also in things like the impact of the natural environment on stress and on other non-communicable diseases. Wessex Water now finds more and more anti-depressants in its wastewater stream. The body is not efficient at dealing with this. The project we are looking at that we put forward for the EU is basically one where we want to monitor if we develop green infrastructure in some urban areas what is the impact of anti-depressants coming in in wastewater, and that has an impact on Wessex’s capital investment plan. They think if they do things sensibly in a smart way they can reduce their capital investment requirements over the next 20 years or so from over £0.5 billion down to about £40 million. That is amazing. Why don’t we do it?
Rupert Clubb: There are some good examples of where health and wellbeing are engaged. In Surrey, for example, the director of public health sits on the LNP so I think that is positive. The LNP in Sussex covers West Sussex, Brighton & Hove and East Sussex, so three administrative areas, and there are some pilot sites for health and wellbeing. In other authorities there are local authority elected members who are on LNPs and sit on health and wellbeing boards. There is no one size fits all for how health and wellbeing links in with LNPs but there is a lot of evidence out there that helps us understand the importance of green infrastructure, of green space and of that natural capital in relation to health and wellbeing improvement.
Q33 Dr Whitehead: This follows a little bit from what has happened so far with LNPs and what we have been concentrating on. There are three pillars of sustainable development: sustainable land use management, green economic growth, quality of life and wellbeing. What areas out of that little palette would you say that local nature partnerships have been following and which areas haven’t they been following?
Liz Newton: My understanding is that they are operating in a way that works across all of those. I talked about the relationship linking in with the LEPs that we are helping them with. We have talked about the local authority planning issues that they are working on. They were also asked to help with the validation of countryside stewardship targeting statements, which is the agri-environment schemes at a local level, so they have been playing a role in that. I think they are working across the breadth of those three pillars. Of course, they determine what their priorities are themselves, so they will have different balances as to how they play in those places, but my understanding is that they are working across that breadth.
Rupert Clubb: Again, this picks up on the differing approach of LNPs. In some areas there is a risk that LNPs are seen as quite conservation-driven, purist conservation, and I think that can turn off LEPs, business and others. So I don’t think it is clear-cut to say that all LEPs understand or follow those three pillars of sustainability. For me it is about economic, social and environmental and those three coming together. Some of the ADEPT feel that sometimes there is more emphasis on that sort of purist conservation and to be successful is in the way that Liz has described. There are some great examples. The relationship between the New Anglia LEP and the Wild Anglia LNP is very strong and sustainability is almost a watchword for that LEP.
Q34 Dr Whitehead: Is there any sense of that the way in which people are recruited, and appointed to the partnership boards has any influence in determining what the LNP pursues in particular? I must say I am not quite clear how those people who are on the LNP board are recruited and appointed and what status that then provides. Take my own local nature partnership board: I see that the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust has provided the chair; the chief executive of the New Forest National Park is there; there is the lead from the Isle of Wight Area of Natural Beauty; there is the director of the South Downs National Park. There is no one whatsoever from any urban areas in Hampshire.
Chair: An area that Dr Whitehead knows very well.
Rupert Clubb: Perhaps if you take Hampshire as an example, there is a lot of goodwill there and certainly a lot of goodwill from the Hampshire wildlife trust in helping take things forward. To be fair, a lot of the work has fallen to the Hampshire wildlife trust. As we mentioned at the start of the session, public services financially is going to be a tough gig for the next few years and budgets potentially will dwindle over time. Those environmental NGOs I think are very important in holding LNPs together with their enthusiasm and passion and drive for bringing back environmental improvements. If I looked at it in a wider context, the key for LNPs to survive and be successful going forward has to hinge on that relationship with LEPs. I think that was the original intent and somehow strengthening that will be a fine step forward.
Q35 Dr Whitehead: The Hampshire Local Nature Partnership covers two LEPs.
Rupert Clubb: It does. That is absolutely right, yes.
Dr Whitehead: And some of the LEPs don’t cover the partnership.
Rupert Clubb: It would be interesting to look at the existing relationship between the LEPs and the LNPs and understand how strong that is.
Q36 Dr Whitehead: I have long believed in the existence of a department of non-congress boundaries at the heart of government beneath Whitehall somewhere and when any new proposal comes forward assurance is given that the boundaries are not congressed with anything else that has hitherto been organised. LNPs are intended to have equal significant status with LEPs. That is in the founding document. Would there be any intention to look at that in the future? Did not LEPs themselves turn up in a rather strange way, by willing themselves into existence and then defining boundaries at that point? Is there any sense in which that working could be assisted in the future by trying to bring them together in any further way, in the way, for example, that the National Health Service has reorganised itself in terms of communications?
Liz Newton: The way they have been set up and the way they choose their membership is all very locally determined. Some of them have very strong public-private partnerships and some of them are led by wildlife conservation type organisations and that will vary the nature of them. DEFRA is currently doing some evaluation that might give some useful insights and feedback from the LNPs themselves, which I think would help us understand whether something further needs to be done around that. That sort of local determination was very important when they were set up.
Dr Whitehead: There isn’t one at all in Essex. Presumably, therefore, nothing happens in Essex to any of these three pillars.
Q37 Chair: Would the local authorities in Essex, for example, take on any leadership role in trying to get one set up?
Rupert Clubb: I am not aware of the circumstances around the LNP for Essex. Essex sits within the wider Southeast Local Enterprise Partnership, which comprises East Sussex, Kent and Essex.
Q38 Dr Whitehead: There is a LEP but there is no LNP?
Liz Newton: I don’t know. I would have to check and provide some information for you.
Dr Hogg: I think it is very difficult to envisage an LNP spontaneously emerging without some support from some local authority. My predecessor—Dr Bevis Watts who is from Avon Wildlife Trust—was basically the interim chair of the West of England Nature Partnership and he always saw it as interim, and part of how our partnership got established was he spent a lot of time.
Going back to your earlier question about how do people get appointed, we would love to have more people coming forward to our board. Nobody is getting paid, apart from me actually and I get £3,000 a year as an honorarium and I spend much more, I can tell you, and I spend a lot of time, and I might get my expenses for today, and the co-ordinator gets paid, as she should; it is her job. All of us are doing day jobs, so we have a board at the moment where we would like to have somebody from the landowner community and somebody from the developer community. We have advertised it, but of course there is no money. We are actively soliciting people to come on to the board and trying to explain to them why they might want to do that. Bear in mind that a lot of the people who are on those boards are people who are basically giving up time from what they would otherwise be doing. That applies equally to our steering group and the working groups we have below that. Everyone is doing that because they feel some sort of commitment to the overall project and we try to maintain that commitment.
Q39 Dr Whitehead: I fully appreciate the nature of the board members. They are essentially doing it for love and that is what they have committed themselves to do. Bearing in mind what we have heard about funding and/or lack of, are there circumstances under which local nature partnerships almost might consider themselves commissioned to do particular things? Would there be a circumstance under which, say, some local authorities decide, “We are going to provide you with some money, LNP, but you do this, this and this”?
Dr Hogg: We have thought about that. I mentioned earlier our state of the environment work. I imagine that would be very useful to the local planning authorities, so maybe we should sell it or at least try to generate value from that. But is that in the spirit of what we want to do? We would quite like to make those widely available and to help people to understand what the opportunities might be. As I say, we are very fortunate in getting that funded by Wessex Water.
I think you made an earlier point about the relationship with local enterprise partnerships. Of the people who responded to my callout, one of the routes that was mentioned for securing better core funding was some relationship with the local enterprise partnership. You were asking about the relative status and, as I think is appreciated, they were meant to be almost parallel organisations. They both are bodies who are—I can’t remember the name of the Act, it slips my memory—included in the duty to co-operate; they are bodies that have equal status in that. It is interesting that the West of England Local Enterprise Partnership is effectively leading on the joint strategic planning system, whereas we are trying to find a way of being included in the overall process even though in principle we are both at the same level in the pecking order vis-à-vis the duty to co-operate in the planning system.
Q40 Martin Caton: Are we at a stage when we can identify new initiatives that might be needed to keep momentum behind the work of LNPs and NIAs? I realise it is quite early on in the existence of these organisations, but have we reached a stage where it occurs that some sort of new initiative would help to maintain momentum?
Rupert Clubb: Just some thoughts, if I may. Whatever source sustainable funding comes from in the future is important for LEPs, be that through public-private partnership or alternative means. It is certainly a question that colleagues from around the country have raised with me. LNPs are very much seen as the preserve of DEFRA, and that is good and I think it should be widened so that they are recognised by other departments and you can make that linkage into the LEPs. The LNPs have such a fundamental role to play in relation to growth that, as I said earlier, you ignore them at your peril. The prospect of the commissioning suggestion is an interesting one. At a time for local authorities where massive pressures are falling upon adult social care and perhaps children’s services, there are pressures on environmental services in local authorities and it is quite an interesting prospect to develop business for the LNPs. Exploring those kinds of opportunities is going to be important for LNPs going forward.
Liz Newton: In the evaluation that DEFRA has done and the feedback we are getting, there is clearly, from the LNPs themselves, points about funding, clearly, consistency between LNPs and what they are doing and perhaps some sort of coherence within the organisations themselves. I am sure some thinking about all those things would help. Natural England and other arm’s length bodies are committed to continue to work with them in the way that we are, helping them with information and supporting them in doing the things that they are doing. It is early days yet and some of them are only really just beginning to get past the phase of building their boards and structures and starting to develop their strategies. I think that will help.
Dr Hogg: It would be interesting to see what the LNPs now came forward with as their key asks in terms of what they felt were the obstacles to them doing a better job. I would not underestimate the degree to which that would be things that could be done at the national level as well as the local level. There are clearly relationships that we have discussed between the local enterprise partnerships and planning. Should there be some more clear direction given to the nature of the interaction between those three types of body? But equally if you look at that things I was mentioning earlier about how projects are evaluated locally, that is effectively centrally determined. If you look at what water companies might want to do about doing things in a non-conventional way, not using the traditional capital investments but looking at doing things smarter, then you are into a question about does Ofwat take a too risk averse approach to evaluating whether or not those types of approaches will work? Is there something to be done about how the industry is regulated? Is there something to be said about the new agri-environment schemes; how can we use those? For example, if we are looking at payments for ecosystem services projects we might be wanting to persuade landowners to do things they are not currently persuaded to do at the current level of agri-environmental payment but with a small uplift they might. Trying to be a little creative with some of the national mechanisms that would enable local nature partnerships do a little more but, coming back to Rupert’s point on funding; we have to make sure they are still there in a few years’ time.
Q41 Martin Caton: Carrying on this theme, to get local nature conservation embedded into our planning system, is it just a case of more of the same or do we need to start thinking differently?
Rupert Clubb: To my mind when you talk about local nature conservation in the planning system, there is a regulatory role there for both statutory environmental bodies and local planning authorities. This is so much wider than just that local conservation. It is about the exploration of opportunity for communities, residents and businesses, with green infrastructure and green spaces. Of course, nature conservation plays a—
Q42 Martin Caton: It probably would have been better if I had used the word “sustainability” rather than “conservation”, because that is a much narrower thing and I take your point.
Rupert Clubb: Yes. I think that is the key. It is about sustainability. It is a recognition that growth will be successful if it is sustainable, if we have got the environment, the social aspects and economy working together. There are some fantastic examples from around the country of where LNPs and LEPs have engaged well, they have sourced funding, got good private sector representation, but there are also some poor ones. There is not a level playing field. There are concerns from members about capacity, both from an LNP and a local planning authority perspective, about the funding and wider resources and I think that relationship with LEPs and other government departments.
Q43 Martin Caton: If the LNP process is going to be repeated or extended in the future, are there identifiable pitfalls that should be avoided and could be avoided?
Liz Newton: I just mentioned the DEFRA evaluation exercise that has been going on. I have not seen the report but there should be some useful insights in that and it probably is to do with consistency of the funding and how they are set up. I think there will be some useful stuff that will come out of that to inform that question.
Dr Hogg: It feels to me that there was not quite enough thought given to exactly what was the role and how that role was going to be delivered, and it is related to the funding question.
Q44 Chair: Do you think there should be guidance about what all the LNPs should be doing?
Dr Hogg: It depends what is included in the guidance, I suppose, because as soon as you say an LNP should do XYZ then you are assuming it has the capacity to do XYZ, and we go back to the funding question.
Q45 Chair: In order to have guidance you would have to have capacity and funding?
Dr Hogg: Yes. I go back to the question about how LNPs can work with DEFRA, for example. If DEFRA wants LNPs to play a role more in delivery, then the resources to deliver need to be there. I know it is a point that you obviously hear time and time again, but I think that needs to be done. Fundamentally, if you go back to the much more strategic point that DEFRA had in its vision for LNPs about integrating the value of nature in decision-making around the economy, what has to happen is that those obstacles that are easily removable, potentially by central government, need to be removed. We don’t want to have to try to do things that arguably could be done more easily at central government level.
Q46 Mrs Spelman: I have a little clutch of questions about your interaction with the EU habitats and birds directives. I would be keen to get your reflections on whether you think these directives have provided the right level of protections and produced the right trade-off between environmental and economic considerations. You will know that they are on the fitness-for-purpose checklist for the new Commission. Do you think ultimately any changes need to be made? Maybe Natural England, because in a way you are the regulator here.
Liz Newton: I know there is a review underway at the moment. The EU are doing this fitness test that we are providing evidence for so we will provide that through—
Chair: Yes, but we would like to have your angle on what is relevant at the moment.
Liz Newton: I have not seen what our submission on that has been. I think we are just going through the process of doing it at the moment.
Q47 Mrs Spelman: Just reflections on it, not an all bells and whistles review of its practice. Do you think they have broadly provided the right level of protection or do you think that they don’t provide enough protection? It is just as practitioners you are dealing with a canon of legislation that within the next six months is going to undergo some big health check, so I would find it quite useful to get your sense of it.
Rupert Clubb: I suppose there are questions about the longer-term sustainability of some of those sites that might be protected by the regulations. A good example would be habitat sites that are struggling against sea level rise. In the longer term, should you continue to protect that site against what is the inevitable or should you accept that landscapes evolve? There is an interesting debate about land management, isn’t there? In some respects it is sort of beauty is in eye of the beholder. There is something about recognising that certainly in this country, in fact the world over, landscapes have evolved for thousands and thousands of years and who are we to stop that evolution. I don’t know how that feeds into the regulations. It is quite an interesting question. Therefore, if the habitat that is there is no longer sustainable should there be an acceptance against things like natural processes that habitat will be lost but it will be replaced by something equally beautiful but different and how should we respond to that? That is not specifically from a practitioner’s point of view. It is more of an observation.
Q48 Mrs Spelman: Probably there is nothing within the habitats directive that covers climate change, as it stands. Is that right? It pre-dates major legislative change, so that is quite a constructive outcome. Do you think the habitats and birds directives have helped or hindered the local nature partnerships’ role in trying to get the balance right in the way forward with development?
Rupert Clubb: If it is habitats regulations or some other designation, LNPs will have regard to it and rightly so. I can’t personally think of a specific example in relation to LNPs and how they view habitat sites.
Liz Newton: As you know, there was a review of the implementation of the directive in England and I think the sort of areas that it came up with that needed some consideration were things like how that can facilitate national infrastructure projects and how the two can work together; streamlining guidance, improving how we all share data and information between us and improving that customer experience. I know Natural England has been working with DEFRA to implement some of those things. For instance, we have set up a major infrastructure group that enables very early conversations around some of these things so that we try to find ways through that will do the protection that is required as well as enable the growth. There has been a lot of work. I don’t have the detail of all of that here, I am afraid, but we can provide you some background information on that if you require further.
Dr Hogg: We have one quite specific example of where there is a role to play here. I think it is fair to say more generally—and this is not my area of expertise—certainly at the board we have tried to concentrate on the strategic issues of trying to get the natural environment and the economy integrated. One of the areas where we have an interesting development is a very old site down in Avonmouth that has a planning consent that goes back to the 1940s. It has been the subject of some legal wrangling and one of the issues is that the old planning consent covers some areas that are reasonably sensitive for habitat and if they were developed out the question that the local authority is facing is what would we have to do in order to make provision for habitat elsewhere in the estuary. I know that Natural England has been looking at the opportunities for that.
Interestingly, that has led to what I hope will become a very collaborative approach down in that area. It is in the enterprise area that the local authority wants to develop out so the local enterprise partnership, I believe, has identified funds to not only look at the issues of biodiversity in the area but is also going to be looking at the flood risk issues at the same time. Of course we hope those will come together and that we will be able to do something quite creative around that and we, as the partnership, have been involved in those discussions, as has Natural England and others. That is the only place where there seems to have been some implications in the work we have done so far but it is something we should look at. You are absolutely right, we should look at what is the potential to have a positive influence on those directives.
Q49 Mrs Spelman: If they were repealed altogether, would your job be made harder or easier?
Dr Hogg: That is an interesting question. I suspect in many ways in terms of the conservation work it becomes much more difficult. There are arguments that we are clearly employed to do those things. It is not my area of expertise. I am sure there will be losses in that direction but—
Rupert Clubb: I think your point about its relationship with climate change is an important one in terms of adaptation and resilience. There will be, in the fullness of time, significant changes potentially to landscape either as a result of sea level rise or warming. I think that is a really interesting observation.
Q50 Chair: You were talking just now about areas that have evolved over thousands of years and we have not really had much reference to ancient woodland. Some Members of Parliament attended a briefing by the Woodland Trust just last week where they were very concerned indeed that the recommendations of the DCLG Select Committee should be accepted by Government to give greater protection to ancient woodland. Do you have any comments at all about how ancient woodland is or is not better protected by the work of local nature partnerships? How much does the protection of ancient woodland feature in the joint work that you are doing and how does that link into the EU birds and habitats directives?
Liz Newton: I know that some of the local nature partnerships are looking at the assets that they have within their areas, and woodlands are part of those. We also have something called national character area profiles, 159 of them across the country, which set out the character of those areas but also the environmental issues and opportunities. Some of those ancient woodlands are hugely important, so we would be encouraging those LNPs to build some action on that into their particular strategies, but I will leave it for these two to comment.
Rupert Clubb: It is a little bit out of my field and I would only just give my observation. The numbers of species that ancient woodland supports is considerable by comparison to single species woodlands. A lot of ancient woodlands, while they don’t necessarily have their own designation themselves, are covered by other environmental designations. Certainly from a local planning authority perspective, local planners are very tuned into ancient woodland and its importance within the wider communities and environment.
Dr Hogg: I would be mightily horrified, very horrified, if we were not actually playing some role in trying to ensure the protection of those woodlands, unless there were extraordinarily good reasons. There would have to be really very good reasons, I think. We are hearing so much talk about natural capital and we are not always good at maintaining our capital, arguably of many different forms.
Q51 Chair: Do you have a view on the Government’s response to the DCLG Select Committee report, which has rejected the recommendation that they made about the tighter presumption in favour of protection of ancient woodlands?
Dr Hogg: Personally, I have to confess I have not seen the nature of the response.
Chair: Well, without having seen the response—
Dr Hogg: Without having seen the response, I would be somewhat disappointed. We are here talking about natural capital and that has to be one of our most prized assets, I would have thought.
Liz Newton: I have not seen that either. As Rupert was saying, there is protection: some of them are SSSIs; some of them have other sorts of protection. We have to work within the legislation and the protection that is available at the moment.
Q52 Chair: Do you have any role in advising on responses to proposals put forward? Is that anything you have had any input into?
Liz Newton: I don’t actually know. I can find out but I personally don’t know that. It is quite likely, I should imagine.
Dr Hogg: It is a very good example, going back to what I said earlier, of where LNPs will be arguably confronting or have probably a very similar view that they would like to project. My hesitancy is only because I am not familiar with the document, but I would like to think that the collective voice of the LNPs—and some have already attained a status that is higher than others—would be a powerful one. If they then said as a collective, “This is bad news” I would like to think the time would come when, if there was that unanimity of view that Government would listen to the LNPs.
Q53 Chair: But that is not there at the moment?
Dr Hogg: It doesn’t feel like it.
Q54 Dr Whitehead: My question to some extent underlines that. Do you between you have any knowledge or any mechanism that ensures the continued existence of local nature partnerships? I don’t wish to quote any particular local nature partnership but one that springs to mind apparently had one board meeting in 2013. They said they would have board meetings every three months and have not had one since. They do have a Twitter account but they have put three tweets out, the last of which appeared last summer. There was apparently a workshop that took place in early 2013 but nothing else. So they don’t actually appear to exist but they are on the map as existing. I presume that the wide variety of activity levels, funding and so on that we have heard about this afternoon as far as local nature partnerships are concerned ranges from being quite active to not existing at all. Is there anything that can be done about that in terms of the influence that you, Dominic, have mentioned that LNPs might have in the future? Presumably if they don’t exist, that could be a bit of a problem.
Dr Hogg: I would like to think that it would be perceived that way. If you think why is that partnership not more active, maybe it is because those who were potentially going to be involved didn’t necessarily see sufficient benefit from carrying it forward or maybe it was the enthusiasm of those involved. I don’t know. At the moment it feels to me as though the success, however we measure that, of the partnerships is very strongly dependent on the goodwill of those who are trying to inject enthusiasm into it and see hopefully the potential that those partnerships have. Sadly, I think we are not quite tapping sufficiently into the enthusiasm that is clearly there. You could say how come local nature partnerships have done as much as they have, given the limited level of resource that has been made available to them. That is perhaps the other way of looking at it right now.
Q55 Chair: It does not give a very good impression, does it?
Dr Hogg: It could give a very good impression, as I have suggested. But I think there is some way to go and some thinking to be done about exactly what are these—
Q56 Chair: Who should be doing that thinking?
Dr Hogg: Partly us, I suppose, in terms of, “What would we have done?” Incidentally, we have an annual conference of the LNPs. It is on 24 March and I am hoping that we will—
Q57 Chair: What is on the agenda of that and who is the keynote speaker?
Dr Hogg: Sadly, I think we were going to be addressed by a Minister, who has had to pull out; I think maybe it was Lord de Mauley. I forget exactly which Minister it was. I was not in attendance at the last of these annual meetings. I had not been appointed at the time. By the way, I did mean to say I had my first job interview for many years. I had to go into an interview and I have not been as nervous in a long time. I did get appointed after an interview. I think at the last national meeting, the LNPs in attendance wanted more table sessions, more discussion sessions and so there is a range of discussion topics that are going to be considered at this next meeting. Interestingly, I responded to those organising it and said I would like something that is a bit more about strategy and how we strategise as a group. I think we will be much more powerful as a group and we will also find that we are probably all trying to do some similar things with our limited resources. So let’s co-ordinate and make sure we are not just reinventing wheels with our very limited resources. Let’s try to use what we have as a collective in the most efficient manner.
Q58 Chair: Can I ask Natural England, where do you think the leadership should come from in respect to the local nature partnerships?
Liz Newton: They were set up by this Government. The legislation or the guidance was all about locally determined things, local priorities, with the idea that people at a local level know better as to what should be happening in a local area. Unless that has changed, that probably is still an important criterion. As I said earlier, we are going to continue to support the LNPs, as we have agreed to, by helping them with expert advice, providing evidence that we have and helping them with particular things where we have common interests. We are all focusing our resources in the areas of most need and often they come together and we will continue to do that.
Q59 Chair: Dr Clubb, do you have any comments on leadership for LNPs?
Rupert Clubb: At the recent LNP LEP conference Lord de Mauley was present and spoke and he is certainly championing LNPs and showing that leadership. If Lord de Mauley’s enthusiasm could spread, perhaps outside DEFRA into BIS and CLG, that would be a positive step. There is leadership from within the LNPs, as you can see here today. There are some fantastic LNPs who are doing some great stuff and are quite embedded with the LEPs, so that leadership needs to continue from Dominic and others to keep promoting with the LEPs. But it needs to be felt across Government and I think that the LEP chairs have a potential role to play in embracing LNPs. Where that has happened, you have some great sustainable growth plans moving forward and they can be held up as examples of where it really can work.
Q60 Chair: So we need to be taking evidence from the LEP chairs?
Rupert Clubb: Those LEP chairs that can evidence where their relationships with the LNPs are strong. I would cite the New Anglia LEP as being one where their relationship with the Wild Anglia LNP is very good, and that is reflected in their growth plans.
Q61 Chair: Thank you. Dr Hogg, you wanted the last word.
Dr Hogg: Clearly we need some sort of recognition and financial support at central government level. If that means that we have some responsibilities given to us then so be it. I would rather it was that way than we had no obvious and clear responsibility but no funding either so we potentially wither on the vine in some cases—I hope not our own. The Natural Capital Committee has been given its stay of existence for a few months because the next Government, as I understand it, will respond to its report. I would like to think there would be a positive response to that report and I would like to think that the LNPs would be given a clear role in how we deliver on the plan for restoring natural capital. That would be wonderful and I think we would all embrace that and want to take that forward.
Chair: On the point, we shall finish. Can I thank all of you, not just for coming here today and giving evidence but for the work that you do on this most important area of nature? Thank you very much indeed.
Oral evidence: Local Nature Partnerships, HC 858 4