Farming back in Defra

Spelman and Paice but not Herbert

"I will work across government and beyond to respond to the challenges of increasing food production, adapting to climate change, protecting our natural environment and ensuring we live sustainably," said new Defra Secretary Caroline Spelman after being appointed to the coalition Cabinet. Formerly Conservative Party chairman and holder of a number of shadow ministerial posts, Spelman is not thought of as a great orator but she has the advantage of a solid agricultural policy background. In addition to making her the most appropriately experienced agriculture Minister of recent decades, these agricultural credentials potentially lay her open to accusations of conflict of interests (real or perceived).

Secretary of State (Caroline Spelman MP) Portfolio:

* Overall responsibility for departmental policy; particular interest in CAP reform, biodiversity and climate change

* Strategy, budget and finances

* Legislative programme

* Emergencies

* EU and international relations

* Environment Agency

* Natural England

Born in 1958, she was educated at Herts and Essex Grammar School before reading European Studies at Queen Mary College, University of London.

Fluent in French and German, she lived in Paris for 6 years where she worked for the International Federation of Sugar Beet Growers after working for the NFU as sugar advisor.

While living in Paris she met her husband Mark, now with Accenture. She fought the Parliamentary seat of Bassetlaw in 1992, 4 months pregnant with her second child and with her first child in a pushchair. She also wrote a book on biofuels before eventually entering Parliament in 1997. Spelman's appointment has courted controversy in the mainly non-farming media for three reasons:
1. Sleaze: Spelman was ordered to return expenses that she claimed to pay her nanny during the 'nannygate' affair of March 2009. She agreed to repay the cash and issued an apology. She also claimed £40,000 for bills and cleaning for her second home in her constituency, despite her husband, Mark, claiming it was his main home when he unsuccessfully stood for the EU elections in June 2009. Finally, she over-claimed hundreds of pounds for council tax. She has now paid this back, telling the media it was a "one-off administrative oversight".
* Her lobbying background: She and her husband Mark set up Spelman, Cormack & Associates in 1989 as a food and biotech lobbying firm. Cormack is her unmarried name. She resigned as a director about a year ago and transferred her share of the company to her husband. At this point, the company address changed from her constituency home to her London flat. The latest year in which it filed full accounts with Companies House was 2006. The company is insolvent with liabilities (directors' loans) exceeding its assets. It did not trade in 2005 or 2006 and made losses of around £1,500 in both those years. It has accrued a capital deficit of £9,941. The company has clearly been dormant since 2005 and presumably was a home for any freelance consultancy and lobbying work that she and her husband did during career breaks.

* Her husband: Mark is a Director of Accenture, the company intimately involved with the computer-driven meltdown at the RPA. His CV seems to indicate that he has more important clients than the RPA. It states, "Mark is an international businessman with considerable knowledge and experience of the global energy and utility markets. He leads Accenture's Global Strategy practice and runs Accenture's global macro economic and political think-tank and the Institute for High Performance. He is responsible for the firm's strategic relationship with the World Economic Forum (WEF) and is a regular participant and session leader at Davos and the WEF regional summit." There is no evidence that he has been involved in the RPA catastrophe and his wife was not in office at the time that the RPA awarded Accenture a £35 million 7-year contract to develop new and more efficient systems in 2003. However, the contract expires this year so Spelman will have to delegate her decision-making powers on the termination or renewal of the contract, under Ministerial rules.
* While InsideTrack's investigations into the media's concerns about her former company directorship and her husband's business activities have proven them largely unfounded, the claim in her CV that she was a Research Fellow with the Centre for European Agricultural Studies (CEAS) seems somewhat overstated. A CEAS staff member of the time said: "Caroline Spelman was awarded a fellowship or similar to do her PhD or similar at Wye in the late 1980s. The Centre for European Agricultural Studies was run and housed in Wye College where we were based at the time so she was attached to the College rather than employed by us but Nick Young ( the managing director) frequently met her over coffee etc. at the time". So it would seem that she started a postgraduate course at Wye, which she never completed, and drank a lot of coffee.

* Notwithstanding the idiosyncrasies of her CV, Spelman has now jumped into the Cabinet seat that Nick Herbert, the shadow Secretary, might have hoped that David Cameron had reserved for him. Herbert had been an enthusiastic Shadow and deserved to get the job but his promise to lift the hunting ban put him in a difficult position in light of the proposed free vote (see below). Herbert may also have lost out to the pressure on Cameron to appoint more female Cabinet Ministers. He becomes a junior Minister in the Home Office responsible for policing, a job which he apparently shadowed effectively before.

* Cameron did, however, keep Jim Paice's seat on the bus, which is good news for agricultural interests. Paice is well known in East Anglia, having been both a farmer and contractor. Born in Felixstowe, Suffolk in 1949, Jim attended Framlingham College. From school he spent 2 years working on farms before attending Writtle Agricultural College and starting a career in farm management. For 8 years before his election he was a director of a training and management development company which was owned by a large farmer-owned business.

Minister of State for Agriculture and Food (Jim Paice MP) Portfolio:

* Farming

* Food

* Animal health (including endemic and exotic diseases)

* Responsibility and cost-sharing

* Welfare of farm animals

* Single Payments Scheme

* RDPE

* Forestry (including Forestry Commission)

* Agriculture and forestry carbon budgets

* Hunting and shooting

* Agricultural wages

* Gangmasters licensing

* Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS)

* Better regulation

* Deputising for the Secretary of State at EU Agriculture Council

Richard Benyon and Lord Henley complete the Ministerial team with portfolios covering the natural environment and fisheries.

Richard Benyon lives on the 4,200ha Englefield Estate in Berkshire and calls himself a farmer. He was born in 1960 and trained at RAC Cirencester. He is a chartered surveyor and the great-great-grandson of Conservative Prime Minister Lord Salisbury. He was part of the Shadow Defra team before his appointment.

Lord Henley will deal with all the departmental business in the Lords and has responsibility for waste management and recycling. Oliver Eden (Lord Henley) entered the House of Lords in 1977 and has held a number of front bench positions both in government under Margaret Thatcher and John Major and also in opposition.

 Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Natural Environment and Fisheries (Richard Benyon MP)

* Natural environment
* Ecosystem services & Biodiversity
* National parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty
* Wildlife & JNCC
* Flooding and water (including the Nitrates Directive)
* Inland waterways (including British Waterways)
* Land management and soil & Coastal erosion
* Rural affairs
* Marine and Coastal Access Act implementation
* Coastal and wider access, countryside and rights of way
* Departmental administration
* Apprenticeships


* Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Lord Henley)
* Environmental regulation & GMOs
* Chemicals and pesticides
* Climate change & Biofuels
* Sustainable development, consumption and production Welfare of companion and wild animals
* Plant health
* Science, evidence and research
* Waste and recycling
* All departmental business in the Lords

Three out of four of the Ministerial team have previous experience of agriculture or agricultural policy, which is a welcome change from the succession of Ministers from inner city seats.

The 'Programme for Government' was unveiled by the coalition on 20 May, focussing Defra on environmental sustainability but also saying "We also believe that much more needs to be done to support the farming industry, protect biodiversity and encourage sustainable food production." The programme lists policy objectives intended to achieve this strategic aim:

* reducing the regulatory burden on farmers by moving to a risk-based system of regulation and developing a system of extra support for hill farmers

* introducing measures to protect wildlife and promote green spaces and wildlife corridors in order to halt the loss of habitats and restore biodiversity

* investigating ways to share with livestock keepers the responsibility for preparing and dealing with disease outbreaks

* introducing a carefully managed policy of badger control in areas with high and persistent levels of bovine TB

* promoting high standards of animal welfare
* ensuring food procured by government departments meets British standards of production wherever this can be achieved without increasing overall cost

* creating a presumption in favour of sustainable development in the planning system
* bringing forward a motion on a free vote for a repeal of the Hunting Act.

It is notable that the programme does not mention CAP reform or specific CAP policies at all, and this is also the case for the Europe section of the programme. Policy differences between the Conservative party and the Liberal Democratic parties are at their greatest over Europe, so this section is very carefully worded to satisfy both Conservative Euro sceptics and LibDem Europhiles.

The most relevant aspects for agriculture are:
* ensuring that Britain does not enter the Euro
* supporting further enlargement of the EU
* strongly defending the UK's national interests in the forthcoming EU budget negotiations and agreeing that the EU budget should only focus on those areas where the EU can add value.

If one assumes that the coalition government believes that the EU cannot 'add value' in agriculture, it would mean that the Conservative policy of trimming the CAP budget as much as possible will be retained within the coalition

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