Tag: Hilary Benn

Below is the text of a speech made by Hilary Benn to the Local Government Information Unit on 28th October 2011.

Thank you for your kind invitation.

It is good to be back in local government, so to speak, after all these years. Quite a few things have changed, and some things haven’t; in particular I find myself once again in opposition with a Conservative Government in Westminster.

My time as a councillor in Ealing – and my experience in Leeds – has made me a passionate believer in local government and what it can do to help people to solve their problems and to realise their hopes and aspirations for a better world.

I say that because – as you know better than anyone – communities are at the heart of society. They are shaped by the places we live in and the relationships we have one with another. And what councils do makes such a difference to people’s lives. Localism is much talked about these days but what I find missing from the Secretary of State for Local Government is any apparent enthusiasm for local government. I don’t think what you do is appreciated enough, and one of the things that I want to do in this job is to stand up for local government.

Now these are very difficult times for councils and for the country. People are worried about their jobs, the rising cost of living and the affordability of housing. You are worried about implementing the huge reductions in funding – unprecedented in my political lifetime – that have been forced upon you, and unfairly and unevenly distributed.

This localism is about devolving responsibility for cuts that are hard and difficult – as you try to protect statutory services and decide where the axe will fall.

Yes, the deficit has to be dealt with, and no I am not here today to say that if you hang on for another three and a half years – and if there is a change of government – normal service will be resumed.

But the Chancellor does face a choice about economic policy, and the one he is pursuing clearly isn’t working. Confidence is plummeting. Unemployment is rising. Growth is grinding to a halt.

Nothing like enough private sector jobs are being created to replace those being lost in the public sector, including by councils – although we were promised that this would happen.

And, worst of all, in the face of this failure the Government has no plan to put it right.

The nation needs a plan, and local government needs a plan too. We have to get the economy going again. And that’s why a temporary reduction in VAT, a 5% VAT rate on home improvements, a NI tax break for SMEs taking on workers, a repeat of our bankers’ bonus tax to help 100,000 young people to find work and build 25,000 affordable homes and bringing forward long-term capital investment would all help to do that.

And councils should be at the heart of a plan for growth, doing what so many of you have done so successfully over the years – promoting the economic development of your area. Thinking ahead. Responding to profound changes rather than become prisoners of that change.  Making sure the right infrastructure and the right skills are in place.

Supporting economic growth of the right kind is really important, but the current mess that is planning isn’t going to help.

Some policies are very hard to understand.  I cannot fathom why the Government has scrapped the brownfield first policy – and very successful it was too – and I cannot understand why it has created so much uncertainty about the transition to the new Framework and where this will leave councils and communities in relations to developers.

The truth is that ministers have a long way to go to reassure people who fear that green England is under threat, and a long way to go to persuade us that we won’t see more appeals and more arguments about what the words of the new National Planning Policy Framework mean.

Some policies are contradictory. The localisation of council tax benefit, with a 10% cut and protection for certain groups, is likely to end up hitting people who work but are on low incomes; the very opposite of what the DWP says it is trying to do to make work pay.

Others haven’t been thought through. The localisation of business rates is fine in principle as long as there is real incentive, that councils don’t lose out financially and there is a fair mechanism for redistribution that recognises disadvantage. But so far even those who favour the idea don’t think much of the proposals.

Some are plain incoherent. When money is tight, and CLG has faced huge cuts, to suddenly find £250m to try to bribe councils into changing decisions they themselves have made  – in the spirit of localism  – about how to collect  people’s rubbish is bizarre and smacks of Whitehall knows best.

We have a housing crisis; a crisis of supply and a crisis of affordability. The housing budget has been slashed, the number of new homes built in England last year was the lowest for decades, and plans for 200,000 new homes have been abandoned since the election, in part because of the chaos over planning.

And some are plain unfair. As any of you who have seen the map that Newcastle City Council has produced will know, this show that the most deprived communities are being hardest hit. The most deprived 10% of single tier authorities will see their total spending power reduce by nearly four times as much as the least deprived 10%. So much for not balancing the books on the backs of the poorest.

So we have:

An Economic crisis

Less money

Significant changes with the Localism Bill, in health, education and policing, with police commissioners, coming, that local government is going to have to work with, and through, in future.

And a continuing debate about the balance between the local and the national.

The charge that all oppositions are localisers and all governments are centralisers has more than a grain of truth in it. The Whitehall machine is naturally centralising, and we have to recognise that when things go wrong locally – the failure to protect a child, for example – there is very powerful pressure on ministers to do something. And we accept that there is a case for central oversight and the inspection regime that goes with it.

So, first it would help if we were clearer about where responsibility should lie for what nationally, locally and in neighbourhoods and communities.

Some national responsibilities are obvious. Defence, benefits, health, and the framework for entitlement to social care, for example.

Education is currently a mixture of all three, although I find the continued use by some of the phrase local authority control of schools rather mystifying as there hasn’t been much of that since local management of schools came in. But even with all the changes that have taken place, there is still a role for local authorities in ensuring a sufficient supply of school places, in providing support services, and of course in working with schools as they contribute so much to the wider community.

At the local end, we have, for example, the number of libraries, or traffic calming, or parks and recreation.

It seems to me that reaching a measure of agreement – finding the right balance – would help us in the relationship between the community, the local and the national, and will be especially important in the new financial circumstances that local authorities find themselves in.

Secondly, we need to encourage the process now underway in which councils are looking at different way of doing things. There is a case for doing this because of the cuts and there is case for doing this anyway in the interests of providing a better service.

Earlier this week I met the co-operative councils network and learned about the interesting things they are doing. Rochdale mutualising its housing stock. Lambeth’s work on devolving youth service spending and decision-making. And co-op trust schools in Oldham. Or look at the bringing together of back office functions and some front-line services by Kensington and Chelsea, and Westminster.

As Sophia Parker puts it: “an increasing number of councils are recognising that slicing existing budgets ever more thinly is not enough in today’s world, and that competition and outsourcing alone will not do the trick. An altogether bolder approach is needed.”

Thirdly, I think there is a very strong case for taking the principle of coming together and sharing things and applying it much more widely outside of local government. I am talking about the Total Place approach. The argument for this way of looking at things is overwhelming.

You only have to reflect on what we have now and ask yourself – if we had been starting from scratch – would the duplication and overlap between local authorities, and health, and police, and probation and other services have seemed a sensible thing to do.

It also means for local government that it can have a bigger say in how other public services are provided in their communities.

What the Worcestershire pilot showed was that of all the public spending in the county, only around 20% was attributable to the 6 district councils and the county – and what was directly controlled was about half that once you took out schools. In other words most of it was elsewhere, but when you bring people together round a table to discuss how to spend the pot all sorts of new ways of doing things emerge and become possible if there is the will.

I think we should be naturally wary of turning the whole system upside down for the sake of it – we have all seen a lot of that – but I favour a radical approach in this area allied to the right kind of incremental change [Fabians]. Pooling budgets to look at all the needs of an area and sharing data on, and working together with, the same people or families that lots of different agencies are dealing with makes a lot of sense. Making the best use of the public estate – school buildings, housing offices, job centres – makes a lot of sense.

And from a resident’s perspective, if several different local and national agencies are undertaking the same financial assessment of you and your circumstances, then doing it just the once seems pretty sensible too.

The argument for a total place way of doing things is even stronger in the context of the cuts, not least because it enables us to see the cumulative impact of what would otherwise be different decisions taken by different bodies and to ask the obvious question – is it fair and are we all working in the same direction?

Fourthly, I am a very strong supporter of neighbourhood management and neighbourhood budgets; what we might call ‘local place’. Before the boundaries changed, I represented the Halton Moor estate. It had its troubles and the Halton Moor Residents Group came together to say “we don’t want to put up with this any more”.

So we set up a neighbourhood management group, the ALMO provided support, and we got all the different services round the table, including the police, and set to work trying to sort things out. It didn’t cost a penny more – apart from the ALMO’s contribution – but it made much better use of the pounds that were being spent, and gradually the local residents told us that things had got better. And one sign of that was that some new houses for sale built where only a few years before perfectly good semi-detached houses had been knocked down were all sold before the last one was completed.

That experience taught me what was possible in doing things differently and what communities can do for themselves if they are given the chance.

Doing a better job for those we represent is what we are all interested in; it is outcomes for citizens that really matter. And citizens are really interested in the services they receive from local authorities; for them whether their needs are met is what matters.

When our children are of school age, what we want is a good local school and we don’t think much about structure or arguments about accountability.

When your 85 year old Dad needs support to stay in his own home, it is the help the council can give him that we rely on.

So we all need to assess how we are doing, and I do worry that with the abolition of the audit commission, we may lose some of the comparative data which would allow people locally and society nationally to see how councils fare in comparison to each other.

Finally, I know you’ve discussed lots of different approaches today about how councils can do the best in the tough circumstances you face. But you remain the defenders of your local communities. You are their voice in speaking to other public services. But the most important resource you have is the essential vitality of local government.

What history teaches us and what we can see around us is that with political will, and good leadership, and determination and confidence you can achieve an enormous amount.

Local government has always been an ocean of innovation. Victorian Britain saw people of civic mind and civic virtue lead the way. They brought gas and electricity to communities. They created the first public parks. They built homes. And they provided the clean water and the sewers that did more than anything else to beat disease and increase the life expectancy of our forebears and our ancestors.

They didn’t wait to be told what to do. They looked around, they saw the problems, and they got on with it.

And it is just as true today. Look at Leeds’s success in building a diverse economy and a thriving city centre.

Look at the regeneration of the former coalfields.

Or Camden’s work on services provided to and with people who have mental health problems.

Or Kent’s social innovation lab.

Or York’s plan to provide free wi-fi in the city centre; the 21st century equivalent of gas and electricity, powering the new economy.

And then think of the new challenges of our age.  Climate change. A population that is growing and ageing.  Obesity – the 21st century epidemic. Finding a way to live sustainably.

And then ask yourself this. If we can do extraordinary and visionary things in one place – and you have shown that you can – then we can do them anywhere.

And that’s why – despite the difficulties and despite the really tough choices that councils are confronted with – we have to hang on to that sense of optimism about what we can do to shape our future together.

And I really look forward to working with you as we do.

The speech below was given at the Barnes Wetland Centre, 21st July 2008.

Thank you all for coming, although I must admit that today is a subtle ruse on my part to enable me to visit the Barnes Wetland Centre.

And what a wonderful setting. I used to come to Barn Elms every week when I was at secondary school to play sport. Little did I think then what this place would become. Or that I’d be back here one day to make this speech.

My wife and I were discussing yesterday what I should say about my interest in the natural world. She said. “Tell them about our oak trees”.

We’ve been planting oaks from seed, and ash, and silver birch on a nature reserve – 8 acres of former farmland in Essex – for some 20 years now. The tallest oak is 15 feet or so, and the trees we have planted and those that nature has brought share the land with adders, foxes, and lots of lots of brambles that I go and do battle with whenever I can. It is my idea of relaxation. It’s a lot easier than doing this job! And every time I walk down the path, and wend my way through the narrow opening into the reserve, I feel the same sense of anticipation.

And why do we feel like this? Because nature is part of our soul.

I use the word ‘soul’ because this is a fundamental part of all of us. Of our identity. Of where we come from.

There are few things that can lift the spirit, or inspire a sense of freedom, as time spent – however fleetingly – with nature.

A glance out of the window of a train. The first crocus of spring. Even if you have spent your entire life in a city and have never before seen the mountains or the downs – looking out for the first time across the still waters of the Blackwater Estuary as dawn breaks, or gazing up at Scafell Pike from Great Moss, or catching a glimpse of the Seven Sisters from Birling Gap, or hearing the buzz of a bumblebee jumping from flower to flower, who would not feel a sense of awe and wonder at the astonishing biodiversity of landscape that this small island reveals unto us?

To be disconnected from nature is to be disconnected from the earth itself. It is not simply self-preservation that urges us to confront the threat of climate change. It is also our love for the soil from which we came and to which we will – one day – all return, in my case under one of my oak trees.

Of course, the natural environment provides us with the essentials of life which we take for granted. But the truth is that we cannot take it for granted any longer, and so our task is to rebalance our relationship with the natural world.

And that is what I really want to talk about today – where we are now, how we got here, and what we must aim for in future.

We have a long history in these islands. For better or worse, the natural environment we see around us today is a product of the relationship between humankind and nature. And it is constantly changing.

We have been managing the land for some 6,000 years since Neolithic farmers began keeping cattle and sheep and started cultivating cereals.

Over time we became more sophisticated. We dug ditch boundaries, we grew hedges, and we found ways to store food and manage woodland. We created fields and improved drainage.

The enclosures, the industrial revolution and the consequent growth of our towns and cities transformed everything, as the relationship changed. And we began to feel the consequences of failing properly to take account of the environment.

In 1848, 14,000 people died from Cholera in London because of contaminated water. The epidemic forced the government to pass the Public Health Act.

A decade later, following the ‘Great Stink’, which was killing the river Thames, making life in the capital intolerable and shut down Parliament, the government gave the go-ahead to Bazalgette’s plan for a new sewerage system.

A century after that, as a result of the ‘Great Smog’ of 1952 in London – which asphyxiated the cattle at Smithfield market and is thought to have killed around 4,000 people in just 4 days – the Clean Air Act was passed.

A little earlier – in 1949 – the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act became law. The minister who took the Bill through the House of Commons, Lewis Silkin, said during the Second Reading:

‘Now at last we shall be able to see that the mountains… moors… dales… and tors belong to the people as a right and not as a concession. This is not just a Bill. It is a people’s charter… With it the countryside is theirs to preserve, to cherish, to enjoy and to make their own.’

It was by this Act that we have conserved some of the most important and iconic of our landscapes. The National Parks now cover 8% of England, and over 90% of people say that the Parks are important to them.

Why? Because we like green places – and we want them to be near to where we live as well. It was pressure from communities that lead to public parks being created in our major cities.

Today we are a more urbanised country, and there are more of us. 50 million more than when the first census was carried out at the height of the industrial revolution, and 10 million more than when Parliament passed the National Parks Act.

And so, inevitably, our natural environment has changed. Its story is the story of human development. And the question for us now is how we can have both and keep both in balance.

We shouldn’t, by the way, over-romanticise life as it was. There are some things we have left behind that should stay in the past.

In 1800 life expectancy was just 37 years of age. It is now pushing 80, and we have been adding around three months a year for the past few decades.

Of course, we don’t want to turn back the clock on advances in education, medicine, technology, transport, science, or in overcoming poverty, but we do want to maintain the natural world around us. And to do so we must recognise its true value.

The natural environment does more than just nourish the soul. It provides us with the very essentials of life: clean air and water; food and fuel; it regulates our climate; it stems flood waters; and it filters pollution. It is the very foundation of our economic and social well-being.

And at a time when – as a nation as well as a world – we are increasingly thinking about the security of our food and of our energy, we should also be asking: how secure is our environment ?

Climate change is showing us what happens when we gets things out of balance. And if we do not manage what nature has given us sustainably, our children will be faced with consequences the scale of which we do not yet fully understand

Of course climate change and the natural environment are inextricably linked.

Many of the impacts of climate change will be felt by nature – from sea level rise and flooding to drought and desertification. So we need to manage the natural environment in a way that enables it to adapt to the effects of climate change and contribute to our efforts to halt it.

So how are we doing ?

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment – led by our very own Bob Watson – looked at the global picture on the natural environment. Its findings were bleak; two thirds of ecosystems are in decline. It also concluded that environmental degradation is a real barrier to defeating global poverty and so to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Time to shout not just ‘more aid, and drop the debt’ – but also ‘save the ecosystem’.

Natural England’s latest ‘State of the Natural Environment’ report says that the natural environment in England is “much less rich than 50 years ago.”

Pavan Sukhdev’s groundbreaking work is showing us that the economic consequences of the loss of biodiversity are potentially severe. He talks of there being three types of capital; human, financial and environmental.

The first is rising because of education; the second is rising too, although it can go down as well as up; but the third is in decline. And yet he estimates that the benefits of global investment to protect ecosystems could outweigh the costs by 100 to 1.

So can we do anything or is everything lost ? I am a great believer in looking at what can be done, and in celebrating our successes.

And there is much to encourage us, because raising awareness, campaigning, institutional change, and politics have achieved a great deal for the natural environment in recent years.

Pavan Sukhdev gives the example of the Panama Canal, where insurance firms and shipping companies are financing a 25 year project to restore forest ecosystems along the canal.

This will result in less erosion and a more controlled flow of freshwater into the canal, reducing insurance risks and resulting in lower premiums for shipping companies.

Our own analysis shows that Sites of Special Scientific Interest in England are doing well, with 80% now in a favourable or recovering condition.

In the tradition that led Clem Attlee to create the National Parks, the Countryside and Rights of Way Act of 2000 finally gave legal expression to the ‘right to roam’.

The Marine Bill will open up our coasts and improve the conservation of our seas, creating a network of Marine Protected Areas by 2012.

In Lyme Bay, off the South West coast, we have recently banned the most damaging types of fishing to protect the area’s rich marine life and habitats.

We’ve created the first new National Park for over forty years in the New Forest. And we are looking at the creation of another one in the South Downs. The public inquiry has recently finished and I am awaiting the Inspector’s report. I look forward to taking a decision.

And although the EU target to halt the loss of biodiversity by 2010 may never have been achievable in its entirety, it has served as a call to arms. We as a nation have made some progress:

• by substantially reducing upland overgrazing and inappropriate moorland burning
• by stemming the overall decline in birds compared with 40 years ago, and significantly increasing the number of wintering wetland birds
• by improving sewage treatment to reduce the pollution of sensitive water bodies
• by launching a plan to tackle invasive non-native species in England, Scotland and Wales, and
• by introducing a new biodiversity indicator to measure the performance of local authorities

Farmers, who manage three quarters of England’s land and mould its distinctive character, have now signed up to 35,000 Environmental Stewardship agreements covering more than 5 million hectares.

Agri-environment schemes have helped more than 18,000 miles of hedgerow to be restored or newly planted – that’s about the distance from the north pole to the south pole and halfway back again.

And I see Graham that, partly with the help of Environmental Stewardship, Martin Smith, from Burnham Wick Farm, has won your Eastern England Nature of Farming Award for what he has done to attract corn buntings to his land.

To build on this success, I am pleased to confirm today that Natural England will introduce an uplands strand to the Entry Level Stewardship scheme from 2010, replacing the Hill Farm Allowance so that we can help maintain and improve the biodiversity and historic landscape of England’s uplands.

And as we reform the Common Agricultural Policy in the years ahead, we need to make sure that we secure the public funding needed to pay for these environmental benefits which the market does not reward.

We have also made progress on water quality in recent years. Today the Government is publishing its response to the consultation on proposals to revise the Regulations implementing the Nitrates Directive.

Nitrate pollution is expensive to remove from drinking water sources and it harms biodiversity.

So we will put a number of new measures in place to tackle it, including creating further ‘nitrate vulnerable zones’ and putting tighter limitations on when manure and fertiliser can be spread.

There’s some of the progress, but there’s still much more that we need to do especially in our towns and cities. The more disadvantaged a neighbourhood is, the worse the environmental conditions are for the people who live there. In deprived areas there’s more air pollution, less green space, fewer trees, more derelict land and less bio-diversity. And a poor environment can lead to poor physical and mental health.

By contrast, research from across Europe shows that people living in greener environments are three times more likely to be physically active and 40 per cent less likely to be overweight or obese. So nature is good for our health.

A recent study for the RSPB investigated the evidence that not only do green spaces promote more physical activity, but they also have an economic impact. So nature is good for the economy too.

Both reasons why I want to see more people visiting our National Parks, the countryside and farms. There are about 75 million visits to National Parks every year, and nearly 17 million to National Nature Reserves. Through environmental stewardship, approximately 800 farms provide educational access visits, free of charge, for over 100,000 schoolchildren.

I visited one in Kent a couple of months ago, and the commitment of the couple who run the farm to passing on their accumulated knowledge and love for the land was simply inspiring.

That’s about bringing the countryside within reach of the many, but what about bringing green spaces within reach of our many towns and cities?

In London, with the 2012 Olympics, we will be creating the biggest new public park for a century.

We also need to use the green spaces that we have better. ‘Walking the way to Health’ – a joint initiative by Natural England and the British Heart Foundation – aims to get more people walking where they live. Hundreds of walks now take place across the country every month.

Green roofs can provide a haven for wildlife especially in urban areas. In winter they can provide insulation, and in the summer they help to cool the building below.

Gardens accounts for up to a quarter of the land surface in our towns and cities. Paving over them contributes to global warming, reduces biodiversity, and causes flash flooding.

We’re taking steps to tackle the latter by changing the planning rules so that we’ll need permission to pave over our front gardens in future, unless we use permeable paving. So why not let the soil breathe again and plant something while you’re at it?

This is just one example of the pressures that human development has created. And we need to be honest with each other about what’s happening.

Pressures from a rising population, unsustainable development, increasing urbanisation, the need to produce more renewable energy, demand for water, our desire to drive and to fly, and from deforestation.

None of them new, some of them made worse by climate change, and many of them intensifying in pace and scale.

In the face of these, protecting the natural environment will require us to make it central to our decisions and not an afterthought. That’s why, for the first time, we have a natural environment Public Service Agreement.

We understand now that the environment has a value that we must account for – as individuals, in businesses, and in government. It’s not a choice between the economy or the environment; as Bill Clinton might have said, it’s both, stupid.

Take homes. We need a lot of them to meet the rising demands of a population that is both increasing and ageing. Where is everyone going to live and how will they afford to do so? We have a target to provide three million more homes in England by 2020. But we have to work together to make sure we build them in a way that is sustainable and in communities where people will actually want to live.

That’s what the Sub-National review – which we have debated a bit – will have to do. It’s a chance to show how the regions will ensure sustainable development – both through helping us meet our carbon targets and through protecting and enhancing the natural environment.

It’s a chance to make sure that our plans are based on the best evidence of the environmental threats and opportunities; which is why Natural England and the Environment Agency have agreed to work to identify the environmental pressures in each region.

To do this we will need to develop a better understanding of our natural environment – so that we can be more clear and consistent in how we value its benefits and pay for public environmental goods in the long-term.

So I have decided that Defra will commit half a million pounds over 2 years to funding an ecosystem assessment for England.

This will pull together what we know about the state of our natural environment so as to improve our awareness and understanding, and think about what might happen in the future.

We will be consulting on the nature and scope of the project in due course and I look forward to hearing your views.

There is one other thing we must value too. And that is the means by which we can do all this – and more. The things which cannot be achieved by Government alone.

Whether it is a thriving, environmentally sustainable farming industry, or more parks, and woodlands and forests, or creating marine conservation zones, or more children having the chance to visit farms or national parks to learn about the natural world, or every family having a pleasant green space to exercise in and enjoy, or planning decisions taken with sustainability in mind, or planting more trees in our streets – and celebrating them as the green lungs they are rather than inspecting them as health and safety hazards – we depend on one another.

We would not have got as far as we have without you.

The thousands of volunteers in wildlife organisations. The farmers who are proud stewards of the land. The people locally fighting to create a bit of green space or protect a vast wilderness. The campaigning might of the natural environment movement. The professional expertise of Natural England, of the Forestry Commission, the Environment Agency, the JNCC and many others. The ability of our politics to listen and to act and to lead – and to change things.

I want to thank all of you for the work that you do, and ask – not that you need asking – that you continue to play your part.

The great truth is simply this.

We have always known that the natural environment sustains our souls, but we have now come to understand that it also sustains our very existence.

That’s why it matters.

And that’s why, in the words of William Blake, we should seek each of us to “hold infinity” in the palm of our hands.

Thank you.