Margaret Beckett

The government needs completely to change the way it deals with rural England. The countryside, as most people who try to make a living there know, is in crisis.

Lord Haskins, who was asked by Labour to investigate, has concluded the official agencies are falling a long way short of making things better. There are too many of them, and they're too remote.

Jeremy Paxman asked the Cabinet Minister responsible what she's going to do about it. He bagan by asking the Environment Secretary, Margaret Beckett, whether she intends to act on the recommendations of this report.

MARGARET BECKETT MP:
(Environment Secretary)
Yes, we are. And what I'm keen to do as a very first priority is that I've said to my department, Chris identifies a range of schemes and programmes and funding sources, all of which we inherited as a sort of, a bit of a mish-mash, nobody ever set out that pattern of provision, and that we need to look at as a matter of urgency because that's the thing that is the most immediate impact for a lot of people in rural communities.

JEREMY PAXMAN:
But you invented DEFRA only two years ago.

BECKETT:
Well, yes, and the constituent parts of the department brought together with them agencies and schemes and so on that they had had in the past. Now we've looked at some streamlining of that, but that's what we asked Chris to look at and to make recommendations to us. So that's the first thing that I want to do.

PAXMAN:
So you are conceding there is a crisis in the countryside which is not being helped by the current arrangement of Government agencies?

BECKETT:
Well actually, one of the things Chris Haskins said at a press conference this morning was that it's not true that there's a crisis in the countryside. In fact I think he said that overall many things in the countryside are improving more than they have for 50 or 150 years, I can't remember his exact figure.

PAXMAN:
That's not a picture that many people living in the countryside would recognise with the diminution in the number of post offices, closure of shops, closures of banks, disappearances of police stations, fewer pubs in the countryside now than there were at the time of the Norman conquest, apparently.

BECKETT:
But most of that, as I am sure you will readily recognise, happened before this Government came to power.

PAXMAN:
I'm not asking, I'm not saying it's your fault. I'm simply asking you whether you recognise there's a crisis.

BECKETT:
I think that we are already starting to turn that around. We are already starting to restore rural bus services. We've got a £450 million investment in keeping rural post offices going. We're looking at what we can do to support the remaining rural shops and pubs and so on. So I think there is a lot of beneficial change, but nobody's disputing that we need to do a great deal more, and what we are trying to look at, through the agency of Chris's report and other work that we'll be publishing over the next couple of weeks, is to say, given the money and the support the Government is putting into the countryside, are we getting the best use for that money? And we concede, as a department that no, we haven't been, and there are changes we want to make.

PAXMAN:
You're not, right. And you are prepared also to accept his recommendation that while central government may formulate strategy, it really ought to butt out of the business of implementing it and leave that to local organisations.

BECKETT:
I think we have to take very seriously the clear distinction in responsibility he makes between policy on the one hand, policy making, and on the other hand, advice about policy, which can also be informed by experience of what happens on the ground when you try to deliver some of these policy ideas. We take all of that very seriously, but, obviously, there are a large number of people in rural communities we need to talk to about how we can work with them to make something like that effective.

PAXMAN:
Sorry, does that mean you are accepting his proposal that central government confine itself to setting policy and leave implementation to local organisations?

BECKETT:
Yes, broadly, we are. And we need to talk to those local organisations about how most effectively and over what period we can actually make that change.

PAXMAN:
Margaret Beckett, thank you.

This transcript was produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors.