Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

moved Amendment No. 9:"Page 1, line 13, at end insert ““or other persons””" The noble Baroness said: The amendment is designed to discover to whom the functions of English Nature and the Countryside Agency, as they are dissolved, should be transferred. The Bill simply refers to them as being transferred to Natural England. I take the Committee back to the genesis of the Bill, which was the excellent report by the noble Lord, Lord Haskins, who is not in his place this afternoon. When he envisaged the Countryside Agency being dissolved and its functions streamlined, he suggested one integrated agency—that being Natural England. Substantially, what the Government have done in creating Natural England has been a good job. However, the recommendation of the noble Lord, Lord Haskins, was that the social and economic programmes should pass to regional and local networks of regional development agencies, local authorities and the voluntary and community sector. Many things that the Countryside Agency was doing will evidently not pass to Natural England. My amendment is intended to explore, and I ask the Minister, what exactly will happen to those functions. Before I return to some of those functions more exactly, I should like to make a general point on the Bill. The Bill is about the administration of rural England. The governance of rural England has been woefully lacking in the run-up to this Bill. Now, we are constrained by the form of the Bill, so it will still be lacking. The Bill reorganises the quangos. Unless we can do a particularly good job in this House—of course, I hope that we will—I do not believe that it strengthens the democratic accountability of those delivering these services. The Government are now having a debate about city regions. For rural areas, the city region concept is another step towards marginalising the opinions of smaller towns and rural communities. The money and administrative power to change life in rural areas would by this Bill be concentrated into fewer hands and minds, which I believe flies in the face of what the noble Lord, Lord Haskins, envisaged. As this Bill goes through, there will be a theme to the amendments put forward by these Benches, which will be to widen the number of bodies to which Countryside Agency functions can be transferred, to make all quangos more accountable and to question whether the existence of those quangos is necessary. When the EFRA Committee in another place made its recommendations on the draft NERC Bill, it said:"““We welcome the Minister’s confirmation that local authorities are included among the bodies to which the functions may be delegated under the draft Bill””." In their response, the Government said that they recognise the crucial role played by local authorities, and so on. I will not bore the Committee with reading out any more. Members of the Committee can read it for themselves. However, in Clause 1, there is no indication of the functions being transferred elsewhere. The vital projects that the Countryside Agency used to do—for example, the Vital Villages Campaign, which helped with the preparation of parish plans for rural communities, and the Eat The View concept—need to be strengthened and continued. Those are the sorts of functions on which I would like the Minister to comment. I do not see a provision for that in this clause. Will the Minister explain to whom these sorts of functions will go, the funding for them and why? I beg to move.