Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill

I support Amendment No. 231A in the name of my noble friend Lord Renton of Mount Harry, for what I acknowledge are paradoxical reasons. I was once the first headhunter in the United Kingdom. One of the principal responsibilities and obligations of a headhunter is to get the client to indicate precisely what specifications he is trying to fill, and, ideally, to give some indication of where the person might come from. The paradox arises because I have the greatest possible respect for those who were Chief Whips of the government party between 1979 and 1997, but I sometimes doubted whether they had thought in terms of specifications for particular jobs on which they made recommendations to the Prime Minister rather than thinking that the person was good in the House of Commons and would be relevant in the government. I give a single example. In the National Health Service there is a particular need for experience of achieving change in large scale organisations. I never saw any significant sign that in selecting Ministers to serve in the Department of Health between 1979 and 1997, that consideration ever entered into the process at all. If it did, they were unsuccessful in responding to that specification. I am enthusiastic about my noble friend’s specifications on this occasion, in the same way that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, was. They are specifications which could well be omitted from paragraph 3(3) of Schedule 2, which might be interpreted by an unkind critic of the drafting as ““any decent rural experience will do””. My noble friend’s amendment simply says that the Secretary of State has to ““have regard to””. That is not a compulsory or mandatory specification, but I happen to think that the particular issue which he has identified is one which is immensely worth having on the face of the Bill.