Clause 26 - Transfers on dissolution of English Nature and Countryside Agency
Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill
2:00 pm
Jim Knight (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Rural Affairs, Landscape and Biodiversity), Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; South Dorset, Labour)
Certainly. As part of the Department’s response to the Gershon report, we have said that the estate properties will possibly be held and managed on a corporate basis for Natural England and the Commission for Rural Communities. It is also worth saying that the estate’s footprint should reduce significantly from the 80 or so sites across the country occupied by the existing organisations, particularly in the light of the more flexible and customer-focused ways of working envisaged and the joining up with partner organisations across the DEFRA family and beyond. Over time, we expect the final estate figure to be in the order of 50 sites across the country, subject to the introduction of more flexible and customer-focused ways of working, to IT to support that reduction and to Natural England’s final business need.
There was a request for an assurance that the IT will be delivered on time and to budget. The right hon. Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack) raised that point on Second Reading and I have written to him accordingly. If the Committee wishes, I will circulate that letter to members of the Committee—seeing nodding heads, I will do that. I assure my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood that I am aware of the difficulties involved with IT, including those of the Rural Payments Agency, and my officials are considering the matter very carefully. We are not complacent, but it would be rash of me to make promises about the outcomes.
It is clearly our intention that the IT should be on-time, on-budget, effective and work well to allow staff to get on with the job they want to do, rather than wrestle with IT problems. That is our intention and I have a fair degree of confidence from the conversations I have had that the IT challenge in respect of setting up the new organisations is considerably simpler than the problems of the Rural Payments Agency: the establishment of single payment systems, the entry-level system and the consequent issues of digitisation of maps and so on. As far as I am aware, there are no digitised map issues attached to the formation of Natural England and the Commission for Rural Communities.