I am grateful for that. The way of thinking behind this is that we agree that a reasonable amount of delivery happens in England, or in Scotland and Wales. We agree that there are GB-wide functions such as research and international forestry which require an arrangement to take place. The debate then is whether we create an even smaller organisation to   carry out the GB-wide functions and possibly make it uneconomic for it to properly function as an organisation, or maintain the existing institutional set-up, but seek to align the England delivery functions closely with Natural England through the memorandum of understanding that I referred to earlier.

The Government have taken the view that we want to do the latter, not the former. I would understand if other people chose to take a different view, but we believe that that is the less risky option because we are dealing with currently constituted bodies and we do not then have to take the risk of trying to unpick all those GB-wide and devolved functions in order to put them back together in a new or emasculated body.