Caroline Spelman warns of cuts in environmental quangos
Jul 19 2010 by Alun Thorne, Birmingham Post
Environment quangos will be slashed as part of Government’s spending cuts drive, a Cabinet minister Caroline Spelman has indicated.
Environment Secretary Ms Spelman - Conservative MP for Meriden - suggested her department’s arm’s length bodies would be sacrificed in order to protect frontline services such as flood defences and animal health protection.
Describing Defra as “the Government’s emergency service” Ms Spelman said many of the quangos were set up in the 1970s and 1980s to perform functions that were now “mainstream”.
Her comments come as the Treasury weighs up detailed proposals for cutting up to 40 per cent from some Whitehall budgets.
Ministers in non-protected departments had until Friday to submit blueprints for how they would reduce spending by between 25 per cent and a worst-case-scenario 40 per cent.
Only health and international aid have been spared the knife as part of the Government’s austerity drive, although defence and schools have also been told they will be shielded from the most painful effects.
The dossiers of potential cuts will form the basis of spending review negotiations between the Treasury and the departments - the results of which will be announced by Chancellor George Osborne in October.
Among areas reported to be in the firing line are the legal aid budget, skills programmes, new fast jets for the Royal Air Force, the arts and support for business.
Funding for local government is also expected to be hit and charities fear town halls will look first at their grants as savings are sought.
And it was reported today that plans for a £1 billion “green investment bank” to help British firms using green technology were being shelved.
Ms Spelman said Defra had 87 quangos, with some set up decades ago to protect the environment or rural communities.
“These things are now mainstream, they are part of what the department does as a matter of course, so we can make savings from amongst those quangos,” she told the programme.
“It is quite possible to rationalise those and make savings without actually compromising ... frontline services.”
And she said: “Whether it’s flooding, whether it’s an animal health outbreak, whether it’s a radiological leak - God forbid, we don’t want that - or a chemical spill, Defra is the Government’s emergency service.
“And that’s a very strong reason to fight my corner on this issue with the Treasury, but equally to accept as a Cabinet member with corporate responsibility that we have got to clean up the mess that Labour has just left, we have got to get to grips with the debt.”
Ms Spelman also suggested that plans to roll out broadband in rural areas would help mitigate high fuel costs.
She said: “If you have access to the internet you don’t have to jump in your car so often to actually go and find the services or connect to the internet in the way that many people have to do.”
