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Committee’s focus on forests sell-off allows environment secretary to avoid difficult questions on flood defence spending After nearly an hour of her grilling by MPs had gone by without a question on forests, Caroline Spelman might have hoped she was going to get away with it. No such luck. After a brief break for the MPs to vote on the police reform bill, the onslaught began in earnest. Spelman was at the environment, food and rural affairs committee on Wednesday, being interviewed as part of its report on last year’s comprehensive spending review. This committee is better known for questions about dead sheep than for savaging ministers. So an easy lob from Tom Blenkinsop, the Labour member for Middlesborough South and East Cleveland, gave Spelman an ideal opportunity. What, he asked, were the main achievements of her tenure so far? After reeling off her many triumphs (talking to trade unions, dealing with arms-length bodies, safeguarding spending on canals) Spelman eventually made it to the B-minus section of her report form. Forests. “Of course,” the secretary of state began: “I could not talk about last year without touching on the experiences with regard to forestry, which were very difficult, as I’m sure you saw, Mr Blenkinsop.” This “difficult experience” was, we should recall, the most humiliating climbdown of the coalition government’s first year. Floating the idea of a sell-off of the entire national forest estate last year , the coalition was stunned by the extraordinarily broad range of voters who protested against it. Tory knights of the shires roused themselves, ramblers combined with online bloggers, and the National Trust found common cause with the Socialist Workers’ party to stop the government in its tracks. Half a million people signed a petition to protest against the plan. Finally, in February, after repeated insistence that the government would not be deflected from its course, David Cameron sent Spelman into the House of Commons chamber to apologise to MPs and the country for her mistake. But, as Spelman recounted, all of the fuss was perfectly smoothed over by the unusual appearance of a secretary of state in the House of Commons to say sorry . (Not that she repeated that word, of course.) We were swiftly hurried on from that “difficult experience” to a paean of thanks to her civil servants. Ministers, we heard, had been “very pleasantly surprised” at how wonderfully they had been assisted by the officials who are paid to assist them. “All this has resulted in a very good working relationship with civil servants,” Spelman told the MPs. Who’d have thought it. The lengthy and fulsome praise was a clear attempt to scotch persistent rumours that Spelman has not enjoyed the most supportive of relations with her officials, who were said during the forestry debacle to be miffed both at her refusal to seek or take their advice, and by her repeated assertions that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) was a “flabby” department with too many people in it. Telling your staff that they are useless is not a technique that features in many management handbooks. Spelman also made a curious assertion – answering a question as to whether she had sought the opinions of “stakeholders” such as the National Trust ahead of pursuing the sell-off, she said firmly that she had, and that she spoke to all “stakeholders” constantly. This is very strange – Fiona Reynolds, director general of the National Trust, categorically denies that Spelman ever spoke to her about the policy before it was announced. She found out about the policy through the media. But the MPs failed to pursue the point, though Spelman’s repeated mea culpa did not get the minister off the hook entirely. Questioned again on why she wanted to sell off the forests, Spelman insisted that every government for the last 30 years had been quietly selling off forestry land (true), and all she wanted was to make the process more transparent. And the only reason people took against this admirable aim was because those awful people in the media had created a “mythology” about the forests. All this took some time. Which meant that, after a few more questions on subsidy payments to farmers (delayed, for many) and how the government could buy more British food products, there was very little time for anything else. At 5pm, after two hours of such “grilling”, the chairwoman Anne McIntosh (Conservative, Thirsk and Malton) asked for briefer questions and answers. But the minister had other plans – she thought the time was up. After some haggling, we got 10 more minutes. And at last someone – in this case Amber Rudd, the new Conservative MP for Hastings and Rye (in the marshes) – asked the real question. About 145,000 homes would be better protected from flooding under Spelman’s plans. But what about the many thousands of other homes and businesses that would not receive the new or upgraded defences that had been planned ? This is a crucial point. Despite repeated assurances from Cameron that flood defence spending would be “protected”, Defra’s budget cuts mean that hundreds of flood defence schemes will no longer go ahead. These include some huge measures – the city of Leeds, for instance, threatened several times in recent years with major floods that would disable its business district and affect thousands of homes, is to be left without flood defences because the budget for its £100m planned defence project has been cut. The same is true for flood defence schemes across the country, spelling a potential disaster for thousands of homes and businesses. Spelman sailed blithely through. Private sector funding would fill up the breach, she told MPs. The Association of British Insurers was delighted that the abdication of the public sector from its duty to protect citizens meant that private companies were now freed to spend their own money on safeguarding homes. And that was it. There was no questioning of the secretary of state’s highly questionable assertion that private companies are just begging to build floodwalls and divert rivers. Five minutes on flooding. Less than was spent on pig farming. Much less than on the future of English and Welsh waterways (government funding of £39m a year to continue to 2022). And the time spent on owning up to the forestry debacle now looked like a very handy way to deflect attention from the real scandal of Defra’s budget: the fact that, in a clear betrayal of the prime minister’s promise to ringfence flood defence spending, the budget is being cut and thousands of homes and businesses, and several major cities, will be left unprotected, even as scientists warn that more severe storms and floods are on the way. But before the assembled MPs could register how they had been flummoxed, the bell rang again for a division. The committee rose, and Spelman beamed. The minister had got away with it after all! Home and dry. England’s forest sell-off Forests Flooding Rural affairs Green politics Tax and spending Fiona Harvey guardian.co.uk