Food for Thought: Reforming the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

The Adam Smith Institute’s latest discussion paper, written by Tim Ambler, proposes a number of reforms to improve the efficiency and value for money of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

This paper is part of the Adam Smith Institute’s “Reforming the Civil Service” series.

• The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has responsibility for a number of functions that are currently performed inefficiently and represent poor value for taxpayer money;

• The Department’s headcount has increased by 36% since 2015/2016. The equivalent department in the Netherlands employs 1,000 staff, and on that staff/population ratio, Defra would employ only 3,300 in total;

• The report includes several recommendations, including:

  • Delegate more Defra responsibilities to local government;

  • Consolidate the five separate teams of Defra inspectors into one entity;

  • Reclassify all non-departmental public bodies either as Executive Agencies or as committees;

  • Sell the forestry units—forestry should not be a government function;

  • Close the Office for Environmental Protection, which is fundamentally a bogus watchdog;

• Taken together, if all the recommendations within this paper were implemented, this would amount to a saving of 15,749 staff.