LORD HASKINS today demanded decisions on the future of North Yorkshire's countryside should be taken locally after attacking the idea that "the man from the ministry knows best".

The former Northern Foods chairman made the argument in a hard-hitting report on the way Government services are delivered in rural England.

He is calling for the organisations which currently offer advice, such as English Nature, to be merged so they can provide targeted regional advice.

Lord Haskins, the Government adviser on food and farming, also wants them to have much greater freedom from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

He said the policies which would work in North Yorkshire would be quite different from those for the Lake District.

He said: "It's no good any more to say the man from the ministry knows best.

"You might have done at one time, but at the moment the man from the ministry is as confused as everybody else about what is expected of him.

"We don't have that deferential society anymore and we have got to give much more scope."

"We need to strengthen and co-ordinate the widening agenda.

"We are going to have a huge reform of common agricultural policy, where money is going to go from being stuffed into farmers' pockets as subsidies to asking farmers and everybody involved in the countryside to look after the environment better.

"Now we must have good organisations out there to make sure that this money is spent for the benefit of everybody.

"The 'one-size fits all' approach to delivery doesn't work."

Any move to disrupt the independent status of English Nature is likely to alarm environmental organisations which have backed its willingness in the past to speak out on controversial issues such as genetically-modified crops.

But Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett has accepted there is a case for re-organising the way services for rural areas are provided. "No one seems to dispute the fact that there are a range of different institutions and schemes and structures, and so on, and that this can be confusing," Ms Beckett said last week.

Lord Haskins painted a positive picture of the countryside in a speech last night.

In a lecture at the University of Reading, he said the countryside was "emerging from yet another period of gloom and despondency, although few of the players are prepared to admit it."

But he accepted that the "large number of urban commuters and second homeowners in the English countryside has inflated house prices beyond the capacity of many, especially young people, who want to maintain an essentially rural way of life and income."

Updated: 12:05 Wednesday, November 12, 2003