Recent reports tell us that DEFRA has spent more than half a billion pounds on consultants and temporary staff in just one year, including more than £80m on external staff to help the Rural Payments Agency.

Phew! Well thank goodness for that I say – there were those of us that thought for a while it was all down to the bungling bureaucracy that seems to form such a key plank of Defra.

How much better we should all feel knowing that more than £80m of the cash we scrape together to pay our taxes was spent on temporary staff and consultants to help the RPA sort out and pay single farm payments.

I don’t now recall the cost of the failed computer system apparently cobbled together in a back street somewhere in the south of England, but, after all that has gone before, the RPA still cannot do what it was set up to do without buying in what is a phenomenal amount of temporary labour. Defra justify it by saying that consultants and temporary staff are used when: “Temporary, specialised advice or labour are needed that would not make commercial sense to retain in house.”

Good job these boys have got their eye on the commercial ball, great sighs of relief sound around the land – particularly when there are allegations about £millions more being scattered around Whitehall to ensure that there is at least one union representative for every 1,000 employees. That’s some job creation scheme given that the number of civil servants has increased by rather more than a million during the life of the current Government. Perhaps we have all become so weary of this saga that nobody becomes angry or outraged anymore - but if not us, then who?

It was my turn on the soap box in The Farmers’ Arms the other Friday and the subject – as it often is these days – was coastal access.

“Semantics dear boy nothing more than semantics” –that was the best opinion I could offer on the latest output from Natural England in its role as both poacher and gamekeeper.

NE’s recently published audit into coastal access was supposed to have been a pretty serious study of where exactly the bits of coast that people could not get to were, and how much of it there was and how many new gates, bridges and so on would be necessary to bring access to our coast up to their expectation – but that’s the nub of the problem, it didn’t or, at least, it didn’t do it honestly.

The headline accompanying the audit claimed that only one third of the roughly 3,000 miles of England NE considers qualifies as coast has legally secure access. That’s where it becomes an issue of semantics, because they have disregarded most forms of access – including access under CRoW - which doesn’t comply with what can, at best, be described as a rather subjective view of access which is “legally secure” and which is neither too steep nor too narrow, nor too far from the sea or on a public road or subject to closure or – well, subject to just about anything you might reasonably expect to find on a coastal path really.

Instead of publishing some objective information, NE has fallen into the pit of political playmaking. It’s a highjack – based more on political spin than objective argument leaving us with a document which seeks to paint a picture of reality which has less connection to it that Eastenders has to real life.

The argument and rationale are biased in what appears to be no more than a bid to offer justification for an act which appears neither justifiable nor necessary.

And there’s another thing – English people whose property might be affected or blighted by the new Act will have no power of lobby over many of the MP’s who will come to vote on this bill – as they are elected in constituencies outside England where different solutions are being applied. Might it not reasonably, therefore, be considered to weaken or undermine the democratic rights of English voters?

I think we could at least feel a little peeved.