Trees: British Ash Tree

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Monday 5th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Earl on securing this debate. He and other noble Lords who have spoken have brought a lot of expertise to bear on this issue, so I shall just stick to a couple of points. First, this is not just a European issue; it is a global issue. I can go back as far as June 1987 to the New York Times headline that says “Unstoppable disease killing New York ash trees”. It goes on to say:

“Scientists first noticed it in the 1930s and believe that ‘ash dieback’ has progressively spread throughout the northeastern states and parts of eastern Canada”.

So it has gradually been circling the globe. Of course, we do not know exactly when it got to Europe, but we know that it is spreading here. We are not sure how it is borne, whether as noble Lords have said it is blown or carried by birds or imported in saplings. The fact is that the global movement of people and animals, as my noble friend Lady Parminter graphically put it, has created something that is really out of control. That does not mean to say that we should not try to do something about it—but in the long term we need to look to the seed banks. The noble Earl mentioned that in his introduction. I would like to agree with him very strongly on that, because there will no doubt be ash trees that are resistant and there will no doubt be the opportunity to breed from them. That is the long-term programme that we need to pursue, not just for ash trees but for oak trees and pine trees and all our woodland. We need to collect the seed from those resistant trees and breed trees for the future.

With other noble Lords, I join in looking forward to a revival of the Forestry Commission’s research programme, which was rather cut back over recent years. This should be a major part of what we do, together with the seed banks at Kew and the Natural History Museum, with all the expertise that sits in those two places. If there is one thing that we know, it is that native trees over centuries and millennia built up resistance to local pests, diseases and fungal infections. With the global movement, completely different ones, to which they have no natural resistance, have entered the country. That is what we need to deal with. In the long term, it can be dealt with only by developing these resistant strains. So while I welcome the suggestions that other noble Lords have made about controlling the disease if we can in the short term, we must look to the long term.