Asked by: Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what budget allocation they have made to fund new woodland planting in England.
Answered by Lord Gardiner of Kimble
Woodland planting schemes supported by Countryside Stewardship (and earlier Rural Development Programme schemes) for planting in 2016-17 and 2017-18 have budget allocations of £3.3m and £8.3m respectively.
The Woodland Carbon Fund has a budget allocation of more than £19 million for the remainder of this Parliament.
The Woodland Creation Planning Grant’s budget allocation is drawn from the £1m Forestry Innovation Fund.
We have allocated up to £3.2m over 4 years to the Trees for Schools programme. This will give hundreds of thousands of children across England a chance to plant saplings in their school grounds and communities as part of a Government-backed scheme to give free trees to schools in partnership with the Woodland Trust.
Countryside Stewardship offers incentives for small scale woodland creation. The normal minimum application area is 3 hectares with a minimum block size of 0.5 hectares; or 1 hectare and 0.1 hectares where woodland creation is part of a suite of measures for water quality or flood prevention.
Countryside Stewardship also provides support for existing woodlands as small as 3 hectares, including preparing a woodland management plan and support a range of woodland management activities and capital items. Additional support is available for woodland tree health
Asked by: Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to offer incentives to small scale forestry schemes in future.
Answered by Lord Gardiner of Kimble
Woodland planting schemes supported by Countryside Stewardship (and earlier Rural Development Programme schemes) for planting in 2016-17 and 2017-18 have budget allocations of £3.3m and £8.3m respectively.
The Woodland Carbon Fund has a budget allocation of more than £19 million for the remainder of this Parliament.
The Woodland Creation Planning Grant’s budget allocation is drawn from the £1m Forestry Innovation Fund.
We have allocated up to £3.2m over 4 years to the Trees for Schools programme. This will give hundreds of thousands of children across England a chance to plant saplings in their school grounds and communities as part of a Government-backed scheme to give free trees to schools in partnership with the Woodland Trust.
Countryside Stewardship offers incentives for small scale woodland creation. The normal minimum application area is 3 hectares with a minimum block size of 0.5 hectares; or 1 hectare and 0.1 hectares where woodland creation is part of a suite of measures for water quality or flood prevention.
Countryside Stewardship also provides support for existing woodlands as small as 3 hectares, including preparing a woodland management plan and support a range of woodland management activities and capital items. Additional support is available for woodland tree health
Asked by: Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what was the annual rate of change in new woodland planting in England over each of the last 10 years, expressed in thousands of hectares per annum and including plantings made by private owners, charities and conservation bodies.
Answered by Lord Gardiner of Kimble
The Forestry Commission collect and publish National Statistics for England on the area of new woodland planting. Figures for the ten years since 2006-07 are shown in Table 1 below, with the year-on-year annual rate of change. In this period almost all the new planting recorded was conducted by private owners including charities and conservation bodies supported by Government funding under successive Rural Development Programme grant schemes (Woodland Grant Scheme 2006-7; English Woodland Grant Scheme 2007-14; Countryside Stewardship 2015-).
Table 1: New planting of woodland in England over the ten years since 2006-07
Financial Year to 31st March | a) New planting by land area | b) Annual change in new planting by land area compared to previous year |
| Thousand hectares | Thousand hectares |
2006-07 | 3.2 | -0.5 |
2007-08 | 2.6 | -0.6 |
2008-09 | 2.5 | -0.1 |
2009-10 | 2.3 | -0.2 |
2010-11 | 2.5 | 0.2 |
2011-12 | 2.7 | 0.2 |
2012-13 | 2.6 | -0.1 |
2013-14 | 3.3 | 0.7 |
2014-15 | 2.4 | -0.9 |
2015-16 | 0.7 | -1.7 |
Source: Forestry Statistics 2016 (Forestry Commission).
Note: These figures do not include planting as part of restocking woodland.
Asked by: Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what mechanisms are in place to co-ordinate new woodland planting throughout the UK.
Answered by Lord Gardiner of Kimble
Forestry is a devolved matter and this response relates to forestry in England only.
New woodland planting in England is supported by the Rural Development Programme Countryside Stewardship woodland creation grant scheme. We also launched the second round of the Woodland Creation Planning Grant last September to encourage further uptake of Countryside Stewardship Grants. To support tree planting further throughout England, the Forestry Commission opened the Woodland Carbon Fund, which will aim to boost woodland creation rates and help to meet the Government’s future carbon targets. This fund was launched last November.
Asked by: Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what targets they have set for future woodland planting in England expressed in hectares per annum including private land, and land owned or let by charities and conservation bodies.
Answered by Lord Gardiner of Kimble
There have been no targets set, in terms of hectares per annum, for woodland planting. We remain committed to planting 11 million trees before the end of this Parliament. We also aspire to have 12% woodland cover by 2060 and we are committed to working with the public, private and third sectors to develop new ways of supporting landowners to plant more trees.