Oral Answers to Questions

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Paterson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his much more constructive question. The public can play a key role. We know that there is a genetic strain that is resistant; we have seen it in Denmark and Holland. Organisations such as the Woodland Trust can play a vital part in helping us to identify the trees that are resistant so that we can start to breed from them.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Secretary of State may know of my interest as chair of the John Clare Trust, which runs a campaign called Every Child’s Right to the English Countryside. The likelihood of any child’s visiting any green space is halved in a generation. As was pointed out by the hon. Member for Keighley (Kris Hopkins), we need an army of people to go out into our forests and woods, to act as detectors of disease, and to help us to fight it. We need that army of people to go into the country’s green spaces and act in the same way as the membership of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, who are good at noticing any decline in the bird population.

[Mr Paterson]

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. That is exactly the way in which we will confront some of these diseases. As I have said, a number of trees are resistant, and it would be enormously helpful if the public became involved in searching for them. There are some 80 million ash trees in the country; officials cannot spot them all, but the public can, and that could be immensely beneficial. I pay tribute to the members of the public who paid a key role during the week in which we surveyed the entire United Kingdom.