Woodland Cover Protection and Grey Squirrel Control

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Thursday 25th May 2023 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, for initiating this important debate.

If we want to promote and protect our woodlands, we need to get much better at forestry in this country. I have said many times that we are overall pretty bad at it. Most of our woodlands are in poor condition and not managed to the proper standard. Our foresters need much better training, especially for continuous cover, which is something that I have been promoting in this House for over 50 years—I hope that its time has come.

The control of grey squirrels should be grant funded, given their impact on the delivery of key ecosystems and services such as carbon sequestration budgets and biodiversity, as well as the loss of timbers. However, grey squirrels are not the only problem and I want to focus on some of the others.

Forestry is not easy. It is easy to say, “Let’s plant more trees”, but it is a jolly sight more difficult to do that in reality. Besides grey squirrels, there are deer and, of our six species, every single one is destructive. At over 1.5 billion deer, there are far too many in this country. They cause an estimated 74,000 car accidents a year, costing £10 million in car repairs alone. Deer kill about 20 people a year and there has been no decline in human injuries in the last 20 years. The sadness is that any deer involved in a car accident will probably die a long, lingering death well away from the scene of the accident.

Those are not all the problems; there are others. I have a list of at least 25 pests or diseases, either in this country or on our doorstep, attacking every single one of our native trees: oak, ash, birch, chestnut, spruce, pine—the list could go on. In fact, one could get quite depressed about forestry, but one needs to look at it more positively.

I turn to hedgerows. I plead with the Minister to include hedgerows in the ambit of woodland. Hedgerows absorb 30 to 80 tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare. The Government need to encourage farmers to have taller and wider hedgerows. The Wildlife Conservation Trust estimates that, if a farmer planted a tree every 20 metres in half the hedgerows in this country, we would plant another 14 million new trees. Farmers need to be encouraged but also their tenancies need to be looked at, because by and large with tenancies any timber is reserved to the landlord.

Those would be amenity trees but I also have a concern about commercial timber. We have a conflict between the area where commercial timber can be grown and where ground-nesting birds are, particularly species on the red list such as curlew and black grouse. Science has clearly told us that there is an increase of predation for any ground-nesting bird within woodland. It is not only about predation; there is fragmentation of the breeding sites as we plant more and more timber. As I said about chalk streams, it is about a balance in the environment. The Minister has a heck of a job to keep everyone happy, because there will always be at least one NGO that will complain.