Forestry: Independent Panel Report

Earl of Courtown Excerpts

Wednesday 27th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Courtown]

My Lords, I have an interest to declare which is in the register. I have also been involved as a land manager and a contractor for the past 20 years.

I would like to thank the right reverend Prelate, as other noble Lords have done, for introducing this debate and commend his report for its thoroughness. I also read with interest my right honourable friend the Secretary of State’s response to the report.

There are a few points in the right reverend Prelate’s report that I would like to explore a little further. One of the first matters of prominence raised was calling on the Government to pioneer a new approach to valuing and rewarding the management, involvement and expansion of the woodland ecosystem. The Government referred in their response to the Rural Development Programme, which the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, also mentioned. I am much interested in whether the Minister can say how this fund could help in those periods where funding in forestry can be very difficult to attain.

Another objective was to increase public access to woodland. In the report, the public estate—in other words, Forestry Commission land—amounts to around 18% of UK forestry. This is not the whole story. I should be most interested to know whether the Minister can give an idea of how much of the remaining part of the forestry estate UK in public, NGO and private ownership provides some form of public access. Perhaps it might be easier to say how much of the forestry estate does not provide any access to the public.

It has also been proposed and agreed by the Government that there should be more woodland closer to areas of high population. I do not want to appear negative on this subject, but in my book woodland areas considered to be close to urban areas would be within an hour’s travelling. There is high demand for land close to the urban population. An illustration of the value of that is a four-acre paddock close to me for sale at £20,000 an acre. Planting trees on it with reasonable spacing will cost £1,500 an acre. Once trees are planted, the value will drop to about £8,000 an acre, as can be seen by the value of forest land already on the market.

The big difficulty is that if trees are planted on very high-value land, there will be an immediate drop in its value. Encouraging people to plant trees in these areas, whether in the public or the private sector, will be very difficult. Following that, there will be about 20 years of high maintenance costs and very low income before gaining even the lowest amount of income from thinning or whatever. It will be in the region of just a couple of hundred pounds an acre. I of course recognise the social and environmental reasons for woodland, but if we are to increase our woodland by a substantial amount—even 1% or 2% is a substantial amount—we will have to get around that problem.

The report also calls for an increase in the amount of woodland managed to the UK forestry standard from 50% to 80%. Perhaps the Minister will clarify how much woodland managed to the UK forestry standard is grant-aided and whether we have a gap of forestry that has been grant-aided but does not reach the UK forestry standard. Having entered many forestry holdings in the past into management agreements, even then I was horrified by the amount of paperwork involved in the exercise. Last week, having downloaded all 116 pages of the UK forestry standard, I hope my noble friend will listen very closely to me when I say that perhaps we could look at cutting a bit of red tape.

I have also consulted some of my forest manager friends who are very concerned that if management plans become a key driver in securing grant assistance for woodland creation and management, it could be a major disincentive to landowners at large to bring their woodlands into better management or to plant new woodlands. Recent experience with linking grant aid to forest certification has had a similar effect.

Some planting that we see nowadays, particularly by some non-governmental organisations, has provided excellent amenity woodland and public access but has not produced good-quality timber. It is possible to have good amenity and public access, and still grow quality timber. Some amenity timber planting has been planted at three-metre spacing. The outcome of this spacing is poor-quality timber and high maintenance costs. At three-metre spacing, a forester would have just over 1,200 trees per hectare. If he decreased that spacing to 1.5 metres, he would have 5,000 trees per hectare. The higher the density, the less maintenance and the better the quality of the timber.

I could go on on this subject. We have to ensure that we plant the right trees in the right place. That means not just planting in the countryside but structural planting and planting on housing estates where we end up planting enormous trees at great expense. We should look at planting far smaller trees and letting nature take its course. They will grow far better, but if they die it would not be that expensive to replace them. I greatly look forward to hearing from the Minister and other noble Lords.