National Tree Strategy

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Wednesday 16th December 2020 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Hollobone. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) on securing the debate. I am the parliamentary species champion for swifts, so I am in the slightly unusual position of campaigning for swift bricks, rather than trees, to protect their habitat; but we all recognise the importance of tree planting and rewilding. It is about not just making our towns and cities more pleasant places to live, but the benefits for physical and mental health of being able to get out into nature, as hon. Members have mentioned.

As has been said, planting more trees is absolutely central to efforts to address the climate change emergency, the ecological emergency and the devastating collapse in biodiversity that we have we seen, by providing natural carbon sinks and habitats for wildlife to flourish. As has been mentioned, it also prevents soil erosion and flooding. In the winter of 2015-16, when I went to some of our northern constituencies that had been badly affected by flooding, there was much discussion about the need to plant more trees to prevent soil erosion. I went to the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) and talked to Yorkshire Water. It is about planting trees in the right place, as well. It is not just numbers that count but location and the type of tree.

Without natural climate solutions we have little hope of reaching net zero emissions or preventing further species decline. The issue is not limited to tree planting; peatlands and sea grass meadows are also vital carbon sinks. I give credit to the RSPB and the WWF for their recent work to raise the profile of those areas. I hope the Government will finally act in response to their campaigns.

However, we are here to talk about tree planting. The UK’s lack of ambition on this front in the past is reflected by the fact that we have 13% forest cover. My hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central said 12%. Whatever the precise figure, that is compared with an EU average of 40%, so clearly there is a lot more to be done. I welcome recent Government pledges on tree planting. As has been said, at the last election there was a race to outdo each other on the number of trees to be planted. The Government were bottom of the league table, pledging to plant only 30 million a year, while the Labour party was pledging to plant 100 million. I think we can all agree, if not on the precise number, that the ambition needs to be there.

I briefly want to mention my concern about deforestation overseas. We are here to talk about England’s tree strategy, but it is shocking to see the continued devastation in the Amazon rainforest, which is referred to as the lungs of the Earth, due to its immense capacity to convert carbon to oxygen. It faces an onslaught due to industrial agriculture, mining and forest fires linked to climate change. When the Environment Bill was in Committee we tried to add provisions to start measuring our global footprint and the links to deforestation in our supply chain.

While I am talking about the Environment Bill, my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central criticised its lack of focus on tree planting. I have a huge number of concerns about the Bill, not least that it has yet to become law. There will be a regulatory gap once we exit the transition period, with the Office for Environmental Protection not fully up and running and able to take enforcement action until July 2021, according to what I have heard. A chair has been appointed but no board has been recruited. We do not know about its budget or resources. How are we going to enforce regulations, not just stop people chopping down trees? We have already heard that there is going to be rowback on planning proposals, but there is still a real battle between the need to protect our natural environment and the desire to build more houses.

We have not had the right reassurances about how net gain and biodiversity offsetting will work, particularly over the long term. It is one thing to say that if trees are chopped down to build houses, more trees need to be planted elsewhere, but how can we be sure that, 10 years down the line, that woodland is protected and maintained? Who is responsible—the developer or the council? Who is held to account if the trees are not put in place? There are concerns about whether the regulators have the powers and resources to take such enforcement action.

A major driver of deforestation in this country, as in the Amazon, is land conversion for agricultural purposes. A key means to address that is agroforestry. I am pleased that, under the Agriculture Act, farmers will be rewarded for planting more trees and encouraging biodiversity on their land. There is a lot of evidence to show that if we plant trees and other plants among crops, rather than rigidly sticking to monocultures, we could improve conditions for crops and wildlife by creating nutrient-rich, complex ecosystems. A lot of people think that the countryside that we see as we go through it on a train—fields of grass, with cows grazing on them—is the natural environment, but it is not. That is not what our countryside should look like. It should be far more diverse, and there should be far more trees. I am chair of the all-party parliamentary group on agroecology—if anyone wants to join, they are very welcome—and we have been campaigning for these things for a long time. Agroforestry should be an absolutely central part of any national tree-planting strategy.

All major landholders have a responsibility to try to do their bit. I have been asking questions at Church Commissioners questions, as the Church of England is one of the biggest landowners in this country. I was originally told that because so much of its land is high-grade agricultural land, it is not really suitable for planting trees, but the figures I have show that well under half of it is good-quality agricultural land, so the Church of England could do much more to plant trees, and the same goes for the Ministry of Defence. I hope that the Minister is doing what she can to encourage that.

In Bristol—I am a Bristol MP—we are leading the way on tree planting. We have a campaign to double Bristol’s tree canopy cover by planting 250,000 trees by 2030. The “one tree per child” campaign is part of that, and in 2015, when we were the European green capital, we managed to plant one tree for every primary school child in the city.

The Woodland Trust has been doing great work planting mini-orchards. One of my pet hates is when housing is developed, leaving green triangles everywhere—little bits of green space—or verges by the pavement. They are of no use for anything. People cannot sit on them and children cannot play on them. It is nothing but grass. The Woodland Trust has been helping to plant mini-orchards on some of those pieces of land, which makes a huge difference to the look and feel of a place. I hope to hear how the Minister plans to do more to empower local communities to push forward with those sort of tree-planting and rewilding programmes.

One of the upsides of covid, and of councils having less in the way of resources, is that they have not been mowing the grass in the same way, and we have seen biodiversity flourish. Some people think it looks scruffy, but I think most of us would agree that that is a massive improvement. I think we are all on the same page on this, but I would like to hear from the Minister how we will raise our ambitions and meet the targets that we have been talking about.