Protection of Ancient Woodland and Trees

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2015 Westminster Hall

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to appear before a fellow member of the Hampshire caucus, Mr Turner.

“Rapunzel was the most beautiful child in the world. When she was 12 years old, the witch shut her up in a tower in the midst of a wood.”

“When Little Red Riding Hood entered the woods, a wolf came up to her; she did not know what a wicked animal he was and was not afraid of him.”

“At last, the Queen said to the huntsman, ‘Take Snow White out into the woods, so that I might set eyes on her no more. You must put her to death and bring me her heart as a token.’”

Those stories are universal. They evoke in us a sense of mystery and a shiver. It is no coincidence that they are all set in the subject of today’s debate: ancient woods, dark and forbidding. To the brothers Grimm, those old forests set the boundaries of human control. The world has changed, but while the whirlwind of human life has careered on, the same ancient woodlands have stood, silently watching. We feel smaller next to them and humbled by their age—feelings not often associated with our modern times. Untouched by us, ancient woodlands are the perfect antithesis of our technologically advanced, man-made world.

Today, science says that everything is explicable, and it may well be right. We are not entirely built that way, however. Somehow, we are healthier when nature is visible and in our lives. Our ancient woodlands will always hold wonder for us, and they are a reminder that no matter how far our knowledge and understanding progress, there is always the chance of getting lost and not knowing the way. We should do our best to preserve that sense, for it is part of what makes us human.

Many Members have focused, and no doubt others will focus, on the biological and environmental value of woodlands, and they are right to do so. Those environments are complex and unspoiled, and they provide habitats for wildlife and rare species. As my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow) has said, they cannot be recreated if they are destroyed. If I may, however, I will leave that aspect to others and focus on the role that ancient woodlands play in our national psyche and our relationship to our history, and on the effect on our psychology of our ever-growing command of the natural world, even if we only rarely notice it or get the chance to experience it.

As the fairy tales that I quoted illustrate, it cannot be denied that those ancient woodlands stir something deep within us—something that we would be foolish to lose. But we are already losing it. As others have said, the Woodland Trust is already ringing alarm bells. It states that we have lost some 1,000 hectares of ancient woodland in the last decade, and that some 500 sites are threatened by planned development. We will lose it all if we do not take measures now, when there is urgency in our building for various reasons, to ensure that we meet our housing and infrastructure needs responsibly. Do we really want to see those living links to our history destroyed to make way for golf courses and paintballing? In my constituency, 60% of which is in an area of outstanding natural beauty, we certainly do not.

No one really planned how we got here. We barrelled forward, not knowing what lay ahead, and never stopped along the way to take account of what we had left behind. Many prophesied—rightly or wrongly, for good or ill—what would happen, but life went on. Jobs have become more specialised and technology has improved. Our population has grown; the demand for land has grown with it and continues to grow. It has brought us to this. As grassy hills and wooded glens become rarer and suburbs sprawl, we risk losing sight of what we actually value. Few would say that the ancient woodlands, the protection of which we discuss today, are not important, but it is far too easy to get caught up in the processes that put them in danger.

The crux of the matter is that failure to protect this ancient treasure will turn us into the kind of country that we do not want to be. It will not have escaped hon. Members that the quotes with which I began my speech came from the brothers Grimm, and that they spoke of forests in Germany; just as in our legends, the forests have deep value in German culture. However, the Germans recognise that value by having the most protected woods in Europe. It has never been more pressing for us to follow their example.

Our forests have borne witness to our island’s history. They have seen war and peace, the sparks of invention, the birth of our democracy and the scores of generations who made them happen and made Britain what it is today. The very youngest of those woodlands were born in a Britain that would—apart from the Misbourne valley—be unrecognisable today. They remind us that we come and go, but there are countless generations behind us and countless more ahead of us.

We know that we have a debt to past generations and a duty to those in the future. Natural treasures such as our ancient woodland are evidence of that connection and contract. If we lose them, life will be less rich, our experience of the world a little bit more desolate and our society more disconnected from itself. If we become the kind of country that takes no notice of such things, or that shrugs and says that we can merely offset the loss by planting more somewhere else, no summer’s bloom will lie ahead of us. To do so would be to accept a Britain where we had broken cleanly with our past and our heritage. The mystery would have gone, and we would be diminished.