Forestry: Independent Panel Report

Lord Framlingham Excerpts

Wednesday 27th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Framlingham]

My Lords, I join the congratulations to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool on securing this debate about trees, which are so central to our national welfare. His panel’s recommendations are excellent, very timely, positive and forward looking. Like us all, I have a huge affection for trees. I founded and ran for many years my own forestry company and I was for some time president of the Arboricultural Association. It is hard to improve on the description of the value of trees given by the right reverend Prelate, although I shall try briefly.

It is hard to believe that trees fulfil so many functions. They take our waste carbon dioxide and give us their oxygen. They provide us with timber for so many uses, including construction, housing and flooring. They provide habitats for birds and insects. They alleviate flooding and stabilise land, to which reference has already been made. They help landscape towns and gardens. Most importantly of all, they are beautiful to behold.

The holy grail, the most important buzzword politically in these days of economic recession, is growth. Trees cannot by themselves solve our economic problems, but they can help a little because they grow. Trees have not heard about the AAA rating, the value of the pound, the national debt or the balance of payments. You plant a tree and, provided you take some care in doing it, it will grow year on year, increasing your investment both in timber and in pleasure. We have every reason in the world to plant more and to look after them.

I want to make just two points. My first point, which has already been touched on, is about the balance between public and privately owned trees, leaving aside the question of access, which I acknowledge has to be handled carefully. I am anxious that there should not be the idea in the mind of the public that one is more desirable than the other. While it clearly is helpful and desirable to have public and government involvement in the planting and maintenance of trees and woodland, I trust it also will always be acknowledged that private landowners planting and caring for their own trees on their own land will always have a huge investment in those trees financially and, more importantly, emotionally.

My second point is about the vexed question of chalara fraxinea, ash dieback, its possible disastrous effect on our landscape and what can be done to prevent similar outbreaks. I do not want to rehearse all the history of how we got to where we are. We are all waiting now to see what the new growing season will bring and then what action, if any, will prove necessary. My concern is how it got here from Europe and the fact that we are squandering the priceless asset of being an island nation in terms of our bio-security.

Since the Plant a Tree in ’73 campaign, the demand for trees has increased steadily. This has coincided with the globalisation of tree diseases as trees are routinely shipped around the world. As nurserymen have increasingly imported stock, the situation has been exacerbated by two other factors. First, to protect themselves against the last-minute cancellation of orders because of lack of funding or grant withdrawals many UK growers have used foreign suppliers as a kind of bank to draw on rather than growing the trees. Secondly, UK seed has been grown abroad and reimported as plants to preserve its UK provenance. This has resulted in the importation of trees on a massive scale: 500,000 ash trees alone on an annual basis. Oliver Rackham, a well-known botanist and ecologist, has written:

“It seems that any of the world’s plant diseases is at liberty to enter Britain provided it does so via some other European Union country. By the time the problem has been detected and the bureaucracy has clanked into action, it is too late. Once a tree disease has become established in a country, it is almost unknown for it to be controlled, let alone exterminated”.

It must be possible with the co-operation of all the organisations concerned and with the Government to devise a system that allows for the sensible forecasting of demand, by species, of the number of trees required nationally in the coming years. Without sacrificing the competitive tendering process, surely the nurserymen and the horticultural trade can be given the kind of firm commitment to numbers required that would allow them to expand and grow the trees that we are going to need in the years ahead. We could then be more self-sufficient and reduce our dependency on foreign imports. This would not eliminate the possibility of importing new diseases—only a complete ban would do that and we may have to consider that—but such a commitment would be an enormous step in the right direction, and I urge the Minister to give it the most serious consideration.

Perhaps I could give your Lordships’ House two illustrations. If you go to Christ’s College, Cambridge, and walk through its fantastically ornate and famous gate to the fellows’ garden you will see a mulberry tree under which John Milton is supposed to have sat as he composed Paradise Lost. You could not imagine a more idyllic situation. If you drove up to Wakefield and got the Home Office’s permission to go into the top-security prison there, you would go through a very severe-looking gate into a yard at the back. There is another mulberry tree, standing in the circular island in the middle of the yard. This used to be the exercise yard when the prison was for female inmates. They were allowed to exercise only around this island that contained the mulberry tree. They were not allowed to speak, so they had to mime. This of course is from where we get the mime: here we go round the mulberry bush on a cold and frosty morning.

These illustrations show the part that trees play in all our lives. We must look after the ancient ones because they have such wonderful history, like our own Catalpa trees in New Palace Yard., and we must plant new ones because trees play such an important part in our national life.