Trees: British Ash Tree

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Monday 5th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marlesford]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, has spoken much good sense. I declare an interest, in that I am a Suffolk farmer. I had the e-mail from the CLA on Friday and we spent the weekend having a look at our ash trees. Today at about 12 o’clock, I sent an e-mail to the Forestry Commission to say that we had found fairly extensive cases of what looks extremely like the ash disease. What is interesting is that there were unhealthy trees in hedges and woods that were next to other ash trees that were completely healthy. That suggests that there is selective immunity. I would be delighted if any scientists from the Forestry Commission want to come and look at us, but I think that in much of Suffolk there is probably a good deal of this ash disease.

I slightly wonder whether it is a new disease. The Forestry Commission produced a very good video, which I watched this morning. Others may have seen it too. One characteristic is that inside the ash there is black wood. Ever since I was a child ash trees have sometimes suffered from having black wood inside. In fact, the story goes that if you want to use white ash to make furniture, you should take ash which grows near water as ash which has its feet in water is more likely to be cleaner than other ash.

We have already heard from other noble Lords that a lot of these diseases have been around for a very long time. We know about the other diseases that have been referred to. There is a lesson for the Government here as regards the structure of government and their priorities.

I have one or two other interests to declare. I am the president of the Suffolk Preservation Society. I was a member of the Countryside Commission for 12 years, a member of the Rural Development Commission for eight years and I was chairman of CPRE for five years. I feel very strongly that there is a real place for quangos. A quango is a body of professional people who have outside people monitoring and focusing their efforts. The function of a quango is to advise government on what to do. It is not a pressure group. CPRE is an unashamed pressure group. The Countryside Commission was not a pressure group. I think it was a mistake to amalgamate all these quangos. It has been done over a period of years. The Countryside Commission, the Rural Development Commission, the NCC and English Nature are now all called Natural England. One of the reasons it was a mistake is that the governing body is comprised of part-time people and the responsibilities are too wide for them to cover them all. That means that the staff do not focus and the right advice is not given to government and therefore government does not take action at the right time. There might well be a case for reinventing or recreating one or two of these bodies which were so crucial to maintaining the countryside that we all love.

I wish to make two other points. Dutch elm disease was spread by a beetle but there is some immunity. On the whole elm trees grow to about 17 feet and then they seem to die back. However, they are still perfectly good hedge trees. I do not think that a policy of rooting out diseased ash trees is likely to work or necessarily be the right thing to do. If ash trees are cut down they make very good firewood and I do not agree that they should not be burnt in people’s fireplaces but in a field.

The other thing that worries me is that I have heard Ministers quoted as saying that people should disinfect their boots. That is nonsense. We have never had more deer in our countryside than we have now. We have badgers, birds and the pheasant, introduced originally by the Romans as your Lordships know. We have many things that can move the disease, including feet. We should remember an important fact that is pretty damned obvious but seems to have been forgotten when people talk about cutting off bits of the countryside, which is that one of the primary functions of the countryside is to produce food. Can we imagine it being possible to close down parts of the countryside? At the moment we are short of food and food production is a primary function of the countryside, so we should not take foolish, apparently populist, action. We should think carefully and hope that the body to which my noble friend Lord Selborne referred—I am delighted that it has been set up—receives some good sensible advice from farmers, countrymen and people who know about the countryside. I am optimistic. I think that our countryside will survive. We have a multiplicity of different trees. Nature has an amazing way of coping. Sad though it was to lose so many elm trees, I do not believe that our English countryside is any less beautiful than it was 40 years ago.