Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, pursuant to the Answer of 18 January 2024 to Question 8421 on Tree Planting: Finance, for what reason the statistics for planting of trees in Forestry Commission Key Performance Indicators, updated on 9 August 2023 are provisional for 2022/23; what the changes are in the revisions of previous years in that release; and for what reason the statistics are released on an annual basis.

New planting of woodland and trees in England is reported in statistics derived from returns from a number of contributors and range of grant types. After first release of the statistics, it is possible for more accurate data to become available hence the reason the statistics are described as provisional.

The Forestry Commission will normally make necessary revisions to new planting statistics when those figures next appear in any related publication including the Forestry Statistics report and its accompanying datasets, available from the Forest Research website at: https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/statistics/forestry-statistics/.

A key reason that statistics on new planting are published annually is that there is one tree planting season a year. The Forestry Commission does publish interim statistics on new planting in England for the first half of the financial year where data are available at mid-year, and these are available in its Headline Performance Updates, available at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/forestry-commission-corporate-plan-performance-indicators.

The Forestry Commission seeks to comply with the Code of Practice for Statistics published on the UK Statistics Authority website, available at https://code.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/.