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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent steps the Government has taken to tackle ash dieback.

Extensive action has been taken on ash dieback since it was first officially found in 2012. We have restricted the movement of ash and invested more than £6m in ash dieback research. We have conducted the world’s largest screening trials and in June 2019 we published the ash research strategy – this set out priority areas for future research, including the UK led work to identify tolerant trees.

We will be planting the first UK archive of tolerant trees in 2020. We are continuing to support landowners to manage ash dieback on the ground by providing guidance, including a toolkit for local authorities and large land mangers which was launched earlier this year and has been downloaded over 16,500 times.