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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps he is taking to help increase tree planting.

We are committed to increasing tree planting across the UK to 30,000 hectares per year by the end of this parliament. We published our ambitious England Trees Action Plan on the 18 May, which sets out our plans to at least treble tree planting rates in England in support of this, using more than £500 million from the Nature for Climate Fund.

The Plan sets out a range of new incentives which will provide significant support for 2021/22 planting season and beyond. This includes the recently launched £15.9 million England Woodland Creation offer for landowners, land managers and public bodies to apply for support to create new woodland, using traditional methods of tree establishment as well as natural colonisation, agroforestry, and riparian plating. We’ve also extended our Urban Tree Challenge Fund, delivering trees in areas of low tree cover and social deprivation, and have launched a new £2.7 million Local Authority Treescape Fund, aimed at establishing more trees in non-woodland settings such as riverbanks or hedgerows. We have also committed £25 million for our Woodland Creation Partnerships, which includes support for the development of the newly created Plymouth and South Devon Community Forest.

For the last planting season (2020/21) we kick-started tree planting efforts through a number of initiatives including, £12.1 million investment in expanding England's ten Community Forests; £1.4 million of planting along rivers through the Environment Agency; and support from the £80 million Green Recovery Challenge Fund for a range of charity projects to protect and plant trees. These initiatives contributed to the planting of 13,410 hectares across the UK in 2020/21, of which 2180ha were planted in England.