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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps she is taking to ensure that wood or paper products from illegal or unsustainable timber sources are not being sold or used in the UK.

Defra is committed to tackling the trade in illegal timber. We implement the EU Timber Regulation (EUTR), which makes it an offence to place illegally logged timber on the EU market for the first time, and the EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Regulation, which aims to combat illegal logging and improve the supply of legal timber to the EU. The EU FLEGT Regulation establishes Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) between the EU and timber producing countries. Once VPAs have been agreed, timber producing countries will issue exports with a ‘FLEGT licence’ which verifies the timber’s legality.

Our efforts in these areas were reflected in WWF’s 2014 ‘EU Government Barometer’ on illegal logging and trade, where we received the highest score of all the EU Member States, see:

http://barometer.wwf.org.uk/what_we_do/government_barometer.

The Government’s Timber Procurement Policy requires central government departments, executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies to procure timber and timber products that are both legal and sustainable.