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

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what was the annual rate of change in new woodland planting in England over each of the last 10 years, expressed in thousands of hectares per annum and including plantings made by private owners, charities and conservation bodies.

The Forestry Commission collect and publish National Statistics for England on the area of new woodland planting. Figures for the ten years since 2006-07 are shown in Table 1 below, with the year-on-year annual rate of change. In this period almost all the new planting recorded was conducted by private owners including charities and conservation bodies supported by Government funding under successive Rural Development Programme grant schemes (Woodland Grant Scheme 2006-7; English Woodland Grant Scheme 2007-14; Countryside Stewardship 2015-).

Table 1: New planting of woodland in England over the ten years since 2006-07

Source: Forestry Statistics 2016 (Forestry Commission).

Note: These figures do not include planting as part of restocking woodland.