Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask His Majesty's Government what was the cost to public funds of the failure of 630,000 tree saplings planted along the A14 by National Highways; and whether any lessons have been learned for future tree planting schemes.

A total of c.860,000 trees have been planted across the mainline scheme and National Highways have spent c.£2m to date. There is a further c.£2m within the original budget to undertake the necessary work and bring the planting on the scheme into a better condition.

National Highways conducted a review in the Autumn 2022 to analyse reasons for tree failures and inform a replanting strategy. This included analysing soil samples taken along the route to better understand the reasons for failure.

Based on the lessons learned, National Highways has produced a replanting strategy which includes:

1. Replanting with cell grown trees which have a higher success rate than bare root trees.
2. Replanting between October 2023 and March 2024 which is the optimum planting season and avoids potentially very dry summer periods.
3. Planting the optimum species for the local soil conditions as soil conditions vary across the scale of the scheme.