Bernard Ingham: Critics of forest ‘sale’ fail to see the wood for the trees

Every council in the country, no matter its political complexion, is blaming the Con-Dem coalition (instead of Labour spendthrifts) for chaos or higher charges to come. Not one of them admits to any extravagance on their part; every one is prudence personified.

Moreover, as I have told my native Calderdale councillors, they have no moral authority to cut anything until they give up their £10,000-a-year “allowances” for just turning up.

Public life is currently awash with alarmist hypocrisy. Just go down into the woods today to see how rife it is. You would think that our every forest had already been been converted into barbed wire Stalag Lufts to keep out ramblers, while mad commercial axemen get to work on our ancient timber.

The hype against the so-called privatisation of our woodlands is frankly pathetic.

I write not as one who couldn’t care less about England’s relatively thin tree cover. Indeed, as president of the Hardcastle Crags Preservation Commitee in Hebden Bridge, I take my stewardship of protecting that lovely valley very seriously indeed.

Until a good 55 years ago, it was in the private hands of the late – and noble – Lord Savile. Since then, it has been owned and managed by the National Trust. In spite of the pressures caused by its popularity, it remains a retreat into nature that so reminded Swiss exiles, led by the late Prof. Jean Inebnit, of Leeds University, of home that they made an annual pilgrimage to it.

Hardcastle Crags demonstrates beyond peradventure that woodlands – and public access to them – can thrive outside the Forestry Commission.

Ah, but you may say, the National Trust is not a commercial logging company. That is certainly true. But the coalition is not proposing to flog off our forests to the highest bidder armed with chainsaws.

This may come as a surprise to you. It would not do so if the coalition were remotely competent at selling anything. It lurches from one presentational disaster to another – from the Big Society to changes in child benefit; from votes for prisoners to the appointment of a Prime Ministerial press secretary who had resigned from the News of the World over telephone hacking on his watch.

So let me try to put its plans for our woodlands in some sort of perspective with the help of a paper prepared for the House of Commons’ library.

First, the Forestry Commission owns a mere 18 per cent of England’s woodland, though 44 per cent of what is accessible to the public. It costs only £15m a year to run – £76m offset by income of £61m, including regular sales and purchases of land.

So, even if it were abolished, it would not save much. Nor is the Coalition going to make inroads into the £150bn deficit by the £75-100m it might raise from the proposed new approach.

As Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary, said (without being heard) at the outset, it is not a fire sale. Indeed, selling woodland, subject to conditions as to access etc, is only one idea.

Others include leasing to charities and organisations like the National and Woodland Trusts with the overall aim of increasing biodiversity, contributing to a network of wildlife corridors and maintaining public access.

In fact, the coalition’s main objective is to make management of our woodlands more local and less central, on the reasonable grounds that those living closest to them are more likely to protect them.

So much for “environmental vandalism” – a crime of which the Forestry Commission has sometimes been accused by planting vast areas of “boring” conifers instead of deciduous woods.

I am, of course, aware of the damage that could be done to our heritage by putting our forests and especially ancient woodlands in the wrong capitalist hands. I fully recognise what the profit motive after the past demands of war could do to our countryside.

But that is not what the coalition is proposing. Instead, it is actually trying to bring the custody of and responsibility for our woodlands closer to the people. If you like, it is taking its much-misunderstood Big Society concept down to the forest floor.

My predecessors in Hebden Bridge saved Hardcastle Crags three times from being sunk under a reservoir. Localism can be effective. Let’s stop being hysterical.