Forestry Commission is not best protector of our woodland

I AM a qualified horticulturist, permaculturist, and a lifelong supporter and worker for community green spaces and woodland. I am also a Liberal Democrat campaigner in Warley, Halifax. I feel moved to address the false information and scare-mongering being generated by Labour and others on the woodland issue.

In the House of Commons, a Labour MP has suggested that the proposals amount to an open invitation to developers to destroy our woodlands and build golf courses. It is this kind of scandalous misrepresentation that makes any fair, honest and well-meaning debate so difficult in this country. Nothing of the sort is being proposed. If it was, I would be the first protesting on the streets.

The Forestry Commission manages about 18 per cent of our woodland. Much of that is conifer plantation with very little biodiversity that results in a pretty sterile ecology.

The Forestry Commission was originally created after the Second World War to, among other things, provide coniferous softwood for quick timber in the event of another war.

Dr Oliver Rackham, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and acknowledged authority on the countryside and its history, has said: “The greatest threats to ancient woodland for a thousand years came from the destructive courses which forestry took in Britain after 1945. Many hundreds of woods were grubbed out and thousands more were wrecked by replanting.”

That replanting was the replacement, by the Forestry Commission, of native, broadleaf woodland with conifers. We have all seen the effects on our vulnerable landscape.

So the argument is absolutely not one of “Forestry Commission good, every other organisation bad”. The Forestry Commission treated a plantation like it was some sort of Government stock, justified by a crude kind of cost-benefit analysis.

Replanting with conifers has already caused an ecological catastrophe. We have the smallest proportion of Ancient woodland remaining of any European country. Anyone who thinks governments are the best people to manage our precious landscape should think again.

I am a volunteer for the National Trust and a member of the Woodland Trust. These bodies are brilliant at protecting our woodland. They replant with broadleaf species, bringing back biodiversity and traditional, sympathetic forestry management and they really care about our environment. They also want as much woodland as possible to be accessible, and they educate us all about our own responsibilities for our environment.

If Government proposals mean more involvement from these trusts, I for one, as a dedicated environmentalist, am optimistic.