The Beaumont Hotel in Hexham was the venue for a conference on the rural economy convened by local MP Guy Opperman on 30 July. Guest of honour was England’s new Forestry Minister Rory Stewart from the neighbouring constituency of Penrith and The Border.

Proceedings began with an intro-duction from Guy Opperman, who waxed eloquent on the thriving local economy for a few minutes before introducing the first of a number of speakers. There were five-minute presentations from Richard Warneford of Northumbria Water, followed by Anthony Braithwaite, chair of the local farm-ing network, who spoke on oppor-tunities for rural growth.

Then it was the turn of Simon Hart of Egger, who summarised what he

was about to say with the simple message: “Trees are good – can we have some more, please?”

He noted that the local Egger plant employs some 600 people, and uses 750,000 tonnes of chip-wood per annum. “Multipurpose forests are a good thing,” he said, “and commercial conifers grow exceptionally well on the hills of northern Britain. A hectare of hill ground can produce 15 to 20 tonnes of timber each year in per-petuity, and that’s on land that will support only one or two ewes pro-ducing one or two lambs a year.

“The productive value of forestry is quite significant. From an eco-nomic point of view, the value of the forest output is far greater than it would be in farming, and upland forestry employs a similar number of people to agriculture. Globally, the demand for wood is rising, pric-

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es are rising, and we’re putting more and more strain on some of the virgin forests throughout the world. We should do more for our-selves in the UK, since at the moment we’re something like 80% dependent on imported wood.

“Well designed forests are great for biodiversity and they’re also great for recreation. Forests can help with flood alleviation and improve water quality. Also, well designed forests can provide shelter for upland farmers. The productivity of farmland can be enhanced by planting shelter belts. Forestry and farming can work in tandem. We don’t have to be occupying our own silos.

“Once up and running, forestry requires very little, if any, public subsidy. Trees are also sustainable. Every time we cut down a tree, we plant another one, and trees sequester carbon.

“There is a lot of capital out there, keen to get involved in forestry at the moment, but we’re letting it slip through our hands. People who’ve got the money, and by and large it’s people in urban Britain, who want to invest in rural areas, are not investing in forestry.

“Woodland cover in the north of England is less than 10% of the area, compared to Germany or France, where it’s about 30% – two countries that are well respected for their attractive landscape.

“When man arrived in northern Britain with his livestock, the whole area was covered in trees. We’re liv-ing in an artificially treeless land-scape at the moment. The govern-ment recognises that the current level of forest cover is not high enough, and they have an aspira-tion of 15% woodland cover in England.

“Each year, the government says it would like to see 5,000 hectares of trees planted, although it has a grant scheme that is designed to

www.forestryjournal.co.uk Forestry Journal 8/15

Rory Stewart answered questions at a rural economy conference at the end of last month

Meet the Minister

deliver only 2,000 hectares. North of the border, where we’ve already got over 15% woodland cover, the Scottish government would like to see 25% woodland cover and they have an annual target of 10,000 hectares of new woodland a year – and this year they might actually meet their target.

“The strong case for forestry is backed up by the local councils, who produced the document Roots to Prosperity, which Guy Opperman launched last year. This calls for 20,000 hectares of new forests in northern England over the next ten years.

“At the moment there is virtually no commercial forestry being plant-ed in England.

“Guy Opperman tells me, when I moan about the lack of planting: ‘If trees are so important to Egger, why don’t you plant them your-selves?’

“That’s a fair question if we were in a free market, but we’re not in a free market. In a free market the private sector would plant trees, but the market we actually live in is one that has a lot of barriers to for-estry. There is a lot of opposition from various organisations, and also we live in an environment with a very high agricultural subsidy, which supports continued activity of sheep farming and also under-pins a high land price. If you took away those agricultural subsidies, we might live in a very different world.

“We’ve got to remove those bar-riers. We in the forest industry have got to win over politicians and the public. We’ve got to let people know the benefits of forestry. I’d also like to see a situation where we’ve got areas where there is an assumption in favour of forestry, which makes the application pro-cess a lot smoother and easier so farmers can be confident that they’re likely to get approval.”

(Left to right) Rory Stewart, Simon Hart and Guy Opperman.

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Forestry Journal 8/15 23www.forestryjournal.co.uk

The next speaker was Glen Sanderson of the Northumberland National Park. Among the many messages he wanted to get across, he said he would like to proactively support the rural economy wherev-er possible.

Next it was the turn of Rory Stewart to give his keynote speech. This was wide ranging, but he did return to forestry on one occasion, when he noted that there is huge potential in undermanaged woodland. “We have between 100,000 and 200,000 hectares of woodland that could be used to help Egger, and also feed biomass boilers in a sus-tainable way,” he said. “The way to do it is to get the detailed data, which Defra and the FC possess, on where those woodlands are.”

It was then onto the Q&A session. The opportunity had been given to all delegates to fill in forms with questions for the Minister, and Guy Opperman noted that many of them concerned forestry.

Indeed, the first one to be answered was what Guy Opperman described as a very robust and wonderful question from Forestry Journal: “Millions of pounds are waiting to be invested in commer-cial forestry. Will government remove red tape to facilitate this? Put ENGOs back in their box please.”

Rory Stewart required clarifica-tion. “Where is Forestry Journal?” he asked, casting about the audience.

By way of explanation, we responded: “When it comes to planting trees, there are obstacles in the way. We were interested to hear from the gentleman at the Northumberland National Park that he wishes to support the local economy. We were at a Sitka spruce planting in February this year. The National Park stood in the way of this all the way. They put obstacles down at every step and managed to half the size of the planting. This was the first commercial afforesta-tion to take place in England for five years. We’re running out of timber for places like Egger, and it’s got a long timescale, forestry, unlike politics, which goes in five-year cycles. We really need to get trees in the ground, otherwise we won’t have an industry here any more. It’s very worrying. We’re approaching ‘peak wood’.”

The Minister responded: “This is fundamentally a question around land use. What the government is engaged in doing is trying to talk to land users, landowners, to get that

sector of commercial forestry, we need to begin by winning an argu-ment about what we wish the British landscape to look like. For example, they’re talking about dou-bling the number of trees in the Lake District National Park, taking it from about 5% to 10%. Again, the question that needs to be asked is, ‘Are those trees going to be of any use to Simon?’ or are they going to be the planting of small strips of native woodland along becks com-ing down the fellside, which, I guess, will be of not much use to you.”

“Unlikely to be harvested,” said Simon Hart.

“Exactly,” continued the Minister, “so I want to open this up, and I’m going to say that, if this is a conversation that you in Northumberland are interested in driving, and I would have thought that you are a good place to drive it, given that you have Kielder here, then I think we need to look at the individual questions posed by Forestry Journal. What is it that is happening in the National Park? Why was that planning process dif-ficult? What are the obstacles that owners actually face in planting this kind of forestry? How do we win over environmental NGOs?

“For example, is it possible to say to them, look, it’s all very well you saying that you don’t like commer-cial forestry in Britain, but in the end we’re still consuming the same number of trees. All you’re actually doing is pushing the commercial growth over to another person’s country, and presumably all the environmental problems that you’re grumbling about are happening somewhere else where these trees are planted. Is that really what you want? Is that in the end a really sus-tainable, environmentally responsi-ble approach to the world, or would Britain like to play its role in growing some of these trees them-selves, provided we grow them in the right way?

“The best way of pulling this off is to find an area of the country which is prepared to really have those conversations. It would be really nice to see Simon sit down with George Monbiot in Northumberland with a particular patch of ground and actually fight this through, talk it through and try to get some kind of agreement. Otherwise we’re going to be in the horrible kind of world that I feel we’re in all the time, where we’re going to have two completely dif-ferent conversations going on and

balance correct. What is going on in forestry at the moment is partly a lack of clarity. There are a lot of people out there talking about committing themselves to planting trees, but there isn’t necessarily enough clarity about what kind of trees people are planting.

“To give you an example, you find people very easily in a room like this who want to plant trees, but when you get down to the question of what kind of trees you are planting and where those trees are going to be planted you get into huge disagreements. Egger is interested in planting basically com-mercial forestry for the wood pro-cessing sector. Somebody else is interested in planting a small strip of native woodland in the green belt adjacent to London giving lei-sure benefits for suburban visitors.

“We often fall over backwards to suggest that all these things can be achieved simultaneously, but they can’t, unfortunately. These things are about difficult choices; they’re about priorities. So, as Simon point-ed out, the question about support through things like the Countryside Stewardship scheme, the questions around the price of land, which is a big driver on forestry, are funda-mentally driven by our views, as a nation, on what we believe is the landscape that we love.

“What do we want? Do we want sheep farmers to be able to contin-ue? If we take the Bailey Valley, for instance, on the edge of Kielder, it is a classic example of the dilemmas that you’re facing all the time. It’s grade 3/grade 4 agricultural land, very, very heavy clay soil, very, very heavy rainfall. It’s poached probably two years out of four. They get about one good year out of five. People are really pushing to plant trees up that valley. At the same time, the farmers who live in that valley are living on 100/120 acre farms. They’re keeping 40 sheep, 50 cows, and yet some of those families have been there unbroken since they were settled in that val-ley by Richard III. In other words, they have been sitting there since the fifteenth century in farms of a very similar size. If you were to sug-gest to them that they should give up their farms and that trees should move in over their farms, they would be extremely resistant to this.

“I’m not, I guess, coming up with a magic wand here,” contin-ued Rory Stewart, “except to say that Simon’s instinct is right. If we are to have a vigorous, flourishing

I’m acting on some weird Chinese whispers between groups without either of them understanding the other.”

The Q&A session then proceeded to other questions, mainly on topics other than forestry. However, on the question of rewilding, Rory Stewart again talked of upland sheep farming and made it clear that it has a special place in his view of land use issues.

Having described the way the local area was cleared of trees, cer-tainly by Roman times, and proba-bly long before that, he stated that while rewilding might take place in certain areas, there also needs to be space for sheep.

“I feel that upland sheep farming is one of the most precious inherit-ances and connections to our past. I feel very, very strongly that when people come up, for example, from the south of England, to visit this area, one of the things they love about this area is that they see in small farms a connection to what they believe about Britain. Ramblers like, in certain areas, to have fell-sides that they can walk over, which are eaten by sheep. We also, I believe, have a responsibility to understand that some of the upland, unproductive ground, if it isn’t used for forestry, is quite well used for sheep, because the inputs into it are essentially environmental-ly friendly.

“For all these reasons, Defra’s vision is to try to create space for multiple uses. We’re not ideologues. We don’t go round saying we want the whole thing rewilded, or we want the whole thing covered with trees or the whole thing devoted to sheep farming.”

There was time for one more ques-tion on forestry. In a project com-missioned by the FC, the new observatory at Kielder Water was built with larch imported from Siberia. “Why, in the middle of the largest forest in northern England was this allowed? Please make sure such things don’t happen again!” demanded the questioner.

Rory Stewart wanted to know whether this was really true. An explanation came from a member of the audience, who said that the decision was taken to use Siberian larch because of its longer life expectancy.

This question came from Andrew Heald of Confor, who was frankly less than impressed with the expla-nation he received.