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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether he has made an estimate of the size of the area of England that will be covered by trees and woodland in (a) 2022, (b) 2023 and (c) 2024.

We aim to plant 7,000 hectares per year in England by the end of this Parliament. This puts us on track to ensure at least 12% woodland cover in England by the middle of the century.

As of 31 March 2021, the area of woodland (greater than 0.5 ha in size) in England was reported as 1,323,000 hectares (provisional statistics) or 10.2% of land area.

This statistic is scheduled to be confirmed in Forestry Statistics 2022 (published by Forest Research). Tree canopy cover outside National Forest Inventory woodland (where woodland is over 0.5 hectares in extent and greater than 20 metres in width) amounted to 565,000 hectares in England as of January 2016, or 14.6% of land cover at that time.

In the recent public consultation on Environment Act targets, we proposed a target to increase tree and woodland canopy cover from the current level of 14.5% to 17.5% by 2050.