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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps her Department is taking to help local authorities in the North West whose area is affected by ash dieback.

We are working closely with local authorities to help them deal with the impacts of ash dieback by supporting them to be prepared and by providing guidance.

Infected ash trees can survive dieback for many years, continuing to provide recreational and biodiversity benefits, and could provide a source of disease tolerance in the future. For this very reason we are not encouraging the removal of infected ash unless it poses an immediate health and safety risk.

To ensure that the issue of health and safety is addressed we have convened an ash dieback taskforce with a number of key stakeholders and local authorities. We are working closely with this group to develop action plans for local authorities and supplement existing guidance for landowners, such as that published by the National Tree Safety Group. We will be making the action plans available for all local authorities in due course.

Local action plan work has initially focused on the areas most likely to be affected in the next few years, but we have been working with other areas and held workshops across the country to inform the research, and we will be engaging local authorities in the North West in this work later this year.