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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent assessment his Department has made of the damage caused by the eight-toothed spruce bark beetle to trees in (a) Central Bedfordshire and (b) the UK.

The eight-toothed spruce bark beetle is a quarantine pest of spruce tree species and is not native to the UK. The Forestry Commission have a nationwide surveillance programme in place to monitor for incursions of this pest, which spreads naturally from Europe. A demarcated area is in place over south-east England which implements robust measures to detect and eradicate outbreaks and prevent potential spread.

The demarcated area does extend to a small part of Bedfordshire, but there have been no outbreaks in this region. All outbreaks to date have been detected on stressed, dying and dead spruce trees, which are more vulnerable to the pest.

There is an estimated 725,000 hectares of spruce in Great Britain, but less than 1% of this is within the demarcated area.