Asked by: Anna McMorrin (Labour - Cardiff North)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what level of carbon savings the Government expects through the (a) sustainable farming incentive, (b) local nature recovery scheme and (c) landscape recovery scheme; and what percentage of the total carbon savings during the (i) 4th, (ii) 5th and (iii) 6th carbon budget periods the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is responsible for.
Answered by Graham Stuart
The Government anticipates its environmental land management schemes, the Farming Innovation Fund and other farming offers will reduce agricultural emissions by up to 6 MtCO2e per year in Carbon Budget 6 in England. The Government will also pursue opportunities through tree planting and peat restoration.
The Net Zero Strategy sets out cross-economy action to keep the UK on track for meeting carbon budgets and includes a range for emissions savings for Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Uses, Waste and Fluorinated Gases. These are indicative pathways: allowing the UK to respond flexibly to changes that arise over time, including technology and innovation developments.
Asked by: Thangam Debbonaire (Labour - Bristol West)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether his Department is providing support to Bristol City Council for (a) managing and (b) increasing the overall population of trees in and surrounding Bristol.
Answered by Trudy Harrison
Our England Trees Action Plan (ETAP), published in May 2021, sets out the long-term, generational vision for trees and forestry to 2050. ETAP details how we will treble tree planting rates in England by the end of this Parliament, contributing to 30,000 hectares of new trees per year across the UK by 2025. The Plan is supported by the £675 million Nature for Climate Fund.
Defra supports local authorities’ tree planting through access to several of the Nature for Climate Fund grant schemes including:
The UTCF and LATF schemes’ combined aim is to not only add, but also maintain hundreds of thousands of trees in our towns and cities. The ETAP also further details how HM Government will ensure the protection and management of trees to deliver more for society, nature, the climate, and the economy.
Asked by: Bim Afolami (Conservative - Hitchin and Harpenden)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps his Department is planning to take to help encourage (a) tree planting, (b) re-wilding and (c) wider planting in rural communities, including in Hitchin and Harpenden constituency.
Answered by Trudy Harrison
Our England Trees Action Plan (ETAP), published in May 2021, sets out the long-term, generational vision for trees and forestry to 2050. It recognises the vital contribution trees can make, including to nature recovery, Net Zero, and health and wellbeing.
ETAP details how we will treble tree planting rates in England by the end of this Parliament, contributing to 30,000 hectares of new trees per year across the UK by 2025. The Plan is supported by the £675 million Nature for Climate Fund.
This includes launching the England Woodland Creation Offer with over £15 million available in this year alone to support woodland creation from as little as 1 hectare, in blocks of 0.1 hectares. The Offer includes funding for natural colonisation, which allows trees to seed and grow naturally next to existing trees.
The Government is continuing to support the creation and enhancement of wilder landscapes as part of our broader approach to nature recovery including, where appropriate, species reintroductions. However, we recognise that as an approach, rewilding is not appropriate in all situations, and is not the only means of delivering the Government’s environmental goals.
Locally we have supported a variety of tree planting and establishment projects including over £25 million for our Woodland Creation Partnerships this year, establishing three new Community Forests with over 1,000 hectares of new woodland being planted across the total 13 Community Forests since 2020, up to £4.4 million available to rural communities through the Local Authority Treescapes Fund, and launched the ground-breaking Woodland Creation Accelerator Fund, which will have a total value of just under £8 million to provide financial support to local authorities to increase their capacity and specialist skills.
The Forestry Commission estimates that there were at least 400,000 newly planted trees with Government support in woodland in the 12 years 3 months from 1 April 2010 to 30 June 2022, in the Hitchin and Harpenden constituency.
Asked by: Charlotte Nichols (Labour - Warrington North)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps his Department is taking to increase the number of trees.
Answered by Trudy Harrison
Trees are at the forefront of the Government’s plans to achieve net zero by 2050, whilst also helping achieve many other environmental and economic outcomes.
Our England Trees Action Plan (ETAP), published in May 2021, sets out the long-term, generational vision for trees and forestry to 2050. The Plan details how we will treble tree planting rates in England by the end of this Parliament, contributing to 30,000 hectares of new trees per year across the UK by 2025. The Plan is supported by the £675 million Nature for Climate Fund. We have already:
Asked by: Rachael Maskell (Labour (Co-op) - York Central)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with reference to the England Trees Action Plan 2021 to 2024, what progress he has made towards achieving his ambitions relating to tree planting; and what his latest assessment is of whether he will meet targets for tree planting and canopy cover.
Answered by Rebecca Pow - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
On 16 June, the Forestry Commission published their Key Performance Indicators and Forest Research published the latest National Statistics on woodland. The statistics show that tree planting and woodland creation in England increased to 2,700 hectares within and outside of woodland in England in 2021/22. We are currently on track to meet our tree planting commitments; however, we do understand that there is more to do to stay on our ambitious trajectory.
Asked by: Rosie Cooper (Labour - West Lancashire)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment he has made of the role of arboriculture in achieving the UK’s environmental targets.
Answered by Rebecca Pow - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
Arboriculturalists continue to support the delivery of the England Trees Action Plan, from the delivery of tree planting in urban areas to supporting local tree and woodland strategies. We have significant ambitions to increase woodland cover in England and bring trees closer to people, and welcome the role of arboriculture, alongside agriculture, horticulture and wider forestry sectors, in enabling that.
Asked by: Theresa Villiers (Conservative - Chipping Barnet)
Question to the Scotland Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for Scotland, what steps the Government is taking to help ensure that organisations in Scotland are able to participate in its programmes to expand tree planting.
Answered by Alister Jack - Secretary of State for Scotland
Forestry is a devolved area of responsibility. However, the UK Government continually engages with the Scottish Government to realise our high ambitions for increasing planting across the UK. We are confident that we are on track to meet the UK-wide target of planting 30,000ha per year by the end of this Parliament.
All of the administrations play a part in delivering the programme and to share best practice and work together on cross-border projects. In fact, Scottish Forestry is leading the review of the UK Forestry Standard, which sets out the UK’s approach to sustainable forest management, and the report is due for publication in late 2022.
Asked by: Anthony Mangnall (Conservative - Totnes)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if he will take steps to protect and restore Britain’s temperate rainforests.
Answered by Rebecca Pow - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
This government recognises the importance of trees and woodlands, and has ambitious targets to treble tree planting in England as part of a UK wide commitment to establish 30,000 hectares per year by the end of this Parliament. This sits alongside our work to protect existing woodland, particularly ancient woodland. The England Trees Action Plan will help to deliver this by seeing an unprecedented number of trees planted, protected and managed to deliver more for society, nature, the climate and the economy.
The international importance of temperate rainforests (also termed Atlantic woodland) in supporting rare and threatened species has been recognised in domestic biodiversity policy for many decades. Many temperate rainforests are protected by existing policy. Many are ancient woodlands, which are protected from development in all but wholly exceptional circumstances; we have committed in the England Trees Action Plan to increase protections in the planning system for long established woodland in situ since 1840. Many of our temperate rainforests support rich assemblages of species and are in our series of Sites of Special Scientific Interest. SSSI selection guidelines for woodlands are focussed on securing a representative series rather than protecting every example.
This government has made a world-leading commitment to halt the decline in nature by 2030, which will rely on the restoration and creation of habitats across the country. This will be supported by funding from the Nature for Climate Fund, future farming schemes including Landscape Recovery, and new funds such as the Big Nature Impact Fund. We will consider, while designing and rolling out these schemes, how they might support the protection and restoration of certain types of woodlands including ‘temperate rainforest’. We also provide financial support the buffering and expansion of valuable woodlands such as temperate rainforests through the England Woodland Creation Offer, and funding for the improvement and restoration of temperate rainforest sites through the Regional Restoration Funds.
Forestry policy is devolved, so the protection and restoration of temperate rainforests outside England is a matter for the devolved authorities.
Asked by: Ian Lavery (Labour - Wansbeck)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what plans his Department has to ensure that the trees lost as a result of Storm Arwen are replaced.
Answered by Rebecca Pow - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
Forestry is devolved and so this answer is for England only.
Initial efforts have been focused on supporting the emergency services and utility providers in re-establishing essential networks and infrastructure with ongoing work to make sure impacted forests are safe for public access. It is estimated that it will take over a year to plan and implement the full recovery effort.
A felling licence is not required to harvest trees that are no longer growing such as those that are blown over or snapped by the wind or are dead or dangerous. In some situations, this may lead to blown trees being cleared with no obligation for the owner to restock. In England, Defra and the Forestry Commission are investigating how regulation and incentives could be used to reduce the risk that there is a loss of tree cover or woodland area in these situations. Regulatory arrangements for clearing windblown trees vary between devolved administrations.
The Government has committed to bring tree planting rates across the UK up to 30,000 hectares per year by the end of this parliament in May 2024. The England Trees Action Plan is supported by an intended £500 million from the Nature for Climate Fund. In the Net Zero Strategy, the Government also announced that it will boost the Nature for Climate fund with a further £124 million of new money, ensuring total spend of more than £750 million by 2025 on peat restoration, woodland creation and management.
Asked by: Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, of the target of 5,000 hectares of trees planted, what proportion were planted in (1) 2020, and (2) 2021; and what the delivery target will be for 2022.
Answered by Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park
The Government committed to trebling woodland creation rates to 30,000 hectares per year in the UK by the end of this Parliament. The Government aims to at least treble woodland creation in England over that time period to contribute to that target and will maintain new planting at least at this level from 2025 onwards.
After centuries of deforestation, tree cover in the UK reached its low point in 1924, with only 5% of the UK forested after the First World War. Now, after a century of effort, we have brought woodland cover back up to 13% of our land. The areas of new planting (woodland creation) taken from the Forestry Commission’s Forestry Statistics are shown below:
Year (ending 31 March) | New planting in England (thousand hectares) |
2019-20 | 2.34 |
2020-21 | 2.06 |
Since 2020-21 there are also quarterly interim reports (provisional statistics) on new planting of woodland published in the Forestry Commission Key Performance Indicators. In the first half of 2021-22 there were 856 hectares of new planting of woodland in England. We expect further trees to be planted throughout this tree planting season which ends in March 2022, and our projections show we are currently on the right trajectory to meet our commitments.
In England, we are boosting the existing £640 million Nature for Climate Fund with a further £124 million of new money, ensuring total spend of more than £750 million by 2025 on peat restoration, woodland creation and management - above and beyond what was promised in the manifesto.