I thank noble Lords for their valuable contributions to this debate. The Environment Act 2021 grants these Houses the power to make targets that tackle the challenges facing our environment today. This target does exactly that. To achieve the tree and woodland canopy cover target, we will need not just action from the Government, but effort across the country from the private sector, NGOs, and people up and down this country. I know many of us have fond memories of planting trees as a child. I am old enough to remember “Plant a Tree in 73” and being furiously dragged by my father to plant a tree, which died last year because of ash dieback, not because of my lack of skill in looking after it.
We want this target to be relevant to future generations. The noble Baroness, Lady Young, manages rage in a way that I need to channel at times. If her calm demeanour conceals rage, she has incredible self-control.
Let us look back at history. We have doubled woodland cover since 1924, but that is no reason to be complacent. As has been pointed out, it is a fraction of what exists in other countries, in which, I have to say, there are many fewer people. In 1086, when data collection was maybe a little vaguer, it was 15%, so our ambition is to take it to record highs. It is not just the Government saying, “Go there and plant a tree.” We can do that on publicly owned land, and we are in conversations with other departments that own a lot of land. The Government can contribute to this by directly increasing planting on land such as Ministry of Defence training grounds, but we are trying to encourage private sector businesses to plant more trees. That means a combination of incentives, regulations and conditionality on various things, and it is a complex ambition to achieve when you do not have direct control.
The noble Baroness talked about this as if was the only tool in the box. Through environmental land management, the opportunities of green finance, as pointed out by my noble friend Lord Roborough, could change quite dramatically in coming years. One of the greatest disincentives for land managers to plant trees is that they receive around £85 an acre from the EU for just farming it. Now with the shift towards environmentally incentivised schemes, some areas of a field will be uneconomic to get a piece of expensive tackle into and in order to use diesel, plough points, sprays, fertilisers and all the other paraphernalia of agricultural production. It is in those areas that we see great potential. We have a specific scheme in riparian planting and in a number of other areas, some of which will not come into these statistics, such as hedgerows—some areas of agroforestry do—and short-rotation coppice, which is a key part of our delivery to hit our carbon budget 6, and I will come on to talk about that in a minute.
I love the Woodland Trust. I think it has an important part to play in delivering these statistics. Apart from anything else, it has lots of money and is able to buy land and plant trees, but what I cannot understand about the Woodland Trust, and I have had this discussion with the noble Baroness before, is its fixation with native species. It is really not a very good long-term resilience policy because, with climate change and the prevalence of tree diseases approaching these shores that I see every day in my job, to be totally obsessed with just a few species of broadleaf trees is incomprehensible.
Therefore, I totally defend our 70/30 target—that is, 70% broadleaf and 30% species such as those that lock up carbon. For example, more carbon is retained by a softwood tree rather than being burned into the atmosphere, so it is better for that carbon to continue to remain in structures, such as roof beams, and other areas of our economy. We need ever more diversity of trees. I am excited by what foresters are doing all around the country, where I see new species. I am intensely proud of some of the trees that I have seen planted on land for which I have had responsibility, and where I have done this for other landowners.
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Many of those species are not native but they have been on these islands for a great many—sometimes hundreds—years. We have not only to plant them but to look after them. It is no good the Government, private landowners or NGOs being able to talk about hectares of trees if we are not looking after them. The greatest threat with respect to biodiversity and carbon is that a lot of the trees planted—particularly broadleaf trees—will not grow to maturity because they will be destroyed by squirrels or disease.
We need to tackle that and get everybody from the NGO world—even those who have an absolute horror of killing anything—to understand that species such as squirrels are destroying biodiversity, trees and trees’ ability to sequester carbon, as well as diminishing our landscape. If there is a bit of verve in what I say, it is because a 44-acre plantation that my father planted has about 4,000 oaks in it, not one of which will grow to maturity because of the effect of grey squirrels. The only thing you can see growing up there is the nurse crop of Scots pine.
This is why I am determined—as are other Ministers—to take this forward. We need everyone’s support, particularly those who have good connections with those who might be wary about such thing as the contraceptive that we are producing or, in future, a gene driver that might limit the ability of the grey squirrel to rampage across our countryside and get rid of our native red squirrel, which we want to see thrive.
I have a lot of admiration for the Forestry Commission. It is well led and has a crucial role to play in relation to the ambitions of this Government, whether in achieving our net-zero targets, complying with the Climate Change Act, supporting biodiversity or the health and well-being agenda, of which trees are an absolutely fundamental part. We ask it to face in every direction; I make no apology for doing that. We want it to encourage more public access and help the forestry industry with greater understanding of what it needs to make its woodlands thrive. What is happening at Alice Holt and the new laboratory that I opened there some time ago is absolutely at the forefront of science. Of course, there is also the importance of timber production and security, reducing the carbon footprint that comes with moving timber all over the world. If we can grow more of it here, we will be helping future generations.
I agree entirely with the noble Baroness about the Rock review. We want to make sure that, in our incentives to farmers to plant more trees, we do not forget that about half of farmers are tenants. They
need to be able to take part in this and work with their landlords to make sure that happens. We are looking at the report very carefully.
I have said in other fora that I used to be very opposed to the land use framework. I thought that it was an entirely wrong thing for the Government to do—I thought that it was Soviet, like with 10-year tractor plans—but I have been totally converted for reasons that have never been more apparent to me than now. When we are trying to produce food in a hungry world, reverse declines in nature and get to net zero, and when we have a growing population and growing demands on our economy, there has never been a more important time for government to work with industry, with farming, with people who mind about conservation and with other bodies to try to make sure that we are getting this right and giving the right incentives.
Leading on from your Lordships’ excellent committee report, the Government have said that we will take this forward this year, but we do not need to wait for that; we already have clear policies on, for example, the connection that woodlands can provide from one nature-rich area to another. Sir John Lawton’s Making Space for Nature report, which said that we need bigger, better and more joined-up environments, is fundamental to this work and the kinds of incentives that we will give through a variety of different schemes, not least of which is ELMS.
I entirely agree with the noble Baroness about urban trees. We have provided some money—I think £4.4 million—for trees outside woodland areas, including urban trees. I heard the other day of some bone-headed council that had said that it wanted street trees that impeded street lights to be cut down. That sort of thing makes me want to put my head in my hands. Trees in urban areas are vital for taking heat out of the environment, as the noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, said, and they enhance our sense of place and pride. We want to see more urban trees. What happened in Sheffield has stuck in the collective memory. In fairness to Sheffield, it is now going berserk on planting urban trees—all credit to it for that—and we want to see more of that.
The noble Baroness asked whether our target is somehow timid in terms of what we want to achieve and in preventing the OEP saying, “You haven’t achieved it”. I refute that; the OEP’s comments on many of our targets have been complimentary. I think we can exceed this target, but at this moment, with all the interactions we have with the people we want to plant those trees, this is the target we know we can achieve. It is a record high for woodland cover in this country, but it is not the sum total of our ambition, and the target will be reviewed in 2028. It is not a question of marginally missing something; it is about doing more. We want to see more agroforestry, and much of that does not fit in with the international definitions of what constitutes woodland or forestry cover.
I will try to address some other points quickly, because I have been talking a lot today. In some cases, the consultation responses suggested that they wanted a more ambitious target, but they want one that is realistic and therefore in line with the legal requirement of the Act. We have to remember that that is a key requirement.
We have decided to take forward a target of 16.5% of England. This will deliver an increase in tree cover of around 250,000 hectares, equivalent to the size of Cheshire. That sounds not timid or modest but quite ambitious as a starting point. It is a very stretching target which will be challenging to achieve, but it is a key part of our net-zero strategy and of delivering our manifesto commitment to plant 75,000 acres of trees across the UK. We will review the level of ambition in future, in close consultation with all stakeholders.
The Government are not currently tracking their tree planting manifesto commitment. There have been challenges in the past few years, not least the pandemic, which saw an entire planting season missed, but we are making good progress. Since October 2019, we have planted an estimated 11.5 million trees. I said “we”; I made that classic mistake that politicians and people in government make. We have seen 11.5 million trees planted, to the credit of those who planted them, not just to the Government who incentivised them. I have addressed the point about conifers as a percentage.