Rural Affairs Committee, 05 Oct 1999

Meeting date: Tuesday, October 5, 1999

Official Report 217KB pdf

---

Forestry

Item 4 on the agenda is the briefing paper "Forestry in Scotland" dated 24 September. Is this the last of the briefing papers?

There will be one more paper, on transport on rural areas, which we should have for our next meeting.

I ask members—if they have had the opportunity to look through the paper—whether they think that this paper is accurate and appropriate. Is there anything that is not covered that members would like to be researched? Are you content with the amount of information? Are there any aspects that should be pursued?

An aspect that is not addressed in this paper—it may come under the rural transport paper rather than this one—is that the increase in forestry production, which, as this paper points out, is set to double in the next 10 to 15 years, will place an enormous strain on some of the narrowest rural roads in Scotland. This is already a problem, as some local authorities are suggesting that forestry companies will have to pay for the upgrading of those roads so that they can carry the lorry traffic when the timber is felled. This is becoming a grey and difficult area of local authority finance.

I know that there are initiatives in Argyllshire to examine this question, but the problem will spread right through Scotland, particularly to the south-west, which is the most heavily afforested area. This committee must consider this problem. I do not know whether it should be considered under forestry or rural transport, as it cuts across both.

It certainly does. Should we ask for information on this?

I agree with Alex. He mentioned Argyll, but the north-west Highlands and the north suffer tremendously from this problem. There is an on-going debate—a battle, in fact—between the local authority roads department and the Forestry Commission. To extend the lifetime of rural roads, the local authority is almost threatening to impose weight restrictions. As members know, weight limits keep going up. The current legal weight is something like 44 tonnes, but many roads were built to take a horse and cart and cannot withstand such a heavy tonnage.

To be fair to the Forestry Commission, I know that it realises that there is a big problem when timber matures and has to be harvested. It has come round to the idea that it should be required to expend some of its budget on improving fragile roads. I am sure that its funds are restricted, like those of any other body. The debate is on-going.

Should we ask SPICe to consider the transport of forestry products?

The Forestry Commission briefing paper addresses this issue. The commission is considering preferred routes and rail and sea transport. We need a more in-depth paper to examine the options.

I can understand why the researcher did not go into this in more detail, as it would be difficult to know where to stop. Many areas could usefully have been explored further. Another example is downstream industry—pulpmills, processing, and sawmills. The great increase in volume, which is due to peak at the beginning of the next decade, raises interesting questions about whether we need more downstream capacity, where that might be located and so on. That, too, could have been usefully explored, but I can understand why it was not—it is a big issue.

Alasdair's comments concern the wider area. If we start to explore that, we will discover that all these things interrelate with one another. It is important that we do not restrict our discussion of transport to roads, as other questions need to be answered.

If we follow Alasdair's suggestion and examine where the timber will be transported to—where it will be dealt with—that will give us a clearer idea of the transport structure that we need to get the timber from A to B.

As I was saying, many local authorities in rural areas are conscious of the situation and are considering measures to address it. We hear constantly about the possibilities of moving the transport of timber from road to rail and from rail to ship. Those are excellent ideas, but the timber must be taken to the port or railhead, and for that purpose a road is needed. The problem does not go away.

It would be appropriate for us to consider local transport, as small roads are heavily burdened by the transportation of products from the forests. We should specifically consider local authorities' concerns about the damage that that is doing to roads. The downstreaming of products from the forests to where they are to be processed, or the way in which they are to be transported to where they are to be processed, is a different, although equally important, issue. For that reason, we can ask for the briefing paper to be extended slightly into those areas of transport.

The development of the structure to handle the increased volume in products has to fit into the broader investigation into forestry that we had intended to pursue anyway. Once the transport issues have been brought up to date, it will be appropriate—perhaps at our next full meeting—to consider how we want to proceed in the longer term on forestry.

I would like to make a suggestion. The consultation period has ended, but we have not yet seen the findings, so perhaps it would be more appropriate for us to wait before we have a global look at forestry issues, with a view to deciding how we want to proceed.

That is a good point, which we will keep in mind. I shall try to find out when the results of the consultation are likely to be available. Do members want to raise any more points on the briefing paper?

I suggest that we formally record our thanks to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors in Scotland, which has copied for the committee all its correspondence on its concerns about the transfer of the lead ministerial responsibility for forestry in the UK from Scotland to Whitehall.

If members do not want to raise any more issues on the briefing paper on forestry, we will progress to item 5.