Official Report 599KB pdf
Agenda item 5 is a panel evidence session on forestry. We have scheduled around an hour and 20 minutes for this discussion. We will then take a short comfort break, which will be followed by a panel discussion with stakeholders on peatland and peatland restoration. To keep us on time, I would be grateful if questions from members and answers from our witnesses could be as concise as possible.
Members have agreed to hold sessions on key topics in our remit, and part of that work is to help to set the scene for the development of the committee’s work programme over the next five years, as well as to cover key topics that are introduced by the Scottish Government’s programme for government and the upcoming budget.
I will briefly introduce the witnesses before moving to questions from members. I welcome Stuart Goodall, chief executive of Confor; Paul Lowe, chief executive of Scottish Forestry; Simon Ritchie, policy and advocacy manager for Woodland Trust Scotland; and Andy Rockall, chief executive of the Community Woodlands Association. Before we begin, I remind you that you do not need to operate your microphones, as broadcasting will do it for you.
I invite questions from members.
Welcome, everyone, and good morning. Considering the current focus on public service reform, will you comment on the proposals to consider including Scottish Forestry in the merger of NatureScot, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and Zero Waste Scotland? In relation to the investigation of the consolidation of public bodies that are involved in the management of public land assets, what are your views on the direction of travel?
The Scottish Forestry proposal is deeply worrying. We all understand the need for public service reform in one degree or another, and we understand the pressure on public finances, but on the proposal to potentially include Scottish Forestry in that merger, the case has not been made at all. We are deeply worried that the functions of Scottish Forestry, the policy specialism, the technical expertise and the staff capacity in the technical area of woodland creation and management could be lost. In the absence of more information from the Government and concrete guarantees that that would all be retained, we cannot support that.
We share the views of Woodland Trust Scotland on that issue, and we have written a joint letter to the relevant cabinet secretaries to make those points.
From a business perspective, for the past 30 to 40 years, forestry has been built on the foundations of sustainability and the concept of managing economic, environmental and societal or community benefits. We have detailed management standards for that—the United Kingdom forestry standard, which operates in Scotland and across the UK. It is incredibly detailed. If you take the standard and all the documentation that underpins it, in physical terms, you would be looking at something about five inches high, in old money.
09:30
The responsibility for applying that standard sits with Scottish Forestry, alongside the ability to approve all planting and harvesting of trees and, through the forestry standard, to determine how forests are managed in the period in between. That gives the Government department in question huge powers, influence and control.
Our concern is about what would naturally happen over time if we take a small department with broad sustainability responsibility and place it into a superagency on the environment, where the staff would be 8 per cent of the total staff, based on current numbers. We do not believe that that would be protected, and we think that the balance of sustainability outcomes would be materially affected.
Obviously, that would take time to play out if it went ahead but, from speaking to member businesses that I represent, I am certain that they would see that as having a huge impact on their confidence to invest in woodland creation and in their businesses for management and for the use of Scottish timber. That confidence would take many years to recover, even under the best-case scenario.
I share those concerns, but I have a slightly different perspective. Scottish Forestry has a distinctive pragmatism. From the perspective of community woodlands looking to agencies, Scottish Forestry is very supportive, which is much appreciated. I would not be content to see that diluted or lost if it was moved into a superagency.
I am in a slightly different position, because I am a civil servant, so I am limited in commenting on ministers’ policies. Last week, at the Climate Action Committee, the Cabinet Secretary for Climate Action and Rural Affairs set out some of the tests for and considerations around whether Scottish Forestry would go into the new environment body. The cabinet secretary is still working through the factors, such as whether it will deliver better outcomes, what it will mean for the operational delivery of the organisation and the service to the citizen, and whether it will achieve the objectives that are set out more broadly for the new environment body. When pressed, there was also consideration about a fourth test, on retention of skills and expertise.
Ultimately, there is opportunity in change and risk in change. If changes are made to Scottish Forestry, careful management would be required not to lose the momentum that is being built. I know that ministers are carefully balancing those issues.
I want to follow up on Mr Goodall’s comments about loss of confidence in the industry. Does that mean that we are already seeing delay in industry investment decisions? Public sector reform is likely to be a lengthy process and we have no certainty on the timescale. How long would a delay in any certainty on this area have to be before it led to a crisis of investment in the industry?
That is an interesting question. Obviously, there is an element of speculation. However, when the announcement was made, I spent a lot of time talking with businesses of different scales in the sector, and every one of them reacted with horror—that would be the best description. I do not think that I am overplaying their response by using that term.
To refer to what I said earlier, I would argue that forestry is more highly regulated, in every aspect of its operation, than any other sector that I can think of. Government policies, incentives, regulations and standards, as well as the funding that is made available, all have a direct and early impact on the sector.
I will give some examples of what the businesses that we are talking about scale up to. Large sawmills look at investment of between £70 million and £80 million when they upgrade or create a new sawmill. For a wood panel mill, which we have a few of, it would be between £130 million and £140 million—and they are looking at a return over 25 to 30 years. Smaller businesses would maybe look at shorter periods, but not by much.
Those businesses simply cannot see moving from a known organisation, which understands and supports economic outcomes, jobs and local community, to one that is absolutely and overwhelmingly dominated by organisations whose purpose is environmental regulation and promotion of biodiversity alone, as a positive thing. That is their whole view. It would, therefore, have early impact. The point is that, even under a best scenario, in which everything was done to protect the purposes and operations of Scottish Forestry in a new organisation, it would take years for it to be proven that that was the case. Investment would be hit immediately, and that would become cumulative.
Without opening up another strand of discussion, over the next 20 to 30 years, Scotland will have more timber than it currently has. There is a huge opportunity. However, this change would destroy people’s confidence to invest and to take advantage of that, and probably even their confidence to maintain current levels of activity.
I am in no doubt that we would see significant reduction in capacity, activity and jobs over the next five to 10 years, preceded by a reduction in investment almost immediately.
Simon, do you want to come in on that?
Yes, please. I will expand on what Stuart Goodall said about investor confidence.
We have done a lot of joint working on budgets in the past couple of years—such as on the forestry grant scheme budget—which we hope has made clear our common vision for sustained, long-term, uplifted funding for forestry and woodland.
Fundamentally, Woodland Trust Scotland is an environmental charity with a focus on woods and trees. We have so much common cause with the commercial forestry sector. None of these issues are binary in relation to the UK forestry standard. Forestry is a spectrum, with different objectives, perhaps, in different places. In many of our sites, for example, the objective is to restore ancient woodland and to restore woodland for people and for nature. Then we have a spectrum that goes all the way through to timber production. It really is a spectrum: it is not an either/or, nor is it a case of us and them.
On Stuart Goodall’s comments about investor confidence, I make the point that we share so many of the same parts of the supply chain, from nursery-grown trees and tree seed collection to contractors who plant trees, timber transport and machinery. We share all of that on our sites, and it is part of responsible native woodland management as well as commercial woodland. When Stuart talks about confidence, that is just as important whether we are in the native woodland or the conservation sector.
What is your one-line message to the Government, Stuart? Is it that it should simply leave Scottish Forestry alone, or is it that, if it is going to do it, it needs move at pace, as quickly as possible, in order to restore that confidence?
If we had a choice, our preference would be for the status quo. If there were a determination, as part of public sector reform, to reduce the number of public bodies, our advice would be to keep Scottish Forestry intact and seek to move it—to lift and shift it into Scottish Government, for example. We see that as the kind of activity that would provide reassurance to the sector that there will be the minimum amount of disruption. I do not believe that proceeding at pace would make a significant difference.
I am interested in your analysis of previous public sector reforms, particularly in Wales, where I think that Forestry Commission Wales was brought into Natural Resources Wales. Paul Lowe, what are your thoughts on the benefits, disbenefits and challenges that that brought?
A number of forestry challenges arose with the creation of Natural Resources Wales. The organisation was created in 2012 or 2013, and the challenges that it faced were compounded by austerity at the time and the need to reduce head count a few months after its creation. Therefore, a number of reportable issues took place.
The fact is that Wales undertakes considerably less woodland creation than Scotland does. In the year running up to the agency’s creation, people were doing 1,000 hectares a year; in the following two years, the figure dropped to 100 hectares a year, and it took about eight years to get back to the level that had been reached before the organisation was created. There were reports and feedback that the organisation had lost a lot of professional forestry skills. People left before the organisation was created, or shortly afterwards, and that obviously had an impact on resource and capacity.
Regardless of whether Scottish Forestry joins it, the model being proposed in Scotland is not identical to that of Natural Resources Wales. There are some additions in the Scotland model, but there are some parts that were included in NRW that have not been included in the proposed environment model. Certainly ministers are very conscious of the experience of Natural Resources Wales and the political views that have been expressed about it at various stages over its lifespan, including in elections to the Senedd and in party manifestos. The Scottish Government has been talking to the Welsh Government about all of that and, if it goes down that route, its intention is to be informed by the lessons learned from the Natural Resources Wales experience and to develop a change process that would factor in those considerations and mitigate those risks as much as possible.
What concerns do you have at the moment? Are you concerned about, say, a reduction in head count?
There has been no indication of that at the moment. In the conversations that I have heard, and in the various committee meetings at which I have heard ministers speak, the focus has been on creating a new combined organisation that will provide a synergy: bringing together different areas of work and expertise to address the significant environment and climate challenges that we face and using those skills and that expertise in a more cohesive and integrated way to improve decision making, whether it be on regulatory activity, permitting, grant giving or various other activities.
My understanding is that all of this is coming from the direction of how a new model might improve the delivery of services rather than from any budget considerations. That said, the First Minister has spoken of the financial challenges that the Scottish Government faces. It needs to be said that any solution has to be fiscally sustainable, but I have heard no suggestion that cuts will be made in the organisation. There is, more broadly, a recognition from ministers that, with the breadth of public service reform, there will be opportunities to rationalise back-office functions and corporate services activities that, over time, might allow savings to be realised.
Would other witnesses like to comment?
It is always helpful to look furth of Scotland to see what other people are doing, how that is going and what the actual outcomes look like versus the intended outcomes. The kindest description that I have heard of Natural Resources Wales is that it has been disappointing, and I have heard a lot of other comments that are not fit to be uttered in the Official Report.
A Senedd committee report a couple of years ago on the performance of Natural Resources Wales described it as having
“been in a constant state of flux since its creation”
in various different ways, and noted that
“Between its creation and 2020, NRW’s budget had been reduced by over a third.”
I think that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Paul Lowe mentioned the performance on woodland creation, which is a core function of the forestry agency—or the forestry arm of Government in whatever configuration it might be—and I would just repeat that, in the first year of NRW, woodland creation fell by about 90 per cent, from about 1,000 hectares in a year to about 100 hectares.
That is deeply concerning. I am sure that we do not need to remind anyone in this room or in this Parliament that Scotland is in a nature crisis and a climate crisis. Woodland creation and expansion have been identified as a solution to both, as well as a way of supporting the rural economy, community wealth building and many other agendas.
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The picture is very troubling when we look at Wales. Taking the focus away from delivery, which we agree should be the singular focus of Government over the next five, 10, 15 or 20 years, would be a bad idea. We need only look to Wales to see how things can go wrong.
I had the misfortune—that is probably the best way of phrasing it—to be involved in working with the Welsh Government at the time when NRW was being debated and then developed. We raised significant concerns at that time. We have since seen the impacts of that merger.
Similarly, the organisations that were involved in the merger were different and had different scopes and remits. Warnings were given that, because of short-term distractions and longer-term priorities, forestry would effectively be lost within the larger organisation. We were told that all those concerns were understood and noted, and that they would not happen. However, on the delivery side, since NRW was created, woodland creation has delivered only 18 per cent of the Government's target each year. In Scotland, we are at 73 per cent.
In Wales, the public forest estate was seen as a cash cow to balance annual budgets, so huge areas of the public forest estate were harvested and then simply left unmanaged for biodiversity, productivity or public access. As a result, there is now a huge backlog problem. Much of that stems from the fact that, when the new organisation was created, it was overwhelmingly focused on environmental regulation rather than forestry. That was compounded by forestry staff, who were professional foresters, wanting to be part of a forestry organisation. When it stopped being such an organisation, they left. They have transferable skills. I cannot imagine why anything would be any different in Scotland, given those same fundamental issues.
That brings me back to confidence. In Wales, confidence in the sector was hit massively. Investment fell, sawmills closed and businesses in Wales still talk about the merger as having been a disaster.
Andy Rockall, have you any reflections on that?
To put it bluntly, I am struggling to see a good reason for the merger from the perspective of communities—it just does not make sense. There would be a loss of connection with local woodland officers, as well as loss of the expertise and history that have been built up between communities, those offices and their offices.
From a community perspective, there is also concern about funding. Scottish Forestry currently provides a community fund, and there is concern about its future. It is a matter of record that our largest source of income is Scottish Forestry, and that income is deeply appreciated. For our organisation, that raises questions about how we will support our member groups if that funding stream moves into a big organisation.
A range of questions exists at the national and strategic levels, and across the private and third sectors.
My final question is about the other aspect of public service reform, which is the management of assets that are in public ownership and their consolidation.
Andy, you represent community woodland associations. The committee has seen how FLS land is being transferred successfully to a number of communities. Do you see opportunities or threats arising from consolidation of the management of land that is in public ownership, or can communities still have a role to play in that?
Through the consolidation of the agencies?
Yes.
I cannot see how it would maintain the same rate of transfer of ownership and management to communities. For the same reasons, and given the concerns about meeting tree-planting targets amid the distraction of consolidation, I am not sure how that rate of transfer of public assets into community management could be maintained.
In the consolidation I do not see an opportunity to increase transfers. From a community perspective, the process for taking over public assets is long winded. There are good reasons for that, from the perspectives of both the public sector and the third sector.
The short answer is no, I do not see a benefit from consolidation of the agencies in that regard. Being able to deal with Forestry and Land Scotland as it is currently, which is not part of this conversation, is beneficial, and having a direct link through Scottish Forestry, which supports it, is good at the moment.
I do not disagree with that. There is no clear benefit. My understanding is that Forestry and Land Scotland is not part of the proposed merger.
There is still work to be done to define what that commitment means and what it encompasses. It could be incredibly broad ranging. It is hard to comment at the moment, given the amount of detail that is available. Many organisations, including Forestry and Land Scotland, Crown Estate Scotland, national health service boards and local authorities, own land assets, so it all requires definition.
Forestry and woodland are far more significant in Scotland than in Wales. The merger in Wales has been a disaster. Given the inevitable disruption that public sector reform will cause, what is your one ask of Government to mitigate any loss in confidence or undermining of woodland creation and forestry jobs between now and whatever the end point of public sector reform might be?
I will kick off. We have only one ask: do not merge Scottish Forestry with an environmental superagency. As I said, anything other than retaining the status quo or adopting some lift-and-shift mechanism will have massive impacts on business confidence. I cannot see anything that would mitigate those.
I have been asked that question by civil servants. The people who are involved would have to believe that, somehow, things were not going to get worse. Fundamentally, nobody believes that. Proving the alternative would take years, so I cannot see an alternative.
The Government should reflect carefully on what questions it is trying to answer with the proposals and the inclusion of Scottish Forestry. The cabinet secretary took a very transparent approach when she gave evidence to the Climate Action Committee last week, when she explained that she had set herself three tests:
“My first question is: will it improve operations for the bodies and deliver better outcomes? My second question is: will it reduce duplication of effort—backroom functions in particular—and save money … My third question … is: will it make it easier and simpler for clients”.—[Official Report, Climate Action Committee, 17 September 2026; c 8-9.]
Having spoken to my colleagues here, in Woodland Trust Scotland and around Scotland, I do not think that any of those questions can currently be answered with a clear yes. My ask of the Government is that it reflects on what it is trying to achieve. Ultimately, our priority is to see more woodland of all types in Scotland for the benefit of people, nature, climate and the economy. Prior to the most recent election campaign, we set out our priorities for the new Scottish Government in a document called, “Mair Trees Please”. However, nothing that I have read in the Government’s proposals to date suggests that they will improve the situation, so we cannot support them.
We have the opportunity to meet the cabinet secretary in the near future, for which we are very grateful. We look forward to discussing the matter in more detail.
When it comes to planting targets, there is often a strong focus on the targets themselves and less discussion about the economic impact and outcomes of timber production and the important role that it plays in relation to rural jobs, local processing, future house building and so on. I do not want to focus too much on the targets, which we are not achieving, but what is the single greatest barrier to increasing planting rates in Scotland?
It is clear that it is not the fact that we have a dedicated forestry agency. There are a number of reasons why the figures for woodland creation have been disappointing and have fallen short of the targets. In 2023-24, we came very close to meeting our targets—the closest that we have ever been—but there was a 41 per cent budget cut in the following year, so the numbers nosedived. There is a clear and obvious link between investment and delivery.
I will be interested to hear whether others agree with me, but I reiterate that there are a number of reasons for those figures. There have been slippages and administrative reasons for schemes not materialising from year to year. There are also workforce pressures. The average person in the Scottish forestry sector is a male in his 50s. There is massive grazing pressure, primarily from deer. There are also questions about whether the technicalities of the forestry grant scheme are aimed at delivering the schemes that we want. That is a detailed problem, but the other problems are of a higher order of magnitude.
What is the one change that would allow us to deliver our targets? If we are to ever hit those, there will need to be a significant amount of large-scale woodland creation. By any stretch of the imagination, we do not have the capacity to achieve 18,000 hectares of planting a year through projects that create, on average, between 10,000 and 20,000 hectares of woodland. I do not mean to give any indication that those projects are not important—they are hugely important—but we have been successful in reaching targets when we have had large-scale schemes.
We can create woodland forestry in Scotland at scale, and we can do it really well. We know how to identify sites, and we have a robust regulatory mechanism. As I said, we have the UK forestry standard. We have put a lot of work into developing stakeholder engagement guidance, so that people who develop large-scale projects, whether it be for commercial or native purposes, understand the process that is in place for undertaking good stakeholder engagement.
We provide training for people. As I have said to the committee in its previous guises, people get into forestry because they do not want to be in front of other people; they want to be out in the countryside. However, we ask them to deal with angry people, so we give them the skills to be able to deal with objectors. We are trying really hard to do the work responsibly, and I think that we can do it well.
To pick up on Simon Ritchie’s points about capacity and expertise in Scottish forestry, I think that a bit of an adjustment process is needed. In the past, woodland officers in Scottish Forestry would take a facilitatory role in managing the applicant and stakeholders. However, given that the heat around woodland creation has increased, woodland officers have struggled to maintain that role. Our advice is that we need a process that is more akin to the planning process, which is more structured. There is good-quality engagement, but there is a defined period and also a process for it, which brings greater certainty for all parties—the applicant, the regulator and anybody who has concerns.
My plea is that we deliver large-scale woodland creation and the improvements in terms of predictability and process that will allow us to make that happen.
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I come back to the point about sector confidence, which is absolutely key. The business model for forestry is different from those in many other business sectors. Landowners or investors have to purchase land with the intention of planting trees, and that process can take a few years to get under way. The realisation of profits in a productive scheme will come 30 or 40 years down the line. Although investment does not present as high a risk as it does in some sectors, the return on investment comes over a much longer time period.
There is a level of interest in increasing woodland creation in the private sector, but the budget reduction in 2024-25 was forced by a very difficult set of financial circumstances. The practical implications were that the capital budget for grants in that year was reduced by 58 per cent. When people plan to develop schemes over many years, that sends signals that impact on confidence. Certainty of outcome, which is ideally linked to multiyear funding that investors can realise and interact with, is really important, and not only in the woodland creation sector. The timber processing sector is looking for reliability of supply, so woodland creation is an important part of that equation.
If factors disrupt or interfere with the progress of that, that will have an impact. Stuart Goodall mentioned the scale of some of the investments. The top two or three companies in Scotland are looking at investing £400 million-plus in this country over the next few years. They are watching very carefully when they should deploy assets, but a range of other factors exists.
The other aspect that I will draw out is funding levels. The rate of grants per hectare in Scotland is a third of that in the rest of the UK. The return on investment that Scottish taxpayers get in woodland creation, when we are delivering 70 to 80 per cent of activity for the amount invested, is really high, but the reality is that inflation has continued to move.
The grant scheme is quite complex due to its links with agricultural systems, but we have made some changes. In order to offset some of the issues, we have introduced additional grant payments, including those under a repair and planting scheme, and we have prioritised funding in certain parts of the country, particularly for native forestry, alongside various other initiatives. We are currently discussing with ministers what further initiatives and developments we could introduce.
Those are two critical factors, but there is a range of others.
I want to pick up on Stuart Goodall’s comments about community engagement and benefit, which I was quite interested in. My question is for everyone else. Do you agree with him, and how can we ensure that communities see tangible benefits as a result of the investment in forestry and woodland? The guidance was refreshed in 2025, so I am interested in people’s views on that.
My perspective is that maximising community benefits from the national forest estate, through tree planting and woodland creation, is vital. The way to achieve that is by treating communities not as consultees but as partners and engaging with them at early doors, before the scheme is designed. You have to ask them, “Where would you like the trees? How do we work together to deliver our targets as planters and benefits for communities?” They are more than consultees.
Communities should have agency over their places, which would fit with the Government’s community wealth building agenda. Engaging with communities earlier and giving them real authority in scheme design would go a long way to mitigating some of the conflicts that have happened. Nobody supports conflict in tree planting, and those conflicts would go away if we worked with communities instead of coming and doing unto them, which is an issue in some areas.
Those two elements—community engagement and community benefit—are slightly different. As you said, we updated our guidance on community engagement quite recently. Confor, with some support from us, also developed training and guidance for the sector on how agents and landowners engage with the community as part of the development process.
When the schemes come to us, we look at the engagement that has been undertaken in the communities. When we approve schemes, we then put them out to public consultation as well. At both stages, we look at the comments that have been made and at what the developer has done to address those points and take them into account.
There is further work going on. For example, the Institute of Chartered Foresters is looking at further skills training for the sector in community engagement. We are also currently considering some technical and process changes. When we receive a fully completed application, we put it out to public consultation. We are improving our technology to make that more visible and to do it at an earlier stage and include much more of the information digitally online. The technology is currently a bit of a barrier—we publish the scheme but not the detail, and people have to contact us to request information about it. However, work is quite advanced on making changes that will allow that to happen.
Providing community benefit is always a bit more challenging—the classic example is wind farms, from which an income stream is derived—and practice is variable. However, we have started to emphasise where there are community benefit initiatives in our scoring and prioritisation for the forestry grant scheme, so that factors into our consideration. Benefits can include access—I am aware of plenty of examples, such paths and routes through forests. We know about the significant benefits of forests for health, both physical and mental, and there are various financial estimates around that. Forests provide nearly £30 million in mental health benefits—a recent report found that they provide £34.7 million in prescribing mental health benefits—and I think that the figure is about £170 million for the UK in terms of general exercise and activity benefits from forests. That is a practical example of people getting out and accessing forests.
In other cases, community benefit is about leasing facilities or areas of land back to the community. Some of the developers undertake such initiatives—they provide a building or location that the community can use for community activities in the forest. There are a range of examples. Community benefit is a challenging financial issue for developers and investors, but we are seeing evidence that it is being addressed in different ways in different parts of the country. More could probably still be done, but there is certainly evidence that it is happening.
To pick up on that point, there is a direct link between community engagement and community benefit. As we have developed engagement guidelines and training—with the financial support of Scottish Forestry, as Paul Lowe said—that has led to the early discussions that Andy Rockall talked about. That is helping to allay fears, but it is also enabling opportunities to be identified. Those might be as simple as public access opportunities, but there have also been examples of local communities being able to take on and manage an area of land. We have also been talking to people about how to potentially link up new forests with wind farms to create cycle routes.
In all those instances, all that I can see is real interest from the woodland owners in being able to do that. Nobody is coming out of the process saying, “I don’t want to do it,” or, “How do I do the minimum?” There are limitations, but there is real interest, and we are really keen to develop that.
There is another important aspect with regard to good community engagement. A lot of misinformation comes out when there is a new woodland creation scheme, some of which relates to employment. I constantly hear, “Nobody works in forestry round here,” which must mean that nobody in Scotland works in forestry, because that is what I am told everywhere.
We have a report coming out in which Scotland’s Rural College has looked at the Eskdalemuir area. If I remember correctly, 82 per cent of the people working in and around the forest are based in the Borders or in Dumfries and Galloway, and most of them live very locally. I can give numerous examples of woodland creation schemes where people have said, “Nobody works in forestry round here,” but their neighbours work in forestry.
Forestry people tend not to speak up—they prefer to just get on with their life and do their own thing; so, when other people are angry, they just keep their head down. That is unfortunate, not just because it is not right for them; it goes back to the
point about community engagement and community benefit. If we are not encouraging people, and if they do not feel confident enough, to have those conversations, we do not realise the opportunities. In our experience, there is a real danger that those conversations are going to be damaged by a lot of the misinformation and media campaigns, which create division and conflict rather than conversations in those situations.
I have a specific question for Mr Lowe. Is there not a significant mismatch between the policy framework that you have just outlined and the reality on the ground? We are seeing Forestry and Land Scotland restrict leisure access, in effect, because it does not have the funding to maintain tracks and path networks, and it is removing bridges in much of its forestry across Scotland.
Obviously, that is primarily a question for Forestry and Land Scotland, but all the organisations are having to manage within the budgets that they have, and sometimes that involves making choices.
More broadly, although Forestry and Land Scotland is a significant forest holder, the amount of land and forested land in Scotland that is held by the private sector is over 1 million hectares against about 468,000 hectares held by Forestry and Land Scotland. The broader picture of access is one of continuing improvement and of further community benefits being delivered and access being opened up more broadly.
We represent 140 community groups that own and manage woodlands across Scotland that, in aggregate, cover about 50,000 hectares, which is a tiny fraction of the land. However, the important aspect is that communities have agency—they determine what they want to deliver for themselves with the woodland and the land that they own and manage. For me, that is a prime consideration.
We talk—I can talk—about access or health benefits, but, in my view, it is for the community to decide on their place. That should be part of the early engagement. If the community says, “We want footpaths,” that is fine—there can be footpaths. If the community would like a health benefit or another social benefit of some sort, that should be part of the consideration. Nothing should be ruled out because of preconceived ideas about what forestry can deliver for communities.
I agree with much of what the other witnesses have said. Fundamentally, people should benefit from the land around them and from whatever land use is under way, whether that is forestry, farming, renewables or any other form of infrastructure. I will not go too deeply into some of the other things, because that is beyond my remit.
Community engagement is incredibly important. I am from the south of Scotland, which is widely accepted to be the best part—I am joking, of course. The region is experiencing a lot of pressures on land use from various sectors. The land is expected to do a lot, and it is important that communities are not overlooked in that.
I applaud the efforts of Confor and the commercial sector in publishing the good practice guidance not that long ago. It is about giving communities and people agency over the land around them and a genuine sense of power over decisions that are made on design, accommodating their requests at an early stage, maintaining access and—above all else—ensuring communication on planting, harvesting operations, closures and things like that, which can upset people if they are not communicated effectively.
The Woodland Trust Scotland manages 60 sites around Scotland, which cover nearly 14,000 hectares. They are all managed for people and for nature, and you will have a first-class time if you ever visit.
I have a question primarily for Stuart Goodall, but I am interested in hearing input from all the witnesses. The vast majority of timber that we are using in Scotland at the moment is imported—the proportion is somewhere between two thirds and about 80 per cent. What could we be doing to better facilitate the use of Scottish timber in the broader economy, and what could that do to incentivise greater forestry planting?
10:15
Thanks very much for asking that question. We have a fantastic opportunity, and not just because we know that we will have more timber available over the next 30 years or so. Scotland builds 92 per cent of its new housing using timber frames, whereas the figure in England has gone up from about 9 per cent to 13 per cent. We pat ourselves on the back about that, but almost all of that is imported timber and it does not need to be. I encourage all committee members to visit Alexanders Timber Design, in Troon, which has invested £90 million in a robotics factory that takes Scottish timber and builds timber frame kits that are then used to build local houses. That company is at capacity, and we could do a lot more of that sort of work.
We have a number of challenges around the perception of Scottish timber and the fact that we are trying to break into established supply chains, which can be difficult. The perception is that Scottish timber is not as good quality as imported timber, but, when you have to meet the same grading standards, you can demonstrate that that is not the case. We have businesses that are used to importing timber or specifying a higher grade of timber, but that higher grade is not actually required. If we have proper, appropriate specification, Scottish timber could be utilised in those circumstances as well.
We can also use more Scottish timber in different ways. As well as sawn timber, we use panel board, and we could use engineered timber. That goes from big spans, such as you see in the debating chamber, to small businesses. We have innovative companies such as Makar, which is building affordable homes in the Highlands. A company called Highland Heritage Woodworks, near Aberdeen, is using Scottish timber to produce plywood. We had never previously had UK plywood.
There is a lot of innovation, knowledge, experience and opportunity. The key things for me are creating that climate of confidence for these businesses to invest and looking at where the Government can step in. For example, in publicly funded and affordable housing, you could say to people that they should specify appropriately and give preference or at least opportunity to local suppliers. At the moment, we are locking out Scottish businesses from building Scottish homes. It is not a big task. We are not asking to change the world or for special pleading. All we are asking for is the opportunity to put Scottish timber in front of a customer on a level playing field. We believe that we are going to expand the industry.
I will pick up on the example of ATD, which I visited a few months ago. It is an incredible facility. What it does differently is that it constructs on site the full timber frame for the house but it also includes the boarding and insulation to make it watertight and insulated. It does that on site rather than on the construction site. At the moment, about 2,500 of these timber frames are produced every year for all sizes of house, and there is no need to change the production line. The robotic machinery and the humans there work together to produce the frames. It is estimated that, at that site alone, if ATD implemented additional shifts, it could meet up to 13 per cent of the commitment in the PFG to build 100,000 units of new social housing.
There are real opportunities around that technology. It is also considerably cheaper, because the timber frame can be constructed in a single day, the windows are put in the next day and the house is fully constructed within three to four months, which is much more rapid than traditional house building approaches. ATD is working with some of the biggest house builders in Scotland, and there are also opportunities in England, where the percentage of new houses built with timber frames is around about 15 per cent. Now that the UK Government has published its timber use strategy, there are real opportunities to get Scottish timber accepted into the wider UK market.
The importation rate is 80 per cent in the UK, whereas analysis shows that it is lower in Scotland. Some analysis suggests that Scotland is a slight net exporter, but it depends on what you look at. There is also an element of what timber is being produced for what reason. There can be movement in the country or importation, depending on the need.
I will expand on that. I agree with everything that Stuart Goodall and Paul Lowe have said.
Beyond the obvious economic and national security benefits of having a strong timber supply to relieve housing pressure and so on, there are much wider benefits for biosecurity and for the avoidance of imported pests and diseases in the future. We need only look around the Scottish landscape—I am sure that you will all, perhaps without realising it, have seen ash dieback or some of the pathogens that affect our conifers, because they are rampant throughout the countryside. By ensuring that our timber supply comes as much as possible from domestic sources, we can avoid reliance on imported timber and, therefore, importing new pests and diseases and pathogens. We at the Woodland Trust promote a standard called UK and Ireland sourced and grown—UKISG—and that is for saplings as much as for timber. It is intended for the biosecurity outcome.
Jamie, have you any follow-up questions?
That was interesting to hear, and I am particularly interested in following up on what was said about exporting and importing and what we can do to promote Scottish timber in the rest of the UK. There is a recognition that a lot of the demand for house building might be south of the border, so it would be of particular interest to explore how, as policy makers, we can better support export of Scottish timber to the rest of the UK.
One of the main initiatives is that our industry has launched the trust UK C16 timber campaign, which makes the point that C16 is good enough and does the job.
Can you explain what C16 is?
I apologise. There are various grading standards. If you are going to build a house with a material, you want to make sure that the house will not fall down because of it. Timber is graded, and C16 is the basic grade for about 90 per cent of the timber that goes into building a house. The roof trusses are sometimes C24, which is a higher grade, although, if you put in more roof trusses, C16 can still be used.
We have developed a culture whereby architects—the people who are specifying materials—are just clicking on a button in the software and saying that C24 timber is required, which means that the whole project proceeds on the basis that C24 timber has to be used. In Scotland, we can produce significant volumes of C16, but at the moment we are struggling to produce large quantities of C24, and it will take us time to crack that. The purpose of the campaign is to say to the specifiers—architects—that they should trust, and therefore specify, C16 as appropriate for projects.
The English market is a big part of where the volume of sawn timber that is produced goes, so if there was anything that we could do to promote the campaign and, therefore, awareness and understanding, that would be good. It would be like supporting Scotch lamb or beef. It would involve talking to a market and saying that people can make a simple change, which does not mean that they are compromising anything. In fact, Scottish timber has to be cheaper in order to compete, so people would be saving money.
Just as an aside, with regard to net zero and carbon, if you grow a tree and then put it into a product, the carbon in that product counts towards your net zero calculation. If you export from Sweden to the UK, you cannot count the carbon in that product, and neither can Sweden, so it is lost. If we used more home-grown timber in Scotland and England, that would help us to achieve our net zero targets, as well as supporting local jobs and our rural economies.
I want to link the discussion back to public service reform and to highlight that, whether we are talking about security of timber production or nature restoration for people and nature, all the arguments come back to the fact that a focus on delivery is paramount. If we end up being distracted by a constant state of flux of the kind that occurred at Natural Resources Wales, which led to a massive collapse in woodland creation, that will be a problem in the long term.
I would like to move us on to the subject of conservation and biodiversity objectives. We have the biodiversity delivery plan, and the Government is to set nature targets, probably next year. I am interested in your analysis of where we are with the conservation of ancient woodlands, Scotland’s rainforest and native woodlands. What are the main challenges in that regard? How do we break those down?
A lot of progress has been made, but there is still lots more to do. That is the snapshot when it comes to the restoration, protection and expansion of native and ancient woodlands.
We are very glad that in the programme for government the Scottish Government has retained its ambitious commitment to native woodland. It is aiming to have 18,000 hectares of new woodland of all types by, I believe, 2029. We went into the Scottish Parliament election with a policy document entitled, “Mair Trees Please”, which highlighted our campaign for an expansion of native woodland. We also asked the Government to continue its support for and investment in Scotland’s rainforest—the temperate rainforests along our west coast, of which only 30,000 hectares remain. We asked the Government to tackle the threat to Scotland’s native woods and trees that is presented by invasive non-native species, overgrazing by deer, pests and diseases, and inappropriate development.
We also said that we would like the concept of tree equity to become embedded, so that people have equitable access to trees no matter where they live. In some of our poorest urban communities, people do not enjoy the benefits of trees that others enjoy. We said that we wanted the Government to support trees in the Scottish economy. By that, we meant that we wanted farmers and crofters to be supported to embed more trees in their landholdings. We also asked for support to be delivered for a sustainable commercial forestry sector.
Your question is a very broad one, convener. On all those issues, lots of progress has been made, but there are some areas where progress has been a bit more disappointing. The figures on woodland creation have been lower than we would have liked. We are glad that the proportion of native woodland is higher, but, ultimately, a higher proportion of a smaller number is not necessarily that great.
We are really pleased with the cross-party support that exists for native woodland creation and expansion and for Scotland’s rainforest on the west coast, but there is certainly a lot more to do. I am happy to expand on any of the points that I have mentioned.
Paul, you were nodding along to quite a lot of that. What is your analysis of where we are at?
My view is similar to Simon Ritchie’s: there is work in progress. There is good evidence of work in Forestry and Land Scotland to address the issues on its estate. We have put additional funding into initiatives to support the Atlantic rainforest, and we are working with the Alliance for Scotland’s Rainforest and the organisations that fall under that. Interventions are being undertaken on issues such as rhododendron invasion and herbivore grazing, and work is being done to remove non-native species from the areas in question. In recent years, thousands of hectares of land in Scotland—native rainforest land—has been improved by such activities. There is still quite a way to go, but significant progress has been made.
When you talk about herbivore grazing, you are talking broadly about the grazing of sheep and deer. Do you think that Government policy is joined up enough on the agricultural side—the committee has been looking at the rural support plan—and the deer management side? You may or may not wish to comment on that.
10:30
Collaboration and co-ordination happen among herbivore grazing groups when they consider those issues, not just across agriculture but more broadly. A range of responses is required to manage the issue. One is the natural management of herbivore deer down to a level where they do not threaten trees, which is quite low—usually around one to two per hectare. In most parts of Scotland, the level is considerably higher than that, which brings in issues of deer control, other herbivores getting access and protective mechanisms.
There is a range of different lines in the forestry grant scheme. Applicants can claim for deer larders and various other things that support activity to control numbers, and for high fencing. There are also protective mechanisms relating to young trees, in particular to reduce the risk of their being damaged by herbivores. In our forestry grant scheme, there is a range of different mechanisms, and there is certainly a range of co-ordination across stakeholders and Government on the issue.
I am interested in cases when there is a licence application for a significant area of woodland creation but there is tension with surrounding farms, particularly around hefted livestock in upland areas, and the displacement effect that that might have. We talked earlier about the need for negotiation in licensing, and about that being a key role. I am interested in your thoughts on that—how do we manage that transition in our upland landscapes?
Are you talking about land use change, convener?
Yes.
There are misconceptions around the issue of trees and farms being in significant competition. The evidence does not actually support that. If we look at the forestry grant scheme applications that have been made from 2015 until last year, we can see that the proportion that include prime agricultural land—the land classification for agriculture 1, 2 and 3.1—is around 581 hectares out of 99,000 hectares of woodland creation activity that was approved on agricultural land, which is around 0.13 per cent.
Some of that will be because a farmer has taken the decision to sell their farm business to achieve the best price that they can for themselves and their family and, in some cases, there will be small developments on that land. The bigger picture here is that there is not a significant competition between forestry and farming. There are broader issues about the impacts of modern farming practices and whether change is needed.
The other point that needs to be remembered is our ethos that farmers should integrate tree planting as part of a diversified farming enterprise. For example, we in the Scottish Government co-fund the integrating trees network, which is a peer-led group of farmers and crofters who have been through the process of planting trees on their farms—in small woodlands, in riparian planting across watercourses or in agroforestry, where they are planting fruit trees, nut trees or various other things. There is a range of those activities.
Around 50 per cent of our woodland creation schemes are small. On average, they are around 24 hectares, but the vast majority of them are sub-20 hectares. The vast majority of those applications come in from farmers and crofters. There are community woodlands and some other activity, but a high proportion of them involves farmers and crofters.
There is some misinterpretation about a sense that great tension exists, but the evidence at present does not support that.
I will begin with trees and farms. I applaud the integrated trees network, led by Scottish Forestry, for its work. In Woodland Trust Scotland, we are very interested in the integration of trees and farms, although not necessarily the land use change.
Agroforestry is the broad term for that sort of work. Whether it is restoring hedges, planting parkland trees, exclosures or the riparian work that Paul Lowe talked about, all that work is agroforestry. It provides benefits to productivity, helps livestock with shade and shelter, does water management, improves soil health and provides by-products such as timber, fruit and so on. It is a great idea.
Lots of farmers are doing it, but some of them need a bit of help and support to get over the line. A couple of years ago, we developed shelf-ready costed proposals that the Scottish Government could adopt. We published a paper on those, and we have endorsement from NFU Scotland and the Scottish Crofting Federation, but, for whatever reason, our proposals cannot happen. I am told that it is because of the payments system, so the Scottish Parliament, or this committee in particular, might want to look at that.
More broadly, on deer and grazing, there is so much partnership work going on. The Alliance for Scotland’s Rainforest and the Common Ground Forum on deer management are exemplars of partnership working on interests that might historically have been in competition with one another—traditional sporting estates in the Highlands and people who want to do nature restoration, for example. Clearly, deer jump fences, so that is a problem, but, when you have people coming together, you can achieve landscape-scale nature restoration and multiple objectives, and you take a lot of the heat out of the argument.
Community management of woodland is good for biodiversity. Community woodlands are delivering multiple objectives across a range of things, including biodiversity. Generally, they are not single-interest organisations, and they are clearly good at delivering biodiversity and conservation. We have a study, using sites in Wales and the south of Scotland, that shows that communities are delivering more biodiversity benefits on forest land than public forests are. That is really interesting, although maybe not surprising, given that Forestry and Land Scotland perhaps has a single forest management focus.
The CWA is a member of the Alliance for Scotland’s Rainforest, and we are waiting on the outcome of a funding bid that would enable us to have a member of staff to connect communities through the rainforest area. That fits with our agenda of connecting people to woodlands, so we are looking forward to the outcome of the bid in order to take the work forward. If the bid does not come good, we will take the work forward in another way.
The spread of self-seeding Sitka from plantations has not been mentioned. It is a potentially significant issue, because it is an invasive, non-native species that could spread on a level akin to rhododendron, and, in some people’s minds, it could become a bigger issue. It would be best to address that soon, if at all possible, so that it does not become a bigger issue than rhododendron.
Another thing that delivers something along the lines of agroforestry is the Woodland Croft partnership, which we are involved in. Again, it has multiple benefits for woodlands, where communities create crofts, which addresses all sorts of issues—small-scale local economies and housing in the local area, including social housing. It creates benefits for woodlands and people and, inherently, it addresses conservation.
Thank you. The committee visited a community woodland in Lochaline, which was informative.
Andy Rockall mentioned community management. Alongside the community aspect, the word “management” is key, because woodlands that are managed will deliver more for biodiversity, but they are also better protected from pests, disease, herbivores and so on. How we support people to manage the forests is really important. As somebody who loves timber, I have to say that there are opportunities to use timber in all types of woodland at all scales, supporting small-scale local use as businesses, which I am hugely supportive of.
The changes that we have made to our productive commercial forests over the past 30 to 40 years represent a process, but it is a huge process. When I joined the then Forestry Commission, much longer ago than I am prepared to admit in public, we basically said to people, “You’ve forgotten a bit there. You’ve got 100 hectares, and you’ve got to plant every single hectare with a tree that’s going to produce timber,” and, surprise, surprise, we have inherited forests of that design. Since the 1990s, we have fundamentally changed the design, which is now about having a greater variety of species, areas managed for biodiversity, open space and so on. However, the change is a process. A forest that was planted in 1990 is not yet being harvested, so we are still experiencing this period of change, but NatureScot is measuring significant change in the biodiversity in these productive forests.
My plea is always that we are not doing enough to monitor, understand and learn lessons from that process. We spend a lot of time asking, “Should we change it? Should we change the standards?”, but, having worked in policy, I am very aware that, when you introduce policy and make changes without having checked the evidence, you get unintended outcomes. Therefore, we are saying that we should absolutely learn and improve.
I want to pick up on Andy’s point about self-seeding Sitka. I sat in front of this committee about 19 months ago and said that I recognise that there is an issue and that we would love to talk to anybody about how we understand and address it, and the only organisation that has actually picked that up has been Woodland Trust Scotland, which recently asked whether it could help us to convene people to talk about it. Not one of my offers and approaches to discuss the issue has been picked up, and offers to MSPs have been ignored. We stand ready now—as we did then—to discuss the issue, and we would love to do that.
I will go back to some of the things that we talked about earlier. If we are to deliver on the conservation and economic objectives that we all want to achieve, we need the workforce to do that, but we all know that that is a big challenge. Has there been any progress on that? What more can we do to encourage people into the sector, and are the challenges more acute in specific parts of the country?
The workforce is an important issue for us, in terms of qualities and numbers, and it is increasingly important, because we have more opportunity to create jobs in the next 20 to 30 years. We have an ageing workforce, so we want to bring more young people in and have a more diverse workforce. We are all blokes on this panel of witnesses, as has been noticed, and most people in forestry tend to come from a particular background. We are doing a lot, as are a lot of the companies, to put in place recruitment opportunities and traineeships, so we are seeing a more diverse workforce coming through.
There are particular areas of challenge. For example, for harvesting trees, you need a timber harvesting machine that costs half a million pounds, and that is paired with another machine, which takes the timber to the roadside, which costs about £350,000 to £400,000. Therefore, you want people who are highly skilled, but, if you are a small business, parking up that machine while you train somebody—who could then be offered a couple of extra thousand pounds by a business down the road that has not experienced the business expense of training somebody—means it can be very difficult to kick off recruitment to some of these areas.
We set up a subsidiary business just outside Dumfries, called Forestry Training Service UK, and its purpose, heroically, is to examine those areas where we have problems and gaps in training and to fill them where there is market failure. The larger businesses across the sector have underwritten that, with kind one-off support from Scottish Forestry and others to set it up. We are also working with military service leavers who are looking to find another career. Forestry can be a very attractive career for people at all levels in the military, from officers to the ranks, so we are now recognised as a provider of appropriate career opportunities, and we are working with the forces and looking to increase that provision. Again, we welcome modest financial support from the public sector to do that.
We are working with science, technology, engineering and mathematics teachers, creating STEM ambassadors to go into schools. We have also been working with an organisation called Prosper to try to get timber and forestry into STEM clubs. Therefore, a lot is happening, but, ultimately, the college and university sectors are driven by applications, and if there is a low number of forestry applications, courses do not run and schools of forestry do not get supported.
We are in a transition phase in which it is really important for us to be able to say, “We’re doing more, and we hope to work with Government to do more, given the opportunity that we present.” We also need the education sector to understand that there are opportunities out there.
I will sign off by saying that forestry is a well-paid career. Professional foresters operating machines in rural areas earn far more than the average salary for others working in the same area, and average salaries for those working in sawmills are higher. It is a comparatively well-paid career, but we need to communicate that.
10:45
We all have a role to play in expanding and diversifying Scotland’s workforce, particularly in forestry and nature restoration. As Stuart Goodall has said, we are all blokes here, so you might take what we say with a pinch of salt, but we can all agree that many of the challenges that are being faced by our sector—by forestry, and by woodland creation and management—are, to a large extent, the same as many of the challenges being faced in rural areas in general.
There is a rural workforce problem in Scotland, and I would like this Parliament and the Scottish Government to stretch every sinew to do what it can to improve the situation. I do understand the limited powers that we have under devolution, but all of us can certainly be doing something in the meantime. We can all be promoting our work and engaging in opportunities, whether it be attending trade fairs or engaging with school leavers, military leavers and so on, to promote what we do. There is an interesting diversity to what we do, and it is a really rewarding career; one person could be operating heavy machinery, someone else could be working in policy in the Scottish Parliament and they would both be connected to the same sector. That is the message that we would like to put out there.
Andrew Baxter has the final question.
We have come full circle, having started off with public sector reform. Such reform should be about not just reorganisation and the merger of functions, but, equally, the effectiveness of public sector funding.
In that light, I have two questions, and I will leave it to you gentlemen to decide which, if any, you want to answer. First, we have talked a lot about the number of hectares planted, but how effectively are we measuring what those publicly supported woodlands will deliver over five, 10 or 15 years in terms of survival rates, timber production and biodiversity as well as carbon and community benefit? Secondly, should future forestry grants include clearer and publicly reported outcome measures instead of simply regarding the planting of a hectare as the end result?
That was a comprehensive range of questions. The system, as it exists, is not based purely on a tree being planted or not; the grant scheme is based on an ongoing and enduring commitment over many years, including commitments to replace trees if they die during a certain period. There is an element of a maintenance grant in woodland creation schemes for the enduring preservation of the forest.
There is lots of data about how much timber is produced in Scotland and what purpose it is used for—I think that we have good published evidence and statistics on its purpose and use. There is also good scientific research on the multiple benefits that trees deliver. We know that, each year, 130,000 tonnes of pollutants such as ammonium, nitrogen dioxide and particulates are taken up by Scotland’s forests, which obviously has clear health implications for humans and animals. We have good data on health benefits, both physical and mental, and we know that Scotland’s forests support 172 significant species, so we have data on biodiversity, too. Therefore, we do have a range of data on what Scotland’s forests deliver.
Moreover, In the UK, there is Forest Research, which is co-funded by Scottish Forestry and the Scottish Government and which produces a range of research on a variety of different forestry topics. Data exists on a lot of the issues that you have mentioned.
That was a really interesting point, and it brings me back to a central theme that we have been dealing with for a long time. As those of us in forestry know, we have multipurpose forestry—we do not have single-issue forestry or do forestry for one particular benefit. Every forest that we have delivers multiple benefits. We have spent such a long time in the sector that we can reel off all of the different positive things that come from it, but when you go out and talk to the public about it, you find that they have almost zero understanding or awareness of a lot of that, or their perspective is to zero in on a particular thing and ask, “What are you doing for biodiversity? What are you doing for local communities? What are you doing for carbon or timber production?”
I have struggled for many years to work out how we communicate what is a very complex issue. Everybody complains about how difficult the job is, but it is also very difficult to explain what we do. Taking a bit of land or an existing forest, with so many different species and opportunities, and working with and crafting it to deliver a wide variety of objectives is an art and a science; it is also very difficult to communicate, and I wish that we could find a way of doing that. An important part of it will be information metrics and having that sort of thing available in an area, because that will give you the evidence base upon which to craft a story. We spend a lot of time—and understandably so—on delivery and on how we do something or make things happen, and then we just move on to the next thing. We do not necessarily get that communication right.
I think that we are all in general agreement that the focus on what area is planted per year is only part of the picture. We want multiple delivery of multiple objectives.
I would challenge slightly the timescales in the question. Community woodlands are multigenerational projects, and as far as those communities are concerned, five years is neither here nor there when it comes to delivery. This was in the days before the general data protection regulation prevented such photos, but I have a slideshow that contains a picture taken 20 years ago of a community woodland group, with children and toddlers sitting around a fire in their woodland. Those people are now managing that community woodland. That should be the normal, and thinking in terms of five or 10 years is simply not, in my view, long enough.
Does anyone have any other final points?
On the first question, a phrase that you will probably hear a lot from anyone involved in forestry and woodland creation is “the right tree in the right place”—and that is a large part of it. Obviously, there needs to be clear public benefit in exchange for public money, and whether the outcome is the production of timber, the restoration of nature or carbon sinks, public access, green space or whatever, we should expect careful reporting. I would say in defence—and as Paul Lowe has set out—that the data is there when you drill down into the reporting on the woodland creation figures that are released every year.
As for how we ensure that trees get established and do not just die after a few years, I think that that is all about planning and guidance, which, I have to say, comes from the specialist knowledge, technical expertise and staff capacity that is currently held within Scottish Forestry. To bring us full circle, then, I will just say again that I am really worried about losing all of that.
I thank our witnesses for joining us this morning. You have been an excellent panel, and you have contributed to what has been a good introductory session for the committee. I am sure that we will return to these topics throughout this parliamentary session.
We will now pause for a changeover of witnesses and a brief comfort break, and we will resume with the next panel at five past 11.
10:54
Meeting suspended.
11:04
On resuming—
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