APPENDIX 2
Memorandum from the Woodland Trust
1. The Woodland Trust, the UK's leading
woodland conservation charity welcomes the inclusion of an Aggregates
Levy in the March 2000 Budget. It represents a positive indication
of the Government's commitment to its stated aim of shifting the
burden of taxation from "goods" to "bads".
Quarrying remains a significant threat to irreplaceable natural
resources such as ancient woodland, the nation's richest habitat
for wildlife, and the Woodland Trust currently has a number of
cases on its books which reflect this fact.
2. As DETR's own research has shown, the
extraction and transportation of aggregates brings significant
local environmental costs. These not only include impact upon
the local landscape and biodiversity but also noise, dust and
air pollution. We hope that in conjunction with revised Mineral
Planning Guidance, the tax will serve to alleviate the negative
impact upon key natural resources.
3. We warmly welcome the proposed hypothecation
of the tax and the establishment of a Sustainability Fund.
This fund should be underpinned by an imaginative approach which
seeks to promote the formation of partnerships which will bring
lasting environmental benefits to communities affected by quarrying.
It is important that the forthcoming consultation paper on the
Sustainability Fund is informed by such an outlook.
4. We believe that there are significant
opportunities for the Fund to foster woodland creation projects
which will bring a wide variety of visual, recreational and biodiversity
benefits to the affected local communities. Such projects will
also help to deliver on a number of the Government's sustainable
development indicators as set out in Quality Of Life Counts[1]
such as Quality of Surroundings (K6), Access to Local Green Space
(K7), Access to the Countryside (S8) and Expansion of the UK Woodland
Area (S10).
1 DETR: Quality of Life Counts; Indicators for a strategy
for sustainable development for the United Kingdom: a baseline
assessment. Back
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