Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
60-78)
MS SOPHIE
CHURCHILL, MR
SIMON EVANS,
MR ROBIN
PELLEW AND
COUNCILLOR HEATHER
WHEELER
20 JANUARY 2010
Q60 Chairman: Because I have read
your wonderful publicity. I read the evidence in Select Committee
and was bowled over by the enthusiasm and felt so moved that I
wanted to join in.
Mr Pellew: Quite seriously, whether
your motivation for wanting to do it coincides with good value
for money for the public purse is one of the first things which
would be considered. We have to have a degree of reassurance that
we are spending public money on a planting scheme which benefits
the private owner, because they have retained ownership, in a
way that does reflect good value for money.
Q61 Chairman: That is what I was
trying to get at because I am a little confused. Changing Landscapes
means funding something different to what you are using the land
for at the moment. I wanted to explore in more detail, having
changed the landscape, what happens then because you were talking
about the mind-set of landowners against the background of extremely
high prices for wheat. Given that the use of forestry or land
for forestry purposes is as, you quite rightly canvass, a long-term
activity, the long-term projections are first of all that we are
going to have to produce more food and, if that is the case, the
pressure on the world's food systems are such that the margin
for error becomes narrower and therefore you could see a series
of price spikes in the future, and it depends on how you gamble
in terms of the return on your piece of land as to what you are
actually going to do with it. What I am not clear about is what
you get if you do have a scheme which passes the test of beneficial
public use, et cetera, once you have changed it and you have established
your forest, what happens then? Just take me from the beginning.
I have got the tick in the box. I have passed the Pellew test.
I am in through the door. I am okay.
Ms Churchill: You would only have
passed the Pellew test if Mr Pellew had actually looked at your
scheme at a board meeting. The schemes are actually approved by
directors of the Company and they are approved against criteria
which directors have agreed, and those would include scoring against
contribution to landscape, climate change, public access, and
so on. In principle, it is competitive because we have a finite
amount of money. One year, praise be, we might have 15 schemes
and we might not be able to fund them all: there is a points system.
That is transparent. The costs are against standard costs which
also apply with the Forestry Commission and their planting. So
it is straightforward: yes/no. At that point if all goes ahead
and we like the scheme, a contract is entered into between the
National Forest Company and that landowner. That contract obliges
them to implement that scheme and look after it for a 10-year
period with the possibility of extensions thereafter for management
and so on. At that point there is no argument. If you have thought
about it hard and you produce a scheme which is acceptable and
contracts are signed, then that is the business of your land for
that time.
Q62 Chairman: So the funding that
is provided is to fund the scheme of initialling the forest development
and subsequent maintenance for a 10-year period?
Ms Churchill: Yes, and there is
a payment on completion of that initial works of 80% of the total
amount. There is a further payment of 20% after five years. If
it had been on agricultural land, there is an element of income
foregone which is also paid depending on the species and so on.
Then there is an inspection regime which is led by members of
the Company.
Mr Evans: It is fair to say that
the design of schemes can be really flexible as well because they
only have to have at least 50% trees. Within that 50% you can
have open ground as well. If you have a 10-hectare site you could
do as little as three hectares of woodland planting. Alternatively,
if the landowner wants to do more they can do more. Within the
open space element it means that you can design something that
is very flexible to suit your own circumstances and landscape
business, so that might include recreational features. It could
include management of existing woodland. It is not blunt in terms
of it is just a scheme for planting trees. It is very flexible
in terms of its design to suit the circumstances of a landowner.
Mr Pellew: This morning I was
looking at sites which either have been approved or are about
to be approved or they are considered sufficient for the Landscape
scheme, and I was impressed in all of them by the sensitivity
with which the landowner or the agent had actually determined
where all the trees were going to go and where there was going
to be agriculture. The one particular scheme which immediately
comes to mind is along a stream, where the low-lying land which
has standing water on it is going to go into the scheme and the
lower mid slopes up to the top is going to remain in agriculture.
They are going to braid the stream itself and they are going to
put in ponds and scrapes to produce wetland. It will produce an
extremely nice wet woodland with a bit of parkland along the edge
and hedges and so on. You feel that the motivation for the farmer
doing this is that this is a bit of unproductive land which he
can diversify and put into this form of use which will make it
visually more attractive and so on, but there is a big public
benefit out of this. It is creating very good habitat for nature
conservation and wetland and so on and it is actually enhancing
the landscape, and I feel quite comfortable, as a non-executive
director, recommending that that sort of scheme goes ahead. There
is a potential competition between woodland and arable agricultural
land in those circumstances for the farmer or the landowner who
does not want to lose his best land but has a bit of poor quality
land which is non-productive which he can put to public benefit.
Q63 Chairman: This new scheme has
been going for a year now. Did you fully spend the budget last
year?
Ms Churchill: We have a global
budget for forest creation which would include a mixture of the
Changing Landscapes scheme and land acquisition small-scale schemes,
and in the last year we slightly underspent, but I will have to
get back to you with the precise figure. I do not have that now.
Q64 Chairman: When say you slightly
underspent was that on the global total?
Ms Churchill: Yes, the global
total for forest creation purposes.
Q65 Chairman: Is the situation that
you have spent everything and there is a queue of people at the
door or is the situation that you spent because the market, if
you like, was in balance between what you were trying to achieve
and what was offered? In other words, is the scheme attractive
enough to keep the flow of land coming up for approval sufficient
to enable you to achieve your objectives—because you said
earlier that you were moving at a slower pace, and I wanted just
to be clear whether that slower pace was because the land flow
had slowed down, and one might conjecture that the scheme is not
quite as generous as it should be, or was it, as Robin Pellew
was just indicating, a reflection of the changed agricultural
circumstances? Give me a feel for the relationship between the
money available and the flow of land to use it.
Ms Churchill: I would say in the
last couple of years the flow of land has been a greater constraint
than the availability of money to fund potential Changing Landscapes
schemes. However, I would also say that at £12,000 a hectare,
if you bear in mind that our total grant-in-aid is £3.6 million
and that does everything including our staff costs, and our staff
costs are not running costs as such, they are also people actually
delivering tourism in the forest, so they are project people,
but if you conjecture £12,000 a hectare, trying to do 250
hectares a year and a total grant-in-aid budget of £3.6 million,
we are in a situation of potential volatility about whether we
have enough to spend or too much or too little depending on land
availability.
Q66 Chairman: Why did you change
from the Tender scheme? Was the Tender scheme judged not to be
giving good value for money?
Mr Pellew: The Tender scheme fell
out with the European Union, let us put it that way. It was deemed
as being inappropriate for us to continue with and we were requested
to produce an alternative, which is what we have done.
Q67 Chairman: Why did it fall out
with the European Union? What did it think it was, a state aid
or something?
Mr Pellew: This could get quite
complicated.
Q68 Chairman: You have got 30 seconds!
I will tell you what, drop us a note on that because I do not
think the detailed guts of it are central. I was just anxious
to find out whether it is an economically driven change or whether
there was another motive behind it, and I think you have made
it clear there was another motive behind it.
Mr Pellew: It was due to competition
rules and so on. I will try to answer the previous question about
the balance between available funding and land supply. To a certain
extent, it is volatile because the situation changes according
to the demand for the grants from the private landowners. If the
private landowners do not want to put trees in because they are
doing very nicely out of existing agriculture because commodity
prices are high, then obviously there is less coming forward and
the land then becomes the limiting factor. Assuming that agricultural
prices remain fairly stable, if they were to continue in the future
at the current level, then I think that the Changing Landscapes
scheme has the opportunity to expand quite significantly to the
extent that our available finances to support all the good schemes
coming forward will become limited. That will become the constriction.
Ms Churchill: If I may add another
source of funding in the future, which relates to our tour this
morning, and which Simon is very much involved in, and that is
green infrastructure, ie putting in compensatory, good-quality
green links and open spaces because there is growth in South Derbyshire
or wherever else. That will not just be a nice added aspect of
what The National Forest does. That could become a central plank
of how we complete the forest, particularly if we get it right
and we do those connections in those villages in the right way.
There could be new sources of funding that follow that.
Chairman: Time is getting short so I
am going to ask if you would drop me a note just to compare your
structure of grant funding with that of the National Woodland
Creation grant so we have a clear distinction because under some
circumstances people in the forest area might look at that compared
with yours. I would like to ask Lynne if she could ask some of
her questions please in the next five minutes.
Q69 Lynne Jones: I know, Sophie,
you said earlier that the scheme must not collapse into a carbon
abatement project and you made some very important points about
resilience which means I can skip some of my questions. Could
I just say that the Forestry Commission published their report
calling for an additional 23,000 hectares of land to be planted
annually to offset carbon emissions but The Government's Low Carbon
Transition Plan is talking about 10,000 hectares a year. There
is somewhat of a difference there. Would you care to comment on
whether it is realistic to have such targets and, if we do, which
is the one that you think we should be going for, the Forestry
Commission's or the Government's?
Mr Pellew: You are going to pass
this one to me, are you! I am not sure if I am in a position to
be able to comment on whether a target of 10,000 or 20,000 or
30,000 hectares or whatever is the correct amount in terms of
the carbon sequestration and the contribution towards balancing
the UK's carbon output. What I would say is that it is very easy
just to dream up a figure without actually putting in place the
mechanism and indeed the money to be able to deliver it. The bulk
of UK land is basically privately owned, and so if you are going
to be looking for rates of forest creation at that level there
has got to be sufficient incentive provided for the landowners
to actually engage meaningfully in that process. To a certain
extent, I think that the scheme that we run, the grant-in-aid
that we run, although at a much smaller scale, could act as a
model to show what those incentives might be, and if you were
to roll out a similar type of scheme like we are doing in The
National Forest at the UK national level to all landowners, I
can see that that might contribute considerably towards your total.
Q70 Lynne Jones: If your rate of
250 hectares a year were scaled up nationally, what would that
be equivalent to?
Mr Pellew: We are 200 square miles.
I am not quite sure what the land surface area of the United Kingdom
is but we are probably about a hundredth of the UK and we are
contributing about a hundredth of the target.
Q71 Lynne Jones: That is the Forestry
Commission target?
Mr Pellew: Yes.
Q72 Lynne Jones: You said about being
a model. There is this proposal in Hertfordshire for a new forest.
Have you been involved in that?
Ms Churchill: I believe that is
the Woodland Trust's new large forest around St Albans, and that
would certainly be, according to their information, the single
biggest new continuous block of woodland, so it is a block of
woodland.
Q73 Lynne Jones: It is a completely
different model then? They have a good site?
Ms Churchill: It is a different
kind of thing really, yes.
Q74 Lynne Jones: In terms of when
you are measuring your success in conserving the environment,
what are your indicators? How do you measure your success?
Mr Evans: We have a range of those.
To kick off with we have our Forest Strategy which is government-approved
and that is a 10-year strategy. We were halfway through that last
year and we have a new delivery plan, so there is a measurement
against that. We have a Biodiversity Action Plan, which is put
together with conservation partners, so there is annual monitoring
against targets for that specifically for biodiversity. We have
sustainable development indicators which look at land-based things
such as woodland cover, public benefits such as amounts of public
access, proximity of access to where people live, and economic
indicators as part of that. There is a range of factors like that
against which we report. We have our own geographic information
system so spatially that helps us to produce our beautiful maps
of what is happening where. That is backed up by information behind
that in terms of who has done what, so the figures that we quote
are always conservative figures and we can hold our hand up and
say, "Come and have a look; this is how it was calculated
this year."
Q75 Lynne Jones: I know you covered
it during our visit this morning but can you explain how you decide
what habitats to develop where and whether your move to more habitat
management is changing your allocation of resources?
Mr Evans: First of all, the starting
point is we do not plant where there is existing good habitat,
full stop. There is a consultation process that is in place with
local authorities and conservation organisations so those sorts
of schemes do not pass muster. Secondly, there is a variety of
landscape in habitat terms. Just in broad terms, a heathy-type
character in Charnwood, wetlands in the Trent Valley and neutral
grasslands in Needwood. If a landowner is designing a Changing
Landscape scheme in a wildlife habitat we would expect them to
pick up the relevant habitats in their area for creative activity,
so it is not just anything anywhere; it is tailored to suit the
place. That is very important to us as well.
Q76 Lynne Jones: Could I ask Councillor
Wheeler how effectively is the environmental work of your local
authority, or what you know of other local authorities, integrated
into the work of The National Forest?
Councillor Wheeler: Very closely
integrated. Zoe Sewter, our Open Spaces Officer, is here today.
We work very closely with Sophie. We are finally going to get
after 20 years a new golf course that is on old mining land, and
one of the most important things about it has been working out
where the trees are going to go. The whole point is it all fits
together because you get the best use out of the land by joining
in partnership with the National Forest Company, making sure that
you get really good use of land, best benefit to the people, and
having Sophie and her team's solid background of environmental
principles behind us, it has just been a joy to work with.
Q77 Chairman: I want to pick up on
the chicken and the egg because local authorities are approached
by people who want to develop land, and the Forest Company, if
you like, waits for people to come to the door and say, "We
have some land that we want to develop." How do you bring
things together so that the regeneration aspirations within the
Council's remit to influence—you might say, "We would
like to do something there,"—link in with what The
National Forest objectives are?
Councillor Wheeler: Let me start
and then Sophie finish off because one of the things I have been
finding so frustrating is that, as you probably appreciate, The
National Forest is not all of South Derbyshire. I would much prefer
it if it was but Sophie keeps saying to me, "Let me do what
I have got first and then we can talk about it," but that
is the point, people are knocking on the door because people want
to live here because it is so beautiful. That is the absolute
difference. The change since 1995 is just incredible.
Mr Evans: In terms of planning
link-up, our strategy is commented on by the local authorities,
so they are giving their comments on what we are putting out and
are feeling comfortable with that. We make comments on the local
development framework to weave National Forest policies in. When
developers want to do something they will often come to our door
and say, "Local authority X has suggested we talk to you.
We want to do X amount of green infrastructure. What does that
mean? Tell me what you want?" We have those discussions with
developers and we are in direct contact with the local authorities
there to try and achieve the same objective.
Q78 Lynne Jones: We talked about
finance and land constraints but what about skills? Are there
skills constraints and what are you doing about it? What should
be done?
Ms Churchill: In term of forestry
and land-based skills, there are training and development opportunities
through The National Forest. We have a new course this year led
by the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers which is taking
people who are out of the labour force who want to get land-based
skills. The National Forest Company is very pleased to support
that financially to make that happen, but as one of the players.
Then we addressed this morning hedge-laying which came up earlier
and so on. Where I might say we have some big challenge, for all
of us, is the green master-planning and then implementing it across
different districts and different areas. We have very, very committed
local authorities but none of them are big. You really need one
excellent and visionary leader, one excellent and visionary head
of planning and development and environment and you need a very
dynamic person, an urban designer and/or a planner. That is uneven
across the forest. We have a job to do to keep our skills up to
speed, because things are changing, and to have an evenness of
aspiration and skills in this area of taking growth and not jeopardising
The National Forest that we have put in. I would say that is a
big area.
Mr Pellew: Very briefly two points
as a non-executive director. The first one, which is slightly
critical, is we have a very good story to tell here. It is a great
success. I think there is a huge amount that has been achieved.
As a non-executive Director, I genuinely find it inspirational
and I cannot think of many NDPBs[3]
in which I have been involved where I would actually use the word
"inspirational". The criticism I would make is that
we need to do more to promote the model elsewhere. There are lots
of places I can see where you have got deprived populations, blighted
landscapes, where the model which has been developed here would
be applicable, in the Midlands, the North of England, Scotland,
the Welsh Valleys and so on. I think that more could be done both
by the Company and by the Government in order to promote the experience
here and to transplant it elsewhere. That is one point. The second
point, which has been touched upon, is that the forest has now
begun to develop a sense of its own identity. If you meet people
attending a Plant A Tree event and you say to them, "Where
do you live?" they are just as likely to say, "I live
in The National Forest," as they are to say, "I live
in South Derbyshire." They say that with a real pride because
it has achieved this sense of geographical identity and sense
of place. It is manifest in the branding with lots of smaller
SMEs now using the name. Estate agents are using it as a "detached
bungalow in The National Forest" to sell the thing. This
is beginning to build a momentum. Companies now want to move in
here because it is easier for them to recruit employees because
they are in The National Forest. It feeds upon itself and this
is how the thing is now beginning to expand in terms of the social
and economic benefits coming in, because it has gone past critical
mass, maintained momentum and this sense of identity as a place
which is terribly important. It is nebulous but it is fundamental
to the success. The trans-location of the experience here has
to identify what are the ingredients of creating that sense of
place so that you could do the same elsewhere. If that could be
done it is a very precious commodity.
Chairman: Robin, I think that is an elegant
summary of what we have discussed with the panel. I would like
to thank you all very much indeed for your evidence. I have let
the questioning go on a little more because we were exploring
some very important areas. I am conscious that I did say that
if there were any members of the audience who would like to make
a personal contribution there would be time at the end for that
to be done.
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