The new Prime Minister has been told to put homegrown timber at the centre of the biggest council building drive since the post-war years, with one of Britain’s biggest natural capital investors moving to claim a stake in Andy Burnham’s signature policy. That is according to an open letter to Downing Street from Richard Kelly, who co-leads Foresight’s natural capital business, arguing a homes-from-homegrown-timber approach would tackle the housing crisis, strengthen timber security, and drive low-carbon growth.
“The real opportunity is not simply planting more forests,” Kelly writes in the letter, with the bigger prize rebuilding Britain’s timber supply chain through sawmills, engineered timber plants, and modular construction lines.
Committing a large share of new council homes to timber would create a steady pipeline of demand, Kelly argues, while funding new productive woodland and tying housing policy to forestry policy over the decades. Homes built in the 2040s, he writes, could be supplied by trees planted in the 2020s.
Every pound spent on homegrown timber supports jobs through forestry, sawmilling, manufacturing, and construction, the letter argues, where the same pound spent on imports supports jobs overseas. Kelly builds the security case on Britain’s position as the world’s second-largest net importer of wood, with 81 per cent of the timber the country uses shipped in from abroad.
It follows an earlier appeal from Kelly, urging the future Prime Minister to hold the line on ending UK-enabled deforestation, as shocks from Covid-19 to the war in Ukraine and the Middle East have shown how fragile timber supply chains can be.
“That is not simply a trade statistic. It is a structural strategic vulnerability,” Stuart Goodall, Confor’s chief executive, said of the import figure when launching a campaign at Westminster in March to have Britain’s timber reliance treated as a matter of national security.
Supplying the programme from home forests is its own contest, with the UK softwood supply forecast to crash 40 per cent by the 2050s as the public estate declines, even as the country’s three biggest sawmillers push homegrown C16 into housebuilding.
It comes as the Construction Products Association cut its private housebuilding forecast to a 10 per cent fall this week, with its own commentary telling the new government to focus on enabling housebuilding and boosting construction demand.
