Peter Latham OBE gave 44 years to selling timber and the rest of his working life to proving its origin, and he has died after a short illness. That is according to PEFC International, which said it learned of his death with deep sadness, and James Latham PLC, the family merchant he joined in June 1973 and ran as chief executive and then chairman until 2017.
“I have been lucky to work in a great industry, with fantastic natural products,” Latham said in 2018, naming in the same breath the wonderfully talented teams of people he had worked alongside.
Stephen Powney, then group editor of TTJ, rang to tell him he had won the Lifetime Achievement Award, and Latham said the call left him amazed. The merchant he chaired took Timber Trader of the Year on the same night, 261 years after the first James Latham began importing hardwoods into Liverpool.
“Peter was widely liked and highly respected across the industry,” the company said, adding that news of his death would be felt deeply by many across the trade.
Latham built a second career next to the first, chairing Forests Forever at the Timber Trade Federation, helping build CPET, the rulebook that set what British public bodies could buy, and leading state-funded missions to Africa, China, and Asia on illegally harvested timber. His own firm wrote a responsible procurement policy under his personal direction and was among the first anywhere to hold both FSC and PEFC chain-of-custody certification.
PEFC UK made him a director, then its chairman, and fewer than 100 British companies held chain-of-custody certificates when he arrived, compared with more than 1,300 when he left, a shift he credited to customers finally asking for it.
The then Prince of Wales presented him with an OBE in 2012, for services to the UK wood industry and more than twenty years spent pressing the trade to buy only what it could prove was legal and well-managed.
Latham joined the PEFC International board in 2011 and took its chair in 2016, leading the world’s largest forest certification system for the next five years, an alliance that now covers more than 7 per cent of the world’s forests.
Defra appointed him a non-executive commissioner of Forestry Commission England, and he sat as a director of ATIBT, the tropical timber body, and a trustee of the Commonwealth Forestry Association. PEFC credits him with steering the alliance through a decade in which forests moved to the centre of arguments about climate, biodiversity, and rural livelihoods.
Speaking for the last time as chair, Latham argued for wood fibre from sustainably managed forests as a substitute for materials produced in ways that harm the environment, and PEFC sent him home from that assembly with an outdoor table made from certified oak.
“Thank you, Peter. You will be greatly missed,” PEFC said in a tribute published yesterday that recorded his wisdom, his diplomacy, and the gift for bringing people together.
