England will need far more trained foresters before it can increase its tree planting, with skills now as critical to new woodland as the land on which it is planted. That is according to Baroness Barbara Young, chair of the Forestry Commission, England’s forestry regulator, who spoke at a reception marking 50 years of the APF Show at Ragley Estate in Warwickshire last week.
“Growing more trees will require growing more foresters, and skills and expertise are just as important as seeds and land,” Young told delegates, with her remit running from timber to flood risk and soils. She told the reception that the one thing she had learned so far was that multi-purpose forestry “is not as easy as it sounds”.
Nonetheless, Young said timber, carbon, and wildlife need not compete, as it was “not a choice between trees for timber or trees for carbon or trees for biodiversity”. Instead, her goal is “more for all of those”, with growing more trees “absolutely fundamental to deliver all those objectives”.
Indeed, she called for more timber in construction, and told the reception that “in Scotland, 91 per cent of new homes are timber-framed; in England, we’re at a pitiful 9 per cent”. At the same time, she wants the commission to become a more modern regulator, one that is “risk-based, proportionate, slick, simpler and aimed on outcomes rather than bureaucratic processes”.
However, Young said policymakers “always immediately think of food security and not timber security”, and “we’ve got to just keep hammering away at that”. It comes as Confor, the forestry and wood trade body, urged Westminster earlier this year to treat timber alongside food and energy as a strategic material.
As it stands, Confor says the UK imports 81 per cent of its wood, whilst new planting fell to 13,480 hectares in the year to March. That is less than half the UK’s annual target of 30,000 hectares, and down from the 15,690 hectares planted the year before.
“These figures will not help deliver timber security and will not provide the jobs, new homes, and economic growth our population needs,” Stuart Goodall, Confor’s chief executive, said when the planting figures came out. He counted just 5,000 hectares of productive conifers among them, and warned the UK faces “a future of reduced wood supply in the decades to come”.
For her part, Young called collaboration crucial, though she would “prefer the term ‘co-conspirators’, because I think that’s how cunning we’re going to have to be together”. Final planting figures follow next month, when Forest Research, the commission’s research agency, publishes Forestry Statistics 2026 to replace the provisional count.
