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PLANT MORE TREES IN THE BORDERS!
PLANT MORE TREES IN THE BORDERS!
Tree planting must be made easier to encourage investment in Northumberland and offer new opportunities in the uplands after Brexit, a forestry summit has been told.
Councillor Peter Jackson, leader of Northumberland County Council, told the meeting hosted at the EGGER site in Hexham: “We have the UK’s largest man-made forest on our doorstep (Kielder) but we are not doing enough; we are importing millions of tonnes of timber.”
The UK is the world’s secondlargest net importer of wood products after China, with 80 per cent of timber coming from overseas. Despite Kielder, forest cover in Northumberland is just 8 per cent, below the English average (10 per cent) and UK average (13 per cent). The EU average is around 35 per cent.
Councillor Jackson said: “We are not doing enough in terms of production and the potential for Northumberland and the whole of the Borderlands area to do that is enormous.
“We need to find a way to get through funding and bureaucratic issues because it’s not particularly easy to plant a new forest, for reasons that escape me. As a renewable resource, it seems to be common sense for us as a society to grow more timber.”
Councillor Jackson, a farmer, was speaking at an event to discuss the role of forestry and wood processing in the Borderlands Growth Deal, which aims to revitalise five areas either side of the English-Scottish border – Northumberland, Cumbria, Dumfries & Galloway, The Scottish Borders and the city of Carlisle.
He said farmers in the uplands clearly faced challenges after Brexit and that forestry had a big part to play in the future of those areas.
Simon Hart, EGGER Forestry business development manager, said: ” We support the need to plant more trees, as wood is one of the key raw materials required to manufacture our products.
“At Hexham, EGGER has invested approximately £250 million in the site over the last decade to ensure it is one of the most technologically advanced chipboard plants in Europe.”
EGGER is the largest manufacturing employer in Northumberland, with over 600 employees and produces a range of wood-based material products for the furniture, interior design and housebuilding industries.
