Labour will pitch itself as the party that will protect nature and the British countryside this week, with a promise to prevent publicly owned forests from being sold.
In a speech at an RSPB nature reserve on Tuesday, shadow environment secretary Maria Eagle is expected to attack the coalition for overseeing a decline in the UK’s natural environment and to pledge to give more people access to green space.
Former Tory environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, was forced into a u-turn over plans to sell-off England’s public forest estate in 2011 following a campaign by green groups and a petition signed by more than half a million people.
Spelman subsequently ruled out selling off publicly owned forests in the future and her successor, Owen Paterson, said a body would be set up to protect the public estate from being sold off. But members of the Independent Panel on Forestry last year chastised the government for not putting legislation in place to stop that happening.
“David Cameron wanted to sell-off our forests. The next Labour government will protect our forests, keeping them in public ownership,” Eagle will say. “And we will reform the forestry commission to increase public access to nature. We will secure ready access to trees and woodlands by planting them closer to the places where people live.”
But a spokeswoman for environment secretary, Liz Truss, rejected the suggestion that the Conservatives had any future intent to sell off public forests. “Our forests and woodland will remain secured in public ownership for the people who enjoy them, the businesses that depend on them and the wildlife that flourishes in them.”
An independent government advisory group warned last week that the UK’s natural environment is in decline and MPs last year issued the government with a ‘red card’ for its record on protecting wildlife. Official statistics show that of the 35 measures of the short-term health of biodiversity, six are in decline but 14 are improving.
“David Cameron promised us that he would lead the ‘greenest government ever’ but the reality is that we’ve had five years of environmental degradation and the decline of nature. This government has been a disaster for the environment,” Eagle will claim.
Truss’s spokeswoman defended the government’s environment record, saying it had supported the planting of over 10m trees and cleaned up over 10,000 miles of river.
Eagle will lay out a 25-year plan to help nature recover, and says Labour will create a landscape-scale ecological network as recommended in a major government report.
Labour would not promise to reverse the 25% budget cuts the coalition have imposed on the Forestry Commission, but said it would be reformed to focus more on biodiversity, access to nature, and the role forests could play in tackling climate change, ahead of its founding agenda of increasing timber production.
