Readers have got together

James Forrest hill-bagging and wild camping in the west of Ireland overwhelmingly happy to have experienced that better world.

Mountain Man is being relaunched as a paperback in October with a new chapter from the author and a foreword by the adventurer Anna McDuff. bloomsbury.com/ uk/mountain-man-9781844865642

CAN YOU NAME England’s Tree Champion? Neither could I until

I looked him up. In fact I didn’t even know such a role existed. He’s called

Sir William Worsley, and I found out about him when checking on the annual new planting figures published by the Forestry Commission.

These figures are hugely disappointing. Last year’s Conservative manifesto promised 30,000 hectares of new planting in the UK per year by 2025. This could make a real difference, not just in our fight against climate change (trees are wonderful at capturing and storing CO2) but also in terms of human recreation and enjoyment.

But despite a whole raft of subsidy and support schemes, total new planting in the UK for the year to March 2020 came to just 13,460 hectares – less than half the figure we were promised. This total is slightly down on the equivalent figure for the previous year, so there’s a lot to be done.

This is surely where the Tree Champion should step in. He was appointed in 2018 and his aim is “to promote the benefits of trees and forests, support manifesto commitments and targets, and drive a step change in tree planting.” Sir William is chair of the National Forest Company. This initiative has transformed a large area of the industrial Midlands, and now draws over 8 million visitors a year.

We will need many more large-scale projects if we are to achieve the stated target for new planting. Woodland in the UK is pretty sparse; we have just 13% cover against an average of 38% in the EU countries. And our coverage is skewed, with less than 10% cover in England but nearly 20% in Scotland, where planting is showing a steady increase.

More schemes are being announced. One recent example is the plan for over half a million trees on Doddington North Moor in Northumberland. There is also the ambitious longer-term plan for a Great Northern Forest, which would see 50 million trees planted, roughly along the M62 corridor from Liverpool to Hull.

This is an incredibly important topic. Trees provide benefits out of all proportion to the cost of planting them, and these

Trees bring benefits out of all proportion to the cost of planting them

benefits last for generations. I wrote in this column a couple of months ago of the joy my wife and I were getting from our daily walk in the woods during lockdown. The trees are beautiful to look at and peaceful to walk among, and they provide habitat for a wide range of creatures from microbes up to mammals such as squirrels and pine martens. And, as I have already said, they are highly efficient carbon sinks.

New planting has to be made as easy as possible for farmers and landowners to join in. A recent survey of almost 700 landowners and managers found that less than a quarter had created new woodland in the past two years. They are concerned about red tape and about the complexity of grant schemes (one grant application form ran to 41 pages). There’s a job for a champion – go through the subsidy schemes, and make them as simple as possible to understand and to put into effect. That shouldn’t prove too difficult.

It is intensely frustrating when inspirational schemes such as the manifesto planting plan are announced and then fall so far short. Doubling our tree cover would be a magnificent thing to do, and I can’t help thinking back a couple of hundred years to the ‘planting Dukes’ – far-sighted landowners who planted millions of trees in the knowledge that their descendants would reap the benefit. They didn’t need government grants; they just got on with it.

That’s what we need today. The Forestry Commission, repeatedly emasculated and asset-stripped by successive governments, has just celebrated its centenary. Its founders, faced with a historically low figure of just 5% tree cover after World War One, managed to more than double that figure. The Commission should be encouraged to take the lead again now.

We need another step-change, and perhaps not one but a whole raft of Tree Champions. Why not have one for each county, all bidding to reach the target first? There’s nothing like competition to spur a champion on!