A government appointed panel which looked into the aborted sell-off of the UK’s forests will today reveal that the government had massively undervalued the publicly owned forests. In what will be seen as yet another blow to the coalitions now ridiculous claim that they were to be the ‘greenest government ever’, the report points out that the relatively small cost of maintaining the forests, estimated to be around £20 million per year, is nothing when compared with the benefits the forests provide to the public. Indeed the report suggests that the social benefits of the forests alone could be put in the region of between one and two billion pounds, something that the forestry proposal had overlooked.

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