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.

The report has added importance when placed alongside the current plans of the coalition to relax the UK’s planning laws and give developers the chance to start developing the formerly protected greenfield sites. The panel also pointed out what it referred to as the ‘heartfelt connections’ between the UK people and their publicly owned forests, something that the Conservative environment secretary, Caroline Spelman failed to take into account and which led to her embarrassing u-turn on the policy of selling off the forests.

In addition the panel noted that the Forestry Commission, which Spelman wants to abolish, is constantly proving itself to be an ‘exemplar of managing land for social, environmental and economic benefits.’ The panel signed off with a poignant warning that woodland policy needs to be depoliticised, because ‘electoral timescales won’t match the lifespan of trees.’