Mr. Simon White:

There are no premiums. There is no income on that, which means that your land is virtually worthless. In fact, not only is it worthless, but if you wanted to sell it, nobody would buy it because they would have to invest to get rid of the trees and to plant again. It has to be compulsorily planted in trees, which means that nobody has any options. That is terribly unfair. That has not been challenged yet. That has never been challenged. The law is supposed to be equitable. That is quite blatantly inequitable. A judicial review is needed to see whether that is fair, especially under an exceptional circumstance such as a disease of this nature.

I will mention miscanthus as another example. The promotion of miscanthus in this country was a ghastly mistake. Why did it happen? It happened because due diligence was not done to work out that we needed to put an infrastructure in place so that we could burn miscanthus within a certain radius of where it was grown. It became completely uneconomic to grow it, to transport it and to burn it. Those people who have miscanthus have losses. It would be interesting to know what that costs the State and what it costs the farmers who grew it. There is nothing in the legislation to say that those people who grew miscanthus have to go back to produce alternative energy off the land that they got. They are not told to put down solar panels. They are not told to grow some other crop. They are told that they can go back to any production that they want off that land. Why is different for people with ash dieback? You cannot replace ash with ash. There is no other commercial broad-leaf crop. We went into this as a business. All of our members went into this as a business, not only for them but for the future generations. Those future generations have memories, too. They will see what was done to their parents. Their grandchildren will see it. We are looking at a whole thing into the future over the way this has been dealt with. People are very short-sighted if they do not see that.