Mr. Niall ? Brolch?in:

I wish to make what I hope is a key point. On forestry, I have two things to say. There are forestry regulations under public consultation in the EU at the moment. The Government should not be supporting the planting of new coniferous forests on peatlands under any circumstances. The current position is that the Government is supporting that policy. I ask the committee to look at that because we should not be supporting the payment of subsidies for new forestry on peatlands. It makes absolutely no sense, and we had a significant issue with it in the past.

A major issue we have in one of the projects we are doing, which is a pilot under the EU LIFE scheme, is as to how we remove the trees from peatlands, which can be quite problematic. Usually what can happen is that these trees can be clear-felled. Sometimes the timber is just left lying on the ground. In other cases, trees can be removed but the bases are left lying there. It does not optimise sequestration, which is what we are talking about here, if we do not remove the trees by the roots. That is quite expensive to do. Quite often we see one-off growths of Sitka spruce on drained peatlands and swampy peatlands, as they later become. Once the trees have been felled, the land is left in an appalling state. The people who planted and harvested the trees have made their money and moved off, and the land is just left there with stumps of trees. Those lands are not proper peatlands or proper anything. This is not a good biodiversity area. How trees are cut and removed is something legislators should take cognizance of.