This piece is an extract from this week's Forestry Features newsletter, which is emailed out at 4PM every Wednesday with a round-up of the week's top stories. 

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ENGLAND needs to plant more trees. That will not come as a revelation to anyone who's been paying attention for, well, decades now. 

Such are its struggles, it has, not unfairly, been described as a "lost cause" by industry figures. In the 12 months prior to the end of March 2022, just 2,260 hectares of new woodland were created, well short of the 7,000 ha annual goal.

Given recent press has suggested officials faced a "race against time" to plant more trees this planting season, it's not unfair to assume we're unlikely to have seen any real progress during the last 12 months. 

READ MORE: Woodland creation 'ignored' in new climate strategy amid industry anger

So, nothing new there, then, but events of the past week have brought planting woes back into sharp focus. 

Firstly, we had reports in The Times that Defra ministers were told their tree-planting targets were "unachievable", with a secret document handed out ahead of the government's "green day" announcements last week. The ten-page advisory pamphlet — marked “not public facing” — was produced on February 20 for Grant Shapps, the energy security and net zero secretary, with 21 of 44 net-zero policies marked red or red/amber, indicating they will be hard to achieve, according to the newspaper. 

Putting this to one side, there was dismay when those green proposals – as part of a wide-ranging energy plan – earmarked £20 billion for carbon capture technology, but provided no new cash for woodland creation. "Why is the government failing to implement the best solutions for reaching net zero?" is how one industry figure put it. 

READ MORE: Bringing back Schedule D is the best way to boost planting, our forester writes

Then came the death of Nigel Lawson, the former Conservative chancellor, whose major contribution to forestry was to remove its Schedule D tax relief in the 1980s. In the years since, this change has made it  "almost impossible to engender the appropriate confidence" in forestry investment, according to Fenning Welstead of John Clegg & Co. 

All this suggests that whether it's the private or the public sector, woes over tree planting and woodland creation are unlikely to go away anytime soon – especially if forestry continues to not be sufficiently supported by ministers.