Another rant, I’ll try to make it a short one! As you can probably tell I am very angry at the efforts of the government to dispose of most of or all of the Public Forest Estate in England (the minister’s words not mine) while we (the current owners) weren’t looking.
The efforts to be ‘economical with the truth’ as Sir Humphry might put it, whilst not realising the strength and depth of public opinion (as measured by current opinion polls) is more revealing of the true intention than they probably intended! The woodland photos accompanying these articles are all taken recently with the use of CRoW access to woodlands near me.
But if the Forestry Commission managed woodlands are sold piecemeal then this is likely to be the type of photograph you will be getting instead. In this case a Forestry Commission owned woodland was sold to a private company which replaced the original information board with this welcoming proposition. No mention of CRoW access either which was apparently also rescinded, despite having been sold with it, due to Health & Safety considerations. You could not make it up!
The case study is simply and eloquently put at this link lost access a case study of west wood
Look beneath all the smoothtalking about maintaining access rights and see what lurks there. The law is very much on the side of the landowner (or leaseholder) in our society. Unlike many other countries there is no presumption of access to woodland in England. Once the landowner (or leaseholder) changes the law normally proves powerless to enforce a public access policy where the new owners do not want it – no matter how smoothly the ministers may describe their intentions.
My own experience of managing woodland operations within a privately owned but open access site is that there is no reason to restrict access – but there are plenty of excuses to do so if you are so minded.
There are also plenty of examples of privately managed woodland where access to locals, if not the public, is tolerated and not prohibited, if not actively encouraged, so I am not wholly against private owners buying land from the FC.
But government does not have a good record in managing to get things right, particularly when it’s in a hurry and where the maintenance of access is in clear conflict with extracting maximum value from the sale of land as is the case with the Public Forest Estate soon to become the Private Forest Estate unless you make your feelings known.
For more information on the current state of the planned disposal visit Save Our Forests the best and most informative site I am aware of and from where you can find a lot of the facts and articles that are often to elusive in these emotive discussions.
It is perhaps ironic that the government has managed to jerk me out of my apathy enough to do two things I’ve never done before. The first is to write to my MP (I’m sure he’s grateful to hear from me) and the second is to learn to use Facebook for this issue. Disclaimer – as a mountain biker, canoeist and climber in the not to distant past as well as a woodland worker nowadays I am something of a radical when it comes to access rights! Mass tresspass in the woods anyone?
Grrr Grrr Grrrr……..
There are few things to get me into full rant, but one of them is my dislike of our successive governments’ attitude to ‘publicly owned’ assets.
Perhaps I’m getting more socialist in my old age, but when I think of the opportunities we have been offered to loose our public assets (and then usually keep paying for them with subsidies, like the railways) or for a few private people gaining long term benefits from the public purse for short term government gains (and then to have them spent on weapons) it just makes me think Grrrr Grrrr Grrrr………
You can’t walk along the coast, you can’t walk along the rivers and now through the woods. Actually, they don’t want you to walk. You must drive. Walking is mostly tax free, and so is not to be encouraged.
Grrr Grrr Grrr
[…] building up information from campaign sites, news stories and blogs like this one from my friend Mark Allery, another woodland worker. Today, as MPs were debating and voting on the governments plans to sell […]
All done, sorted, cancelled, it worked, no more forest sale I hear.
Not far off Max. Mind you I don’t trust DEFRA further than I can throw them, which isn’t far. What I’ve heard so far is that the proposed change to legislation to allow all of the public forests to be ‘disposed’ of has been cancelled. The minister has apologised for ‘getting it wrong’ but can’t actually say what they got wrong. One suspects that she means wrong handling of the matter rather than they think it was a bad idea. They haven’t yet said what is to happen to the 15% disposal which did not require a change to legislation. It would be typical of DEFRA to say one thing and mean another entirely. So I will be watching very closely. Unlike you in Vancouver we are little short of woodland in the UK, though I have no doubt you are doing your bit to catch up 🙂
Well, at 1/144 scale it will take a while to clear BC, but I am working on it.
In the mean time, I trust you are fundraising to buy and protect those 15% in the UK when they come up for sale.
If all those 500,000 complainants put a tenner each in, that should buy some nice woodlands for you to manage.