FORESTRY'S GREAT ESCAPE

Abstract

Summary Few will be surprised at the Government's rejection of the Countryside Commission's recent recommendation that the larger upland afforestation schemes be subject to planning control. And yet the calls for afforestation controls which grew within the rural amenity lobby through the sixties and seventies attracted Conservative support and Labour opposition. That pattern changed in the early eighties when Labour adopted, in advance of any national environmental organisation, a policy of agricultural controls. The politically more important agricultural issue now dominates and today Labour advocates planning control of agriculture and afforestation, whilst the Tories reject controls of agriculture and afforestation. Arguably, the foresters' (and the farmers') best strategy now is to use what time remains under Tory administrations to so develop an effective co-operative system that the calls for control disappear.