Trees: The people in charge of Britain's trees

Nicholas Schoon, Environment Correspondent, looks at the government agencies who are responsible for overseeing tree planting in the UK.

Most tree planting in Britain happens in bulk, with entire fields covered with little saplings, and is state-aided.

If you are a landowner, then there are a plethora of government grants for tree planting, for replanting in existing woodlands and for looking after woodlands. The biggest of these schemes, all administered by the Forestry Authority, gives you pounds 1,350 per hectare to plant native broadleaf trees like ash and oak and the Scots pine. You have to plant 2,250 trees per hectare, and you get paid in two instalments - 70 per cent immediately after planting, and 30 per cent five years later. There are also add on grants, intended to lure farmers into growing trees instead of crops and livestock. For instance, there is an extra pounds 600 a hectare for planting on cropfields and pounds 950 for guaranteeing to let the public roam in your woodland. And there is a further pounds 600 a hectare if you plant in specially designated areas, chosen because they are so short of trees in the landscape. There have even been tree planting auctions and `Challenge Funds' in some areas such as the new National Forest (see below). Landowners bid for the price at which they will plant trees - those who bid cheapest win the grant.

The Government and its Countryside Commission have joined with local councils and the Forestry Authority to create several new, substantially sized forests dotted around England. Twelve of these are community forests, located on the fringes of some of our biggest cities. If they succeed, they will make land designated as "green belt" in order to stop urban sprawl into a real belt of greenery - covering the tatty farmland you often find on city edges. But the most exciting plan of all is for a new National Forest in the countryside north of Birmingham, where the landscape has been scarred by clay extraction, opencast mining and spoil tips and the economy damaged by the closure of all the local coal pits.

The intention is to cover one third of a 200 square mile area in parts of Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire in woodland; when the programme began in the early 1990s just three per of this land was tree covered. The planting is being coordinated by the National Forest Company, a tiny state-owned firm working with a shoestring budget. It is struggling to persuade local farmers to join in, and to bring in private sector and charity money. In its latest annual report company chairman Rodney Swarbrick admits the company has fallen a little behind its tree planting targets.

Provided there is public access to this gigantic new forest, it should give lowland England an amazing natural asset within a quarter century. The hope is that new timber and tourist industries will spring up in the area, showing the way to a more wooded future for other parts of Britain.