[Diggers350] Forest sell-offs reply to Dave B

[MarkiB]

Re: Dave's both eloquent and emphatic argument of why public ownership is
infinitely preferable to third-sector ownership, I freely admit that I
stand corrected on this one.  I am actually embarrassed to have expressed
that I have 'no absolute ideological objection to public sell off'. The
actual point I was trying to make was that if the govt had condeded that a
thorough all-emcompassing regulatory framework governing the management of
the 256,000 hectares of public forest was neccessary which the weight of
public concern and opinions of English Heritage, wildlife groups ..etc (*)
has been steering them towards, such a transition of the Forestry
Commission into more of a technocratic bureacracy to oversee third-sector
ownership would be costlier in the long run and also by it's very nature be
completely daft as compared to direct control (public ownership).

However, just perhaps there maybe is more scope for the FC to employ more
thorough all-emcompassing regulatory mechanisms in its management of all
woodland.

[* - National Trust and Woodland Trust have also been critized for being
initially slow off the mark on the issue, but it may have been the National
Trust which dealt the final deathblow when Fiona Reynolds, director general
of NT, admitted to being "very surprised" to have had no approach from
Defra before the forests sell-off was announced, despite being a prime
candidate to take on stewardship of heritage woodlands].

I am also embarrassed to acknowledge that my lame point that the amount of
large commercial forest in England is small in relation to overseas trade
was meaningless. Thankyou for pointing out that the FC is responsible for
60% of the national timber harvest on that mere 18%, and provides an
example that puts the private sector - with all their semi-derelict woods -
to shame.

Through discussion such as this some of us benefit from getting more
reliably informed.

Of course, the FC is an institution of eminent standing informed by the
sums of it's parts - a rich seam of a skilled workforce informed by years
of collective experience in their localities working on the ground in tune
with the local environment, flora, fauna ..etc. No institution is without
criticism at the same time and inefficiencies of management undoubtedly
occur from time to time - but these a few and far between as compared to
the scope and extent of their work.

Dave is on the button referring to how the government's proposals for a
15% sell-off over the next 4 years are still in the pipe-line, together
with the 27% staff job cuts (400 jobs out of a national workforce of only
1,100...leave alone all the many contractors and suppliers), together with
a 25% saving on their DEFRA grant (which amounts to £13 million by 2015-5).

It reveals their raison-detre all, as well we all know, has been to slash
spending with DEFRA being one of the departments hit most - and with the FC
lined up to be in the forefront, what better way than sell off the forests
(which conveniently also provides a nice inheritance-free investment
opportunity for city-spiv Tory donors).

And thankyou Dave for the priceless summing up of what Public ownership
effectively means. It is of course of relevance to all our Public services
and lets keep in mind the proposed privatisation of the Royal Mail and
backdoor privatisation of the NHS (GP consortia will be subject to EU
competition law, and so, market penetration by multinationals unlike the
NHS a fully public sector body which is not subject to EU competition law).

Dave's summing up here again, this time we-worded slightly here:
'PUBLIC, accountable or potentially accountable state ownership partially
extracts the resource from the operation of market forces. 'Third sector'
ownership doesn't do that - as any charity or coop or not-for-profit
manager will tell you, since their share incomes and other private sector
revenues have crashed with the global slump. 'Third sector' ownership
doesn't directly challenge the market. Indeed, it can reinforce
it by re-legitimising its operations. (Better to sack yourself and cut
your own pay than have a nasty boss do that for you, it is argued !!).'

M

  

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Diggers350] Re: Forest sell-offs
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 13:40:03 -0000
From: "david bangs" <dave.bangs at virgin.net>
To: <diggers350 at yahoogroups.com>, "MarkiB" <mark at tlio.org.uk>

See piece below which is in today's (Wednesday's) Morning Star. 

It's now delightfully semi-redundant after the government's climb-down
yesterday (WHOOPEEEE!!!)...but only partly so...for, as far as I am aware,
the government's proposals for a 15% sell-off over the next 4 years are
still in the pipe-line (subject to them agreeing new acceptable criteria
for sale), together with the 27% staff job cuts (which amount to 400 jobs
out of a national workforce of only 1,100...leave alone all the many
contractors and suppliers), together with a 25% saving on their DEFRA
grant
(which amounts to £13 million by 2015-5).

If these job cuts & financial cuts go ahead then it will be impossible for
the FC to fulfill their Forest Design Plans and to deliver all the public
services they currently do (in recreation, education, biodiversity and
landscape terms). For instance, in East Sussex the FC has a team of five
workers, TWO of whom are forest rangers...directly delivering the public
services we need.

Down here in the FC's South East Region (from the Chilterns to the Isle of
Wight, round to Kent) we have been very slow in getting organised. It has
taken us five months to start up the 'Keep Our Forests Public' network
(which now has groups in Brighton and Worthing, and coming meetings in
Chichester and Lewes). This means that we are at risk of losing these new
networks even before they have solidified. 

Yet we need such woodland defence networks big-time. Only last year the
Forestry Commission sold off half of Sheffield Forest (Funnel's Wood)
south
west of Ashdown Forset in Sussex without any kind of public consultation
or
public knowledge. All we got out of it was a measly bit of press
publicity.
There are no guarantees that this will not happen again, and we need all
the eyes and ears we can to defend the national forest estate in all its
parts.

The PROSPECT union is organising round-the-country rallies on March 20th
to defend Forestry Commission jobs and services. We have a rally and walk
in Friston Forest, near Eastbourne, on that date...Noon on Saturday 20th
March, @ Exceat car park, Friston Forest.

Lastly, I absolutely cannot agree with Markib (hi Mark !) in his failure
to centralise the issue of public ownership...not 'third sector'
ownership,
but PUBLIC, accountable or potentially accountable state ownership, which
partially extracts the resource from the operation of market forces.
'Third
sector' ownership doesn't do that - as any charity or coop or
not-for-profit manager will tell you, since their share incomes and other
private sector revenues have crashed with the global slump. 'Third sector'
ownership doesn't directly challenge the market. Indeed, it can reinforce
it by re-legitimising its operations. (Better to sack yourself and cut
your
own pay than have a nasty boss do that for you, it is argued !!).

And I disagree that the public forest estate's small size makes it a
marginal player. An estate of 18% of all english woodland isn't small. The
FC owns 2% of the UK footprint, which is TWICE the footprint of the
National Trust...one in 50 acres !! The FC is responsible for 60% of the
national timber harvest on that mere 18%, and provides an example that
puts
the private sector - with all their semi-derelict woods - to shame.

The case for a democratically planned and publicly owned economy has been
swamped by the neo-liberal tide over the last generation. The sooner we
rehabilitate it the better... 

in solidarity

Dave Bangs


Keep Our Forests Public

From: Dave Bangs (chair, Brighton Keep Our Forests Public).
dave.bangs at virgin.net  

Tel: 01273 620 815. 78 Ewhurst Road, Brighton, BN2 4AJ

9th February 2011

The governments’s announcement that they are postponing the sale of 15% of
the Forestry Commission estate so as to review the site-by -site criteria
for disposal is a first victory in the massive grass roots
anti-privatisation campaign.  We have a country-wide wave of anger that
has
brought levels of support for the public forest estate of the same order
as
that for the NHS or free education. We’ve seen activist groups forming
from
top to bottom of the country, with (polite) anger so raw that Mark Harper,
the Forest of Dean Tory MP, scuttled fearfully out of the back door of a
meeting venue, rather than address the shivering crowd outside.  We’ve
seen
an on-line petition approaching half a million signatures and rising.

And yet ALL of the rich conservation organisations – the National Trust,
the Woodland Trust, the RSPB, the Wildlife Trusts Partnership, and even
Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth - who have the resources and clout to
lead this campaign to a rapid victory have been horribly absent from the
field.  

At a recent ornithologists conference in Sussex I asked the RSPB’s
Conservation Director what kind of a campaign they had, and suggested that
his organization and its sisters had the ability to make or break the
campaign. 

His answer was chilling. He made no mention of a campaign, and started off
by telling us that the RSPB was not a rich organization (though their
regional office down the road from me has 60 salaried staff, and they have
recently acquired several new tracts of Sussex land) and rounded up by
saying that “the state had no business growing trees”.

Yet it does. Though the Forestry Commission controls only 18% of woodland
the Commission produces 60% of home grown timber, and harvests 92% of its
softwood increment, as opposed to just 37% in the private sector. The
public forest estate counters the business cycle by a steady timber
harvest
irrespective of market conditions. They maintain their network of staff
and
contractors, their forest infrastructure and year-on-year thinning and
planting operations, irrespective of market conditions because they know
that, if they don’t, their long term forest plans are jeopardized. By
contrast, only 60% of all private woodlands are in management schemes, and
commercial pheasant shooting represents the only real management many of
the woods in my county receive. My countryside is tarnished with privately
owned semi-derelict forestry plantings, ancient woodlands strangled by
invasive rhododendron, giant veteran trees strangled by encroaching
conifers, and gill woodlands dating back to the ‘wildwood’ now flooded for
commercial duck shooting ponds.

But the Commission doesn’t just grow trees. They are a major player in the
restoration of ancient woodland, as well as endangered heath, mire, fell,
and other open habitats. About 26% of Forestry Commission land has SSSI
status and 96% of this is in favourable condition. The Forestry Commission
today bears no resemblance to the Commission of a generation ago, with its
narrow remit to grow conifers, conifers, and conifers, irrespective of
landscape and wildlife. Their recent dedication of their entire freehold
estate as statutory access land, and their energetic creation of Community
Forests and multi-purpose urban fringe and brown field woodlands,
exemplify
a major progressive turn. 

Down here in Brighton we have some previous experience of the bureaucratic
inertia of the conservation NGOs. Fifteen years ago the Labour Council
proposed privatizing our 13,000 acre farmed downland estate. Every one of
the rich local conservation organisations accepted that the privatisation
could not be stopped, and contented themselves with seeking tokenistic
measures of amelioration. A hastily cobbled together coalition of
community
and wildlife activists – ‘Keep Our Downs Public’ – refused to accept this
sell-out, campaigned furiously, and won. This victory set the scene for
four more successful local anti-privatisation struggles, including a 77%
tenants’ vote against council housing stock transfer, and a recent success
against the privatisation of council–owned downland at nearby Worthing. 

The lesson is clear. We need a two-pronged battle. First, the widest
possible independent mobilization against this privatization, on a clear
demand for the protection and expansion of the public forest estate as an
exemplar for a people’s countryside, and, secondly, a hard challenge to
the
rich NGOs to adopt a common position of refusal to take over any
privatized
fragments of the Forestry Commission estate. Such a boycott will blow out
of the water the government’s smokescreen proposals for an increased role
for the ‘third sector’, social enterprises, and community control.

If we do not succeed in this the ramifications of failure will spread far
beyond the decline and commercialization of ex-Forestry Commission land,
for the fire-fighting role of the NGOs will be even further compromised.
We
will be faced with a huge diversion of the energy of countryside NGOs and
activists to the effort to absorb chunks of privatised forest and preserve
their public values, without the commercial cross-funding and professional
resources of the Commission. 

Down here in Sussex we have painful recent experience of this, for Keep
our Downs Public’s fight against privatisation came too late to keep one
important landscape, at the Devil’s Dyke, in municipal control. The
National Trust took it over, and launched a big fund raising appeal.
Whilst
they were doing so a further stretch of gorgeous downland came onto the
market – downland with ‘Site of Special Scientific Interest’ status and
traversed by a stretch of the South Downs Way. The National Trust refused
to bid for it - too expensive, in the light of their new commitment. The
result was that this downland was lost to an agri-business investor who
wished to convert its woodlands to intensive game rearing. The old
conservation projects were abandoned, and when I inspected the site last
year the landowner had herbicided over an acre of ancient flowery chalk
grassland to secure his fence lines.

Thus, the National Trust wasted its energies on purchasing land that was
already in public ownership, and abandoned the fight for a site that was
at
real threat.

But the struggle for the public forest estate is one that we CAN win, and
in so doing we can make further gains. We can use this campaign to
re-connect people with the wider countryside and its problems. Down here
in
the south east many of our Forestry Commission estates are scattered and
relatively remote. Our campaign will make sure that the public get to know
better what they are at risk of losing. 

We can, too, gain traction for the case for greater democracy and local
initiative in the management of public forests, without fragmenting
ownership and strategic control amongst a rag tag of third sector
organizations, private forestry companies and landowners.

State ownership’s major advantage is that it subtracts a resource, at
least partially, from the irrationality and greed of the market.  The
answer for our public forests is the same as the answer for our economy.
We
need more democratic public ownership and economy-wide planning  – enough
to break the dominance of the market – not some porridge of private
businesses and ‘social enterprises’ struggling for market share.

‘Keep Our Forests Public’ is a new coalition formed with the intention of
galvanising campaigning activity across the Forestry Commission’s South
East Region.





  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: MarkiB 
  To: diggers350 at yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Monday, February 14, 2011 10:56 PM
  Subject: [Diggers350] Re: Forest sell-offs


    
  Fran and Ben extoll the virtues of buying woodland for ownership by the
community - which on the surface appears an attractive proposition
(chiming
with that often unconscious assumption that local always know best). 
  However, in doing so, they both appear to have missed Dave's earlier
comment about how community buyout in Sussex has led to the loss of
coordinated management (eg. coppicing), and so, as a result, a negative
impact on biodiversity. 

  Perhaps community management would best work if kept firmly under a
  regulatory umbrella overseen by the Forestry Commission?

  My inclination that community buy out, if it should even happen
  at-all, should only be at the margins to protect the national interest
of retaining a strategic reserve of forestry for the market in wood does
not really stand up to scrutiny because the amount of large commercial
forest in England is small (much more in Scotland), and so, in the
international free market, this consideration is rendered laregly
meaningless. 

  In these circumstances, I personally have no absolute ideological
objection to public sell off provided every sq inch of that land remains
fully protected, it's management is subject to being overseen by the full
vigourous regulatory authority of the Forestry Commission, that all public
access agreements remain fully in place, and finally that all of the above
are held absolutely sacrosanct irrespective of any future governmental
change in policy that may seek to compromise on any of the former
stipulations (deed of covenant).

  However, since I am not satisfied that the government have embarked on
  their now stalled attempt at privatisation without ensuring all of these
considerations are to be fully adhered to, I have so far been opposed to
public sell-off.

  Actually, bearing in mind the increased cost in management terms of
  regulation as opposed to direct control, the reason the gobvt may have
  ditched the proposals is that they've realised that their plans will be
costlier in the long run!

  Mark Brown (The Land Is Ours)

  Latest from 38 degrees:

  The government have announced they will pause forest sell-offs for a few
  months. It's a brilliant sign, but our forests are still in danger. If
we
  keep working together, we can save our forests forever - not just for a
few
  months.

  The government is still going full steam ahead with changing the law to
  clear the way for a 100% sell-off. It looks like they hope the fuss will
  die down if they pause a few sales here and there - so they can press on
  with quietly scrapping legal protection for our public woodlands.

  Our petition is now 490,000 strong. Let's show the government we will
keep
  campaigning until English forests are safe, by making sure the petition
  passes half a million signatures today.

  Please forward this email and ask your friends to sign:
  http://www.38degrees.org.uk/save-our-forests

  Picture yourself in the last forest you visited. Remember how you felt,
  what you saw, how peaceful it was. Now imagine hearing that this
beautiful
  place has been auctioned off. We just can't let it happen!

  By working together, bit by bit, we are protecting our woodlands for
  future generations. Since 38 Degrees members voted to launch this
campaign,
  we've spread the word, emailed our MPs, and chipped in to pay for
opinion
  polls and adverts. It’s starting to work - today is a time to celebrate.
  But we also need to keep the pressure building.

  Please forward this email and ask your friends to help get our petition
  past half a million signatures today:
  http://www.38degrees.org.uk/save-our-forests

  -------- Original Message --------
  Subject: Re: [Diggers350] Woodlands.co.uk
  Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 08:41:51 +0000
  From: Fran Ryan <Fran at peopleincharge.co.uk>
  To: Ben Mathers <benjaminmathers at gmail.com>

  I have fantasised about setting a national community land trust and 
  fund, to buy the woodland for the benefit and use of local communities. 
  this would be a way of securing it in the public domain in perpetuity. 
  Maybe community bonds could be part of how it could be funded. Sadly I 
  don't have the energy or time or expertise to do this.

  But with so much stuff on the verge of being sold off (other bits of 
  land such as county farms, school playing fields etc,) all then gone for

  ever it would be great if we could muster some energy to make a 
  concerted effort to capture the land for local people for ever.

  Fran Ryan
  Oxfordshire Community Land Trust

  On 10/02/2011 13:12, Ben Mathers wrote:
  > I did get in contact with the folks managing their South Wales
  > properties asking about their attitude to One Planet Development and
  > whether there was anything in their covenant stopping people from
living
  > on the land and the woman I contacted definitely said that there
wasn't.
  > The only issue she thought would be with the planning department...
  >
  > Wouldn't it be great though if someone could buy these bits of
woodland
  > and then split them up and sell them for the £1,800 that was paid,
does
  > anyone know of anyone thinking of doing something like this? Even if
you
  > were to sell them for £2,800 you'd still be making a whopping £54,000
  > profit for doing nothing! I mean if a trust was set up to do something
  > similar that money could then go into buying some more land and doing
  > likewise, obviously with a strict covenant on the land ensuring low
  > impact principles with areas of common land etc etc. I know this is
  > probably something most people on this email group think about, but
  > really it wouldn't need a very big initial outlay (well not very big
for
  > some people at least!). What is stopping people I wonder?
  >
  > Ben
  >
  > On 9 February 2011 10:01, John Boshier <john at permaculture-jb.me.uk
  > <mailto:john at permaculture-jb.me.uk>> wrote:
  >
  > They may be unpleasant, but they do seem to be open to discussing
  One
  > Planet Developments in Wales, See
  > 
 
http://www.woodlands.co.uk/blog/woodland-economics/one-planet-development-in-wales-a-policy-for-low-impact-sustainable-livin/
  >
  > . I think the wording has changed a bit, as when I looked on their
  site
  > recently I think they said they would not object to it, and I've
  heard
  > this from another source.
  >
  > If anyone knows more I would like to know. I'm going to be producing
  a
  > One Planet Development newsletter, and am organising meetings to
  help
  > people get started on low-impact development in Wales. You can sign
  up
  > to the newsletter at http://www.eco-hamlets.org.uk/newsletters.php ,
  > and
  > I'd welcome any contributions to the newsletter.
  >
  > John