Any other business | 5 February 2011

Privatising forests must be a sensible policy if so many celebs are against it

The more passionate the outcry against the government’s plan to privatise its English forestry estate, the more I feel the urge to cash in my meagre investments and bid for one of the forests in question myself. For a start, any policy which attracts the opposition of Tracey Emin, Ken Livingstone and Dame Vivienne Westwood is likely, on close examination, to be entirely sensible. And a holding of woodland is, after all, the perfect answer to my twin concerns for the immediate future, expressed here last month, of inflation and social disorder.

Managed forests grow in timber value at a steady 4 or 5 per cent per annum — because that’s how nature works, and British forests grow faster than those in the more northerly climes because we have better soil and a warmer, wetter climate. We also have compulsory replanting requirements that make our forests more sustainable, plus they come with nifty tax advantages and without any of the ticking-timebomb complexities of financial products pushed by wealth managers.