Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:57 pm on 1 February 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:57, 1 February 2022

Llywydd, I know that Adam Price will know that the Minister responsible has already established an expert group of people to help us to see how we can bring further investment into woodland creation in Wales in a way that does not lead to the sorts of damage that he identified, and he'll know that that group has many interests represented on it—Llais y Goedwig, Woodknowledge Wales, as well as experts like Professor Karel Williams of Manchester University.

That group has provided its recommendations to the Welsh Government, and it has a series of proposals that Ministers were discussing only last week: to reduce payment rates in the new woodland creation scheme for non-farmers, for example, to make sure that the money goes to people who are active farmers on the land here in Wales; the option of reducing payments in the new woodland creation scheme for people getting carbon credits, to deal with the point that the Member raised; and work to define less productive woodland, so that there is a future for Welsh farming in which it makes its contribution, through tree planting, to dealing with climate change, but does not intrude on land that could be used for productive, commercially saleable food production as well.

Now, that report does not recommend changes to the planning system, believing that it would be an ineffective way of dealing with the issues that the report was asked to respond to. But Ministers will take that forward, together with other ideas that are available from other sources, in order, as I said, to make sure that what we achieve here in Wales is tree planting on the scale that the Climate Change Committee recommends to us. The Climate Change Committee says that we must plant 86 million trees in Wales over the next decade, if we are to achieve net zero not by 2035 but by 2050. If we're to do that, we can only do it with the enthusiastic support of Welsh agriculture. In order to do that and to keep the support of communities of the sort that the Member referred to—and I was interested to hear about his meeting with local people in the Cwrt-y-cadno area—of course we have to make sure that we have that investment in a way that is owned locally. And I don't mean just physically owned, I mean owned in the sense of people wanting to support it as well, because that is the way in which we will be able to make sure that we meet our climate change ambitions without doing harm to local communities and the future of Welsh farming.