8. What is the Welsh Government's forestry and woodland restocking policy? OQ59243

Thank you, Mark Isherwood. We need to increase tree cover in Wales. Woodland that is felled is normally required to be replanted as a condition of the felling licence. Where there are good reasons not to do so, loss in tree cover is usually compensated for elsewhere.

Thank you. There is widespread support for plans for a national forest for Wales, a vast network of woods and forests across the nation open for everyone to explore and enjoy. However, woodland continues to be seen as a public good even when it provides an ideal habitat for apex predators whose predation of nests and chicks is a primary cause of, for example, curlew breeding failure. What specific action, therefore, are you taking to ensure that the Welsh Government's target for woodland planting in Wales takes further account of this, which is central to nature recovery? Further, how are you addressing concerns raised with me by a Flintshire constituent that your My Tree, Our Forest scheme is seeing trees planted too close to each other with very little, if any, space for them to develop properly, and, finally, by the Country Land and Business Association Cymru that the planting of new trees should be accompanied by a tree health strategy to support those who manage woodland in removing diseased specimens promptly and replacing them, in order to reduce the spread of disease, when we have a crisis in ash and larch and emerging issues in oak? Diolch yn fawr. 

Thank you, Mark. I pay tribute to your efforts on behalf of the curlew. You know that I've come along to the meetings of the curlew protection programme. I'm really pleased to see that we're working alongside them. I'll just say, and I said this at the weekend to a number of groups I spoke with, that we use the tree as an iconic symbol of what we're trying to do in both carbon capture and in nature-positive work, in the same way as the World Wildlife Fund uses the panda. Nobody thinks that the World Wildlife Fund, therefore, thinks that pandas should be absolutely everywhere on the planet, and we don't think that trees should be absolutely everywhere in the countryside. It's an iconic symbol. You know as well as I do that we are restoring an enormous amount of natural peatland. Clearly, that should not be forest. Species-rich open meadows should not be forests. Where there should be forests, though, we are woefully behind, so we do need to restock, and we need to restock quickly, but the right tree in the right place.

In terms of the My Tree, Our Forest initiative, each tree comes with a programme to help you understand how and where to plant it and what it should look like at various stages; a wealth of expertise is available via Coed Cymru to help people and, of course, we will also plant your tree somewhere else for you if you're not lucky enough to have a garden capable of having it. It's been a very popular programme.

I've also planted trees through the National Trust initiative in schools in my area, and I'd encourage all of you to get involved in that. They're blossom trees, and they bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the children who are very excited to do that—very interested in my talk to them on a future career in forestry. So, we're doing a lot of the right things here.

I don't want to put people off planting trees in their garden, but it does come with a plan for how to do that—it comes with instructions, so to speak. I do encourage people to go along to their hubs while they're open and pick up a tree and donate it to your local school, if you want to, because it's a really important part of reconnecting our population back to the natural environment, but it's very much the right tree in the right place. If you go along to one of the hubs, the people who are handing out the trees will have a long chat with you about where you want to put the tree and what kind of tree will be best suited to your piece of land or your garden.

I'd love a Wales full of pandas, I must say. You could be the champion of pandas at that point, then, Darren Millar, to bring us—[Laughter.] Okay, okay. Thank you to the Minister and the Deputy Minister.