BREXIT will break down 'silo thinking' on land use in Britain – and that could mean more of the post-CAP rural budget going to encourage tree planting.

Speaking to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Forestry, Berwick-upon-Tweed MP and vice chair Anne-Marie Trevelyan, said: “There are key areas we are looking to drive forward in terms of the opportunity to break down some of the silos which EU regulations have allowed Defra to follow without question.

“Defra has spent 40 years as an outpost of EU funding decisions. The message is that we need joined-up thinking – and ways of thinking we haven’t seen in the past.”

Mike Seville of the Country Landowners Association reckoned that UK landowners could only “tinker around the edges” of new planting for the next couple of years, but saw a major opportunity when Brexit decisions kicked in: “We talk about the farming sector and the forestry sector but the truth is that most landowners do both. We need to look at models which allow landowners to make a choice – both cash-flow and investment models.

“Forestry delivers lots of non-market benefits which the public enjoys and expects, and there is a legitimate argument for society to pay for those benefits. We will make a strong argument for the CAP budget level to be retained but for it to be used for different things. Forestry should benefit from that and could take a bigger part of the post-CAP budget. Also, the potential for woodland creation to deliver on the government’s carbon mitigation targets in a cost-effective way is very strong.”

Stuart Goodall, chief executive of forestry trade group Confor, briefed the APPGF on its latest report "A Thriving Forestry and Timber Sector in a post-Brexit World", but said that increasing new planting and restocking was the crucial issue, irrespective of Brexit.

“New planting is still disappointingly low. The Woodland Creation Planning Grant has opened up again in England and will hopefully bring more planting forward but we are still not hitting the targets we would like.”