I’ve seen a lot of tweets and Facebook updates asking people to support this campaign to “save our forests”. I don’t support it. Here’s why.

For a start, the campaign is extremely misleading. It gives the impression (probably deliberately) that the government is bent on selling off forests so that they can be cut down and used for golf courses, holiday villages, etc. But that’s entirely untrue. For a start, there aren’t any firm proposals at all yet – just a planned consultation on what to do next. And, even if forestry land is sold off, it’s not going to lead to wholesale destruction of the forests. Wording such as that in the Telegraph report which says that the law is “likely to be changed giving private firms the right to cut down trees” implies that trees aren’t being cut down at the moment. But they are – it’s just that the state has a monopoly on doing so in many forests. In the future, it won’t. The BBC report is rather more balanced, and makes it clear that any sell-off will ensure that the environment and leisure uses of the forests will be protected.

In any case, I don’t think it is necessarily a bad thing that some land owned by the Forestry Commission could be sold off. It’s a bit of a historical anomaly anyway that the state is by far the largest operator of commercial woodland in the UK – something which dates back to shortly after WWI when the government decided it needed more wood, and nationalised a lot of land in order to plant trees. These days, there’s no particular reason why forestry should be predominantly state-run any more than any other form of agriculture or rural land management is.

Forestry is a form of agriculture – it’s not like, for example, moorland which is left to go its own natural way. All forests need to be managed by felling, coppicing, thinning and replanting trees – even those commonly thought of as “ancient” forests are predominantly managed woodland. So transferring the responsibility of doing that from the state to private landowners isn’t going to significantly affect the amount of forested land in the UK, or the nature of that land. Yes, it’s possible that some of it – the parts which are less valuable as woodland, and don’t have any planning restrictions – may be converted to golf courses or Center Parcs. But the Forestry Commission is already willing to sell land for those purposes anyway, so, again, it’s not a big change.

Provided that existing access rights are protected, therefore, I don’t see any reason why this is a bad idea. I certainly can’t sign up to a campaign to stop it happening.

What I would sign up for is an extension to the “right to roam” principles so that commercial forestry land is included. That would be far more useful, because not only would it protect rights which currently exist even after Forestry Commission land is sold to private owners, but it would also bring land within its remit that currently is not. And such a campaign would genuinely be politically neutral as it wouldn’t start from the premise that state ownership is good and private ownership is bad – if anything, it would tie in with a lot of what the coalition government is already proposing as regards open government. So it would be more likely to be heard, and more likely to be successful.