Today’s announcement might not be the victory campaigners were hoping for but at least it’s a small step in the right direction.
It means if we continue to SHOUT LOUDER, government will hear us.
What to do now…
There are still a lot of people who don’t know anything about the government’s plans for the forests. We still have a way to go to stop the Public Bodies Bill and there are a few ways you can help to Save Our Forests!
Sign the petition if you haven’t already – tell others about it and get them to sign too
Write to your MP to ask him to vote against Clauses 17-19 in the Public Bodies Bill
Send a Love Trees letter to a Lord – we’re not sure the government are briefing the House of Lords fully on their intentions for our forests, so we must brief them about how much we love our forests
Find a Local Campaign and join in – the left hand side of this page has a list of local campaigns
If you set up your own Local Campaign, get in touch and let us know where you are in England and what your web link is and we’ll put your Local Campaign on our website
Most importantly – SPREAD THE WORD!
We’ve come a long way but we’re not out of the woods yet!
Let’s be clear about this … the Govt has *not* paused the sell-off that everyone is campaigning against. The Govt has paused the sell-off that would see 15% of forests sold off over the next five years to raise £100M for Defra. This was previously a done-deal, as this sale was permitted under the Forestry Act without the changes being sought under the Public Bodies Bill (Clauses 17 & 18) that are needed to allow them to sell-off the entire estate. The sell-off the the entire estate is the subject of the current public consultation, and this is not affected at all by yesterday’s announcement by Caroline Spelman. There is a lot of misunderstanding in the public domain about this.
One thing this post and most MP’s seem to have over looked is that this “suspension” is simply for the 15% announced last October. This does not include the 85% under current consultation where the sale looks likely to go ahead!
This is not a time for sitting back thinking we have won, far far from it.
I am currently releasing a bunch of articles including interviews with politicians including Arlene McCarthy, an interview released yesterday. http://bit.ly/saveourforest1
That’s right Andrew – the “on-hold” sales are only 15% of the Public Forest Estate and this land area is already set for sale outside of the consultation.
You can read more about this, hectare by hectare here: http://saveourwoods.co.uk/news/on-hold-planned-forest-sales-and-what-that-means-by-hectare/