The UK government has just laid out its plans to boost the amount of timber used in English house building projects, publishing the Timber in Construction Roadmap in December, which aims to boost the supply and use of timber in English homebuilding.
Currently, just nine per cent of homes in England are timber framed, compared to 92 per cent in Scotland.
Timber is a sustainable material, and it can play a key role in helping to decarbonise the construction industry. The built environment accounts for 25 per cent of the UK’s total carbon emissions, mainly through the use of carbon-intensive materials such as steel, reinforced concrete, aluminium, brick, cement and glass.
Timber has a much lower embodied carbon footprint than almost any other building material, except for ancient techniques such as rammed earth. However, rammed earth relies on unsustainable resources such as earth, chalk, lime, and gravel. One of the huge advantages of timber is that it can be renewed if managed and sourced responsibly.
One of the current stumbling blocks to increasing the use of home-grown timber is a lack of consistent supply. Last year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs published a target to plant 30,000 hectares of forestry by March 2025.
However, the present rate of planting is on target to meet only half of this goal, according to a report by the environmental audit committee (EAC) of cross-party MPs.
The EAC said it was “disappointed to observe that Forestry England is not currently on track to contribute fully to national tree-planting targets: to date it has only planted 303 hectares against its own target of 2,000 hectares between 2021-2026.”
It added: “Ministers should also commission work to identify opportunities for woodland creation on the wider government estate.”
The EAC chair, Philip Dunne, said: “The government’s target to plant 30,000 hectares of woodland in the UK by March 2025 is welcome and by and large ministers appreciate the conflicting challenges and demands on woodland.”
“But the committee is concerned that England is currently way off meeting its contribution to that UK-wide goal and that the rate of planting must increase.”
There is also a shortage in the timber workforce, as older workers retire and younger people are not receiving the relevant training and gaining the requisite skills. In an attempt to mitigate this situation, the government announced that it was investing an additional £1m in funding for training courses and arboriculture across England.
The training will cover areas such as chainsaw operation, planning and planting new woodland, pruning and branch removal, and marketing and selling timber.
Meanwhile, the government has announced greater funding and flexibility for land management and forestry schemes in England. Maintenance payments to support land managers with longer-term activities will be increased for ten years to 15 years and there will be an extended capital window from two to three years to provide a longer planting season.