Tunbridge Wells is blessed with green spaces, populated with many mature trees.
This was confirmed a few years ago when some of us became “citizen science volunteers” by taking part in the national Canopy Cover project, estimating the percentage of tree canopy cover in Tunbridge Wells Wards via online software and aerial maps.
The results were interesting – Pantiles & St Marks, for instance, turned out to have 34% tree cover, and Broadwater 47%, which are much higher percentages than the England average of 17.5%.
So it was sad to hear that the Council recently cancelled its tree planting budget – no doubt another victim of the central budget cuts brought in by the Conservative/LibDem Coalition after 2010, resulting in TWBC’s income now being some 40% lower than it would otherwise have been.
But that cancelled budget is nothing to the travesty that is carried out by the Government every year in subsiding the felling and burning of trees at the massive Drax power station in Yorkshire, for a few percent of the UK’s electricity supply.
Some years ago, when our MP Greg Clark was Business Secretary, my wife and I lobbied him (appropriately enough in Ashurst – a “hurst” being Kentish for a wooded hillside, and ” ash hurst” sounding like the trees have been burnt….) against the Government subsidising the burning of thousands of good trees chopped down in the southern USA in the Drax power station.
The Govt was at that time gifting £1billion a year to the burning of trees across the UK under the name of “biomass”, with 80% of the money going to Drax. The annual subsidies started in 2012, under the Conservative/LibDem Coalition government, and will soon total £11billion.
Greg lost his position as Business Secretary in the Brexit frenzy, but the current Energy Secretary Claire Countinho recently succumbed to the Drax lobbyists, and signed off on their plan to add unproven and complex carbon capture and storage to the wood-burning units. Analysts report that the likely £40billion (yes, that’s right, Forty Billion Pounds) it will cost will be paid for by domestic consumers’ energy bills.
£40billion is about £600 for every person living in the UK, and tots up to £46million pounds for the 77,000 adult voters in Tunbridge Wells – comparable to half the cost of the rejected Calverley Square project, and adding to all our energy bills in due course.
The scale of the folly is breathtaking, as was the quiet way the Government slipped the news out under the radar screen.
Across Tunbridge Wells there are homeowners and community groups doing their best to preserve our trees and plant new ones – but all that comes to nought while we have a national Government that encourages the large-scale chopping down and burning of trees in Drax power station via massive public subsidies.
There is a General Election coming, and Times readers can help to stop this idiocy; ask any canvassers at your door what their Candidate plans to do with the Drax subsidies – and vote accordingly!