The Tree Health Diagnostic and Advisory Service (THDAS), a sub-section of the Forestry Commission which was defunded by the last Government, has experienced over five years worth of enquiries in the last six months due to public fear over the chalara disease, which causes dieback of ash trees.
In a normal year, the service receives a combined total of 750 enquires. But in autumn 2012, the UK saw multiple cases of chalara, a serious disease of ash trees which is caused by the fungus Chalara fraxinea. According to Forest Research, the disease “causes leaf loss and crown dieback in affected trees, and usually leads to tree death in younger trees”; as a result, “it is being treated as a quarantine pest under national emergency measures”, and Forest Research is asking that suspected cases be reported.
Since then, THDAS has received over 4000 enquiries from England and Wales alone (as well as approximately 200 from Scotland), a workload ten times higher than normal.
That massively increased workload comes as the service struggles with budget cuts introduced in the years leading up to the 2010 election.
Las Autumn, the Times‘ Oliver Moody reported on the numerous cuts made to biosecurity programmes run by the Forestry Commission:
- In 2010 Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary at the time, signed off a strategy paper making biosecurity the Forestry Commission’s least-funded field of research, with an annual budget of less than £1.2 million;
- David Miliband presided over a 20 per cent cut in biosecurity funding in 2007 alone;
- In the last financial year for which figures are available, 2010-11, just £50,000 was spent on Forestry Commission research into invasive diseases. This was in spite of a £130,000 external grant for the work;
- Between 2004 and 2010 the “monitoring and biosecurity” budget was cut by almost 60 per cent in real terms.
Those cuts came despite warnings from Scandinavian scientists in 2007 that chalara outbreaks had been reported, and could spread to the UK. Roddie Burgess, then head of plant health at the Forestry Commission, told Moody that he had sent a pest alert to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) that year, but still the cuts came. As THDAS attempts to cope with its 1000 per cent increase in calls, that is starting to look like a false economy.
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