Nick Boles was speaking at a
Woodland Trustevent celebrating the Healthy Woods, Healthy Lives campaign.
The campaign promotes the health, wellbeing and other benefits of woods and trees. The NHS could save £2.1bn in healthcare costs if every household had access to quality green spaces.
At present just 14% of people in England live within 500m of a wood they can access.
Boles praised the Trust, which is headquartered in his Grantham constituency.
“I am planning minister which puts me in some very difficult situations,” he said.
“There are some decisions in which woodland is involved and they are never easy but one of the things I am keen to see is that we don’t just think in a defensive way about woodland.
“That we don’t just think – though it is important – about how we preserve what we have inherited, but we also think about how we create stuff that is new.
“How do we make sure that our burgeoning population in new cities and new suburbs are able to enjoy little slices of woodland like so many of us have done?”
Boles added:
“Just because something isn’t 400 years old doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value.”
The minister also paid tribute to Chief Executive Sue Holden, who is leaving the Trust after nine years.
“She has been an inspirational leader of the
Trust,” Boles said.
“At times it has felt like I have had a terrier with its jaws firmly clasped around my shins, but that is exactly what the relationship should be between a leading charity and a lowly government minister like me.”
Charles Walker hosted the event in the Commons, and MPs from all parties attended to show their support, including John Penrose, David Heath, Roger Williams, Clive Efford, Sammy Wilson, Mark Durkan, James Brokenshire, Ian Paisley and Heather Wheeler.
Also attending were representatives from the Government, grant giving bodies, local authorities and businesses.
The
Trustsaid its “key message” was to reaffirm the need for Government to capitalise on the value of wooded green space as a cost effective preventative health care tool, which ultimately improves peoples’ lives in a wide range of ways.
The
Woodland Trusthas an online resource listing almost 11,000 woodlands that people can access across the country.