This piece is an extract from our Latest from the Woods newsletter (previously Forestry Latest News), which is emailed out at 4PM every Friday with a round-up of the week's top stories.
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PUBLIC forestry in Wales has found itself in the firing line lately.
No sooner had the dust settled on Forestry Journal's exclusive report on the concerns of the country's industry (a story widely cited since) than it emerged the environment agency was seeking to cut more than 250 jobs and close a string of visitor centres.
As is stands, we don't know how many of these at-risk positions could affect the forestry wing of Natural Resources Wales (unlike the rest of the UK, forestry has no distinct government department), but it is a worrying development all the same.
READ MORE: Natural Resources Wales plans to cut more than 250 jobs
FJ has since been told by timber buyers that NRW is sending out bills for timber from two years ago, with one senior forestry figure going so far as to say "the wheels are falling off".
Others have called on Huw Irranca-Davies, who oversees forestry in the Welsh government, to show "political leadership", calling the job losses "short sighted and damaging".
Defending the move, Clare Pillman, chief executive of NRW, said: “Public funding is exceptionally tight across the whole of the UK. As such, we are having to look across all of our remit and critically review what we can and must continue to do, what we stop, and what we slow or do differently to fulfil our Corporate Plan ambitions.
"This is no different to any other public sector body at the moment."
The uncertainty over NRW's future hardly paints an optimistic picture for the year ahead; a year in which the country desperately needs to get its woodland creation levels back on track, after they plummeted in the 12 months prior to the end of March 2024.
"Times are indeed hard and budgets tight," wrote Nick Adams, vice-chair of the Forestry Contracting Association's (FCA) English Policy Committee, in a letter to FJ. "But again, this cannot be used as an excuse. Budgets, and where they are allocated, are a choice."
What departments NRW chooses to prioritise at this time will be telling.
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