Timber company warns of Welsh wood shortage

The warning has been sounded by timber fence post manufacturer Clifford Jones Timber, which manufactures over two and a half million posts a year at its Denbighshire headquarters and at a second timber mill in Gretna.

Penny Lloyd, purchasing director of the Ruthin-based company which employs over 80 staff, warned that a failure to meet planting targets was turning Wales into a tree-free zone and threatening an industry worth over £450m a year.

“An on-going programme of commercial timber planting is vital for the survival of our industry,” she said. “Back in the 1970s we were planting over 7,000 acres of trees every year – in recent years it’s been less than 250 and this is a crop that takes 20 years plus to grow to maturity.

“We have lost over 40,000 acres of forestry in the last 15 years – that’s an area one and a half times the size of Liverpool - and that needs to be replaced if our timber industry is to survive.

“There seems to be an opposition to planting conifers but it makes sense in terms of the needs of both commercial forestry, and conservational and amenity woodlands.

“Only 14% of Wales, 750,000 acres, is forested making it one of the least wooded countries in Europe but the timber industry employs over 11,000 people.”

Clifford Jones recently hosted an event as part of the Welsh Government’s Inside Welsh Industry programme to showcase the sustainability and innovation of their processes. Clifford Jones Timber chairman Richard Jones said Wales needed to be planting 50,000 acres a year to meet long-term targets set by the Welsh Government.