GREAT BRITISH ELM EXPERIMENT CAMPAIGN

That this House congratulates the Conservation Foundation on launching the Great British Elm Experiment which is an inspirational project aimed at restoring elm trees to the British landscape which from the late 1960s onwards witnessed the loss of an estimated 25 million elm trees destroyed by Dutch elm disease, leaving little more than 200 survivors according to research undertaken by the Natural History Museum; welcomes the involvement of 250 schools across Britain which have planted cuttings taken from some of the few mature trees that survived, from Hampshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire; further welcomes the announcement by the Conservation Foundation that in the coming years it intends to provide thousands more saplings which it will propagate; notes that this process will take decades but hopes that future generations will be able to enjoy the British landscape immortalised by the paintings of John Constable and the evocative lines of John Betjeman;calls on the Government, across departments, to encourage the planting of elm trees, of which there are 40 different varieties, on land which it owns; and also calls on other public bodies and land-owners to do the same.