
The billionaires and aristocrats cashing in on tree-planting schemes
Critics argue public grants for planting woodlands are benefiting the wealthiest over local communities, but landowners say they're helping fight climate change
by Lucie Heath
Billionaires, aristocrats and private investment funds are scooping up millions of pounds in taxpayer subsidies to plant trees, The i Paper can reveal.
Data released under Freedom of Information requests shows some of the biggest beneficiaries of tree planting subsidies include members of aristocratic families such as the Duke of Sutherland, the Duke of Buccleuch and Lord Dalmeny, whose estates have all received over £500,000 in public subsidies in the past five years.
Foreign billionaires, including Anders Holch Povlsen, the Danish owner of ASOS and Mohammed Mahdi Al Tajir, a businessman and former UAE ambassador to the UK, also own estates that have received similarly large sums.
Some landowners are then making a profit by felling trees for timber or by selling carbon credits to companies looking to offset their emissions.
Recipients of the subsidies are all large landowner businesses in Scotland, where the majority of the UK’s new forests are planted, with the money handed out by the Scottish Government.
Most environmentalists agree public money should be made available for planting trees and there is no suggestion landowners have broken any rules.
However, critics argue the system is driving up land prices and benefiting wealthy landowners and corporations to the detriment of local communities. Concerns have also been raised over the environmental credentials of some schemes receiving public funding.
A tree-planting gold rush
The UK has less tree cover than almost anywhere in Europe and is on track to miss a Government target to create 30,000 hectares (74,130 acres) of new woodland a year by 2025. Latest figures show just 20,660 hectares (51,051 acres) of woodland were planted in 2023/24.
To stimulate woodland creation, the UK Government and devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, provide subsidies to encourage landowners to plant trees.
Due to the availability of suitable land, roughly 75 per cent of the UK’s new woodlands are based in Scotland and the Scottish Government has spent almost £400m on subsidies over the past decade.
Scotland also has one of the most concentrated patterns of land ownership in the developed world, with roughly half of the country’s rural land held by less than 450 people.
As a result, much of the public money for such initiatives ends up in the hands of a few mega-wealthy individuals.
“The least deserving corporations and landowners are getting the largest grants and public subsidies,” said former Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard, a vocal critic of the current scheme.
‘Explosion in corporate ownership’
The landed aristocracy are amongst the biggest recipients of woodland creation grants.
Estates owned by Scotland’s most prominent aristocratic landowner, the Duke of Buccleuch, have received at least £1.5m to plant woodlands.
Estates owned by Duke of Sutherland received £812,018 and The Rosebery Estates near Edinburgh, owned by Sotherby’s chairman Lord Dalmeny, were granted £670,209.
Most of these estates will have previously received large subsidies under the European Union’s ‘basic payment’ scheme for farmers, which has been criticised for paying landowners simply for owning land, rather than ensuring environmental benefits.
“That’s a far bigger problem than paying landowners to do stuff, which is what the forestry grant and the environmental grant and other things actually do,” said Jon Collingdale, a forestry consultant based in Scotland.
A spokesperson for the Buccleuch Group, which posted post-tax profits of £2.1m last year, said the estates are playing a “key role” in helping meet climate targets. They added grants are paid to the business and not an individual.
The availability of forestry grants has also helped attract a new type of landowner to Scotland: corporations who are planting woodland in order to sell carbon credits or take advantage of tax benefits afforded to the forestry industry.
Over the last decade, London-based investment firm Gresham House has become Scotland’s third largest private landowner, research of land registry data by campaigner and former Green MSP Andy Wightman has found.
Gresham House manages forestry projects on behalf of investors who can enjoy significant tax breaks, including exemptions from inheritance tax and capital gains.
Income tax, corporation tax and capital gains tax is not levied on profits from selling timber. Commercial forests also qualify for 100 per cent relief from inheritance tax once owned for more than two years.
On its website, Gresham House states investors in forestry can enjoy “favourable taxation treatment in the UK” and returns in the region of 17 per cent.
An analysis by The i Paper found Gresham House has received at least £3.9m in public subsidies to plant trees since 2019/20.
“They are not in the business of planting trees. They’re in the business of helping people avoid paying inheritance tax and capital gains tax,” Leonard said.
“Commercial forestry can generate significant profits with money flowing to shareholders and being extracted out of local economies and the wider Scottish economy,” added Dr Josh Doble, policy manager at Community Land Scotland.
Other corporations have bought up land in the hope of taking advantage of the emerging carbon offset market.
One notable example is beer company Brewdog, which bought a former Highland sporting estate in the Cairngorms National Park in 2020 to undertake a mammoth reforestation and peatland restoration project, calling it the “Lost Forest”.
The purchase aligned with Brewdog’s green marketing plans; at the time the firm was promoting itself as a “carbon negative” brewer, a claim it later dropped following criticism from the advertising watchdog.
Brewdog’s project is registered under the UK woodland and peatland carbon codes, meaning other companies can buy credits in the project to offset their own emissions.
To date, Brewdog has received over £1m in public money for the Lost Forest, which its critics have dismissed as a greenwashing stunt.
Last February, campaign group Parkswatch Scotland said that over half of the trees planted had died within their first year.
A Brewdog spokesperson blamed this on “the unseasonably long hot and dry spell we saw in June 2023” and said the majority of saplings had now been replaced.
They added the project is “restoring, and preserving the beauty of the Kinara Estate for the people of Scotland to enjoy for generations to come” and that 790 acres of new woodland had been planted to date.
Shortly after Brewdog purchased its land, another Cairngorms estate was scooped up by an investment fund linked to Abrdn, formerly Standard Life.
Abrdn Property Income Trust (API) purchased the estate for £7.5m in 2021 to offset emissions from its property portfolio.
It entered into a grant agreement with Scottish Forestry worth £2.5m to be paid out in increments until 2029, however in July last year it emerged the trust was abandoning the project and putting the site back on the market for £12m.
Fraser Green, Head of Natural Capital at Abrdn, said the increased price reflected the planting and survey work carried out to progress “environmentally beneficial activities”.
But critics claim companies like Abrdn are exploiting Scotland’s natural assets – and the availability of public subsidy – for commercial aims, while driving land prices out of the reach of local communities.
The demand for “natural capital” projects resulted in soaring land prices in Scotland around the time of Brewdog and Abrdn’s acquisitions, which has cooled recently as the market for carbon credits struggles to get off the ground.
“Land prices have increased dramatically in recent years,” said Dr Doble. “Whilst encouragingly the market looks to be slowing… prices remain extremely high meaning that only the biggest players, often owned outside Scotland, can afford to buy forestry land.”
“[Forestry grants] have not fueled an extension of community ownership, but an explosion in corporate ownership,” added Leonard.
A spokesperson for Scottish Forestry defended the grants as an “essential driver in stimulating woodland expansion”.
‘Ecological dead zones’
As millions in public money flows towards the planting of trees, some are also raising concerns about the environmental credentials of many schemes.
Governments across the UK provide funding for both native woodlands and non-native conifers, the latter of which is typically felled and used to create timber.
Scotland’s timber industry argues non-native conifers benefit the environment as they grow, and sequester carbon, quickly, before being used as a sustainable building material.
But others question the logic of funding conifer forests that are destined to be chopped down.
“These forests are so tightly packed, under-monitored and unmanaged…they’re left for 30 years and then they’re cleared,” said Cornell Hanxomphou from the Environmental Rights Centre for Scotland.
He describes some of the single species forests as “ecological dead zones”.
“What’s happening is the forest is so dense, there’s no sunlight that’s able to reach the forest floor, so there’s no other life that’s really going on down there. It does nothing for ecology.”
In February 2024, a report by the Royal Society of Edinburgh called on the Scottish Government to scrap subsidies and tax breaks for conifer forests, arguing they don’t do enough to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises.
The report found roughly 80 per cent of the £390m Scottish ministers have spent on woodland subsidies has been spent on commercial conifers.
Spending should instead be focused on long-standing native forests, the report argued.
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Landowners The i Paper approached insisted their forests were managed in a sustainable manner.
Scottish Forestry said large timber projects “play an irreplaceable role in tackling climate change and achieving net zero, they support over 30,000 mainly rural jobs and contribute over £1bn to the Scottish economy each year”.
“Scotland needs to plant a mixture of both productive species as well as native broadleaves if we are to tackle climate change, nature loss and support a growing demand for timber,” they added.
However, many experts are calling for greater scrutiny over what – and who – benefits from the millions in taxpayer money available for trees.
“The real economic and environmental impact of this industry needs to be fully assessed, with claims of timber security and net zero tree planting ambitions properly placed against the quality and type of timber being produced and the impact on climate and biodiversity,” Dr Doble said.
“More of the wealth being generated needs to be captured locally with meaningful community benefit arrangements put in place so that communities impacted by dramatic land use change see some proportional recompense.”
Leonard added: “We do have to go back to the fundamentals, about the extent to which there is a concentration of land ownership in Scotland, which will lend itself to this kind of skewing of where the money goes.
“You come back to that fundamental principle of the many are paying the money, but the few are benefitting from it.”
Landowners: ‘We’re helping fight climate change’
Landowners approached by The i Paper said their tree-planting schemes are helping the UK meet its climate goals.
A spokesman for the Buccleuch Group said: “The Buccleuch Group operates a long-established forestry business which, apart from commercial forestry operations, is actively involved in native and riparian woodland planting – often working with communities and other organisations.
“We are committed to playing a key role in helping to achieve the Scottish Government’s stated target of 18,000 hectares of new woodland from 2024/25 as part of wider efforts to tackle climate change and boost timber production.”
Tim Kirkwood, CEO of WildLand, which manages the estates owned by Anders Holch Povlsen said: “Every penny of public funding we receive to supplement WildLand’s own substantial investment into nature recovery at sites like Glenfeshie supports the planting and maintenance of native tree species and the fragile natural habitats they support.
“We do this in line with the Scottish Government’s aim of creating public benefit from funding from woodland creation.”
A BrewDog spokesperson said: “The Lost Forest is one of the largest reforestation and peatland restoration projects the UK has seen, restoring, and preserving the beauty of the Kinara Estate for the people of Scotland to enjoy for generations to come. We partnered with Scottish Woodlands to plan and deliver on a five-year peatland restoration and woodland creation programme. So far, we have restored 725 acres of peatland and planted over 790 acres of new woodland, with more peatland restoration and new woodland planting in the pipeline.”
Fraser Green, Head of Natural Capital, Direct Real Estate, abrdn said: “Over the last three years, we have taken an area of land that was unproductive and previously predominantly used as a grouse moor and progressed a series of substantial environmentally beneficial activities. This includes restoration of native pine and birch woodland through planting and natural regeneration, with a further opportunity to restore degraded peatland.”
The Duke of Sutherland and Lord Dalmeny could not be reached for comment.