Forest Research Quinquennial Review

 

Forest Research was set up as an executive agency of the Forestry Commission on 1^st April 1997. Like all government executive agencies, its work is reviewed every 5 years.

The Review started in August 2001 with a consultation inviting the opinions of customers, partners and interested parties of all kinds (the ‘stakeholders’) and looked forward 5 years from April 2002. The results are summarised below.

Quality of research

The consultation showed that there is universal recognition of the high quality of research carried out by Forest Research, and of its published outputs (and other ways of disseminating results, such as Research Update seminars).

Forest Research is clearly ‘well-plugged’ in to government departments, non-departmental public bodies and the academic world: its "customers" (in the sense of those who pay for the work) feel that it is very responsive.

The strong degree of unanimity on these important issues shows solid achievement by Forest Research.

Improvements sought

There were four points on which many respondents sought improvement:

• Forest Research has had less success with the difficult task of communicating research results to a geographically-widespread and often-isolated group of forestry practitioners: its outputs were too little known and there was clear scope for using the website more.
• Many respondents felt that they had little or no input into the research priorities which Forest Research was pursuing.
• While perceptions of research priorities differed widely, the general feeling was that Forest Research had diversified its portfolio of research in the right direction, but that change had been a little slow and that more emphasis was still needed on the environmental and (especially) social aspects of forestry.
• There was a lot of reservation about the "wash its own face" financial requirement and a desire (not restricted to the academic community, in fact expressed more strongly by practitioners) for more speculative research.

Organisation

In organisational terms, most respondents favoured retaining a dedicated Forestry Commission agency.

A handful suggested alternative models, including re-absorption within the Forestry Commission, non-departmental public body status, a private trust or complete privatisation (although a large number of respondents made it clear that they would oppose the last option).