MARK Harper, in your pages, told us that we should buy and manage our own Forest, as we would do a better job of managing it than the Forestry Commission.

Can I ask him exactly where he thinks we will get the money? Not just the up-front cash to buy the Forest of course, but also the tens of thousands a year the forest costs to run over and above the revenues it earns.

This amount is estimated by one of Mark Harper's Tory colleagues, Cllr Venk Shenoi, to be a "£10million-plus maintenance bill" (in his letter to a local paper recently). The Forestry Commission themselves make a slightly more modest estimate of something under £810,000 a year (this sum being the operating losses for the full 'division', including forest in Somerset, Herefordshire etc)

Cllr Shenoi doesn't waste our time suggesting we can all club together to buy and run our own Forest – his 'vision' is of private ownership, making drastic cost efficiencies "Forest land under private ownership will gain from more efficient management to save cost". Those are pretty drastic 'efficiency savings'. It is hard to see how the same public benefit could be delivered on a break-even budget.

So do they expect us to take it over, or the "efficient" private sector? The Tories can't have it both ways, can they? Oh! But they can! At least they can if they are Steve McMillan, who in a single paragraph manages both to deplore the fact that the poor government has to 'stand the cost of managing the forests' and then the next sentence, asks 'why shouldn't the people of Dean get the direct benefit?'. Confused? I know they are!

I leave you with a final reassurance about this clearly well-thought-out and coherent policy. None of us needs to worry about whether or not the public and environmental benefits of publicly-owned and managed forests are at risk – because they are protected by the imagination of the Secretary of State for the Environment.

She doesn't have time to trouble herself with facts, of course – too tiresome my dears. But writing in the Guardian newspaper on November 12, she deployed that cast-iron, infallible protection measure – hoping for the best. Loftily waving away any concerns there might be a free-for-all of golf courses, holiday parks or housing developments she wrote: "I imagine local planning departments would have some strong views and use a range of safeguards to prevent this happening. Any proposals for development will come before the town and country planning process."

I hope you are as reassured as I am!

– Kate de Selincourt, Whitecroft.