WE have sent the following letter to Mark Harper MP.

"Thank you for your letter dated 25 February 2011 regarding our concerns over government plans for the Forest of Dean. As you probably guessed, we already knew the details of the Secretary of State's statement, but we nevertheless appreciate your courtesy in writing to us. We certainly welcome both the abrupt ending of the consultation on the future of the public forest estate and the promise to remove the forestry clauses from the Public Bodies Bill, although we feel sure that both had much more to do with the massive public furore than with messages via the early consultation returns.

However, the choice of the Secretary of State's expert advisors and the subsequent government decision, the future disposal of 15 per cent of the English public forest and the threat drastically to reduce the staffing and objectives of the Forestry Commission, remain serious concerns.

We want to be sure that the advice given to the government by the autumn comes largely from unbiased technical experts, not from non-scientists with political axes to grind, and that it is published well before a government decision is made. We want the ministers involved to understand that the Forestry Commission must retain its team of professional scientists, economists, estate managers and statisticians, together with sufficient technicians and foresters to maintain the present standard of the public forest and to continue the present technical support it provides to The Woodland Trust, The National Trust, the RSPB and to private estates. Those very many politicians lacking scientific training and with scant numeracy need to be told that, to remain effective, technical teams need a critical mass – scattering expert professionals in all directions will drastically reduce their cumulative value, particularly in an environment where expert committees are branded as quangos and eliminated. And please don't recycle the spin that since the last government sold off woodland without any consultation it's alright for the present one to do so. We know that, over the past decade, sales have been small and substantially offset by acquisitions of woodland forming better public amenities.

So, can we be sure that from now on, publically, you will stand up for your constituents by:

•Ensuring that the Public Bodies Bill contains no clauses concerning forestry;

•Arguing for the present structure and responsibilities of the Forestry Commission to be kept;

•Arguing in favour of keeping all the present English public forest in public hands?

Finally, you contrasted the way your government has managed consultation on our forests, with how Post Office closures were managed, referring to the latter as a "sham consultation".

We have three comments. First, we're not sure that it's proper for an MP to make overt party political points in a letter to constituents presumably paid for out of parliamentary expenses. Sec­ond, each closure consultation referred to an individual Post Office, unlike the blanket forestry consultation which excluded as an option the outcome most people wanted, and over 350 threatened Post Offices remained open as a result of consultations – hardly an outcome to be expected of a "sham consultation". Third, because your closure argument is such a clumsy example we think you should avoid future attempts at making party political capital out of past history."

­– David and Morag Norman, Longhope.