Hoping to carve a slice of Olympic action

[Fiona]

AS FORMER sports minister Lord Moynihan was head-to-head with David Hemery for chairmanship of the British Olympic Association yesterday, David Crichton was also presenting his credentials to the Olympic Organising Committee in London, for a share of the spoils in the run up to 2012.

As chief executive of ConFor, the Edinburgh-based Confederation of Forestry Industries, Crichton was making his most important pitch to date in the short life of the new body that aims to transform the image of the Scottish wood producing and manufacturing sector.

"We were focusing on the common opportunity of the Olympics in 2012 which will generate a huge amount of investment in urban regeneration as well as sporting facilities," says Crichton, a former chief executive of Scottish Enterprise Lothian and Edinburgh.

"The wood industry sees this as something not to be missed, we want to ensure that timber figures very highly in the plans. It's a great market in pounds and pence terms, but also because London has stressed that this would be the sustainable Olympics.

"What better way to do that than making use of a sustainable product like timber."

ConFor intends to get the "voice of wood" noticed in the national debate over economy and environment.

Professionalising the message of the Scottish, and UK, wood industry is long overdue.

A patchwork of distinct sectors - growers, harvesters, first and second stage processors - the industry has been historically ineffectual in fighting its corner, relative to its more coherent and well-resourced competitors in steel and concrete.

"What we are trying to do is to create a single voice for the industry, in areas of shared concern like building the market and influencing policy. Because the industry has been fragmented in the past I don't think people realise the scale it represents," says Crichton.

From the perspective of the Scottish economy, re-organisation has been overdue, at least since the 1980s when Scottish forests came into their own as major suppliers of softwood, growing from 1.5 million cubic metres in 1980, to 5.5 million in 2000, with ten million projected by 2020. This represents around 55 per cent of the total UK harvest, putting forestry closer to the centre of gravity of Scottish economic life.

That exponential growth has stoked investment averaging £60m a year, but the cross-communication across the supply chain has been poor.

Since 2000, the Scottish Executive has made efforts to maximise the major economic opportunity by creating the Scottish Forest Industries "Cluster". Now, in ConFor, it has a cross-industry private sector partner, with an ambition to make forestry "sexy", says Crichton. "Forestry is seen as a traditional and typically rural industry. We are demonstrating that it's as forward-looking, technologically advanced and globally-aware as electronics and life sciences."

ConFor was set up in May last year as a not-for-profit members' organisation, incorporating the Forestry and Timber Association (FTA) and the UK Forest Products Association (UKFPA).

It is funded by, and is accountable to, its own members and its aim is to promote the market for wood and forest products, and to help improve industry competitiveness.

Featuring strongly is the environmentalist pitch, the potential of wood as an energy supply via "biomass" (see panel), whose use Crichton describes as a "win-win situation" for the industry and the economy as a whole.

It will not be plain sailing. Competition from other building materials is intense, and builders and architects "always have a choice", says Crichton.

Growers and harvesters in particular are beginning to feel the heat of imported wood products at ever lower prices (the price of imports has barely risen since the 1970s).

"Like most other manufacturing sectors, we face competition from lower cost manufacturers, and China is most certainly beginning to make its presence felt in our market," he adds.

"There is also the problem that it's becoming more and more difficult to refresh skills in our industry."

Despite such challenges , ConFor's picture of the future of wood is highly optimistic: "If you look at the quality of the product, timber is the ultimate product in terms of design, look and sustainability, it has so many advantages. We have to keep pressing home those advantages, which are not just business and economic objectives but also environmental and social ones as well."

Whether or not ConFor's Olympic dreams succeed, the important fact is that it is one of first occasions where the industry has come together to focus on a specific project opportunity instead of reverting to fragmented initiatives.

"The Olympics have an iconic profile. We are really trying to influence behaviours and buying patterns of major construction companies, and the long-term gain is to get them thinking more regularly and positively about use of timber.

"It's a one-off opportunity, and we intend to win a good share of that business but the real prize is the longer-term impact Olympic contracts would have on construction and purchasing patterns. Ultimately it's in everyone's interest to grow the market."

UK needs to branch out into biomass

ONE of ConFor's chief aims is to talk up Britain's woodlands as sources of energy.

With the UK struggling to meet the government's target for 10 per cent of electricity to come from sustainable sources by 2010, ConFor has been pressing the case for "biomass" fuel, renewable energy derived from the processing of tree tops, branches and other wood litter rotting on the forest floor, the by-product of the thinning process that is part of forest management.

ConFor has been making representations to the DTI on how backward the UK is in European terms in using wood as an energy source, stressing that biomass-fired generation systems can produce up to 10MW, enough to heat homes, schools and hospitals, and are ideal for heating remote communities.

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