Labour has announced a plan to plant 2 billion trees over the next 20 years. The BBC describes this as “ambitious”. Guido has been doing some sums.

• This would mean more than 270,000 trees being planted every day for 20 years.
• Assuming a 7-hour working day that is over 600 trees a minute.
• That would require 20,000 people planting trees.
• If each tree requires a planting density of say 10 square metres per tree, that is 10,000 trees per square kilometre, so 27 square kilometres-a-day, that is foresting an area the size of Exeter every day for 20 years.
• After 20 years some 9.5% of the UK land surface would have to been forested.

The surface area of Britain is 209,331,000,00m², given 13% of Britain is already forest, that means Labour’s tree planting would result in nearly 23% of Britain being forest. Roughly 70% of Britain is currently agricultural land and the remaining 7% of the country is urbanised for human habitation. Looks like Labour’s 150,000 homes a year pledge will actually have to be treehouses…