Addressing an audience of 80 at the latest London Softwood Club lunch meeting, Mr White, who is stepping down from his role after nine years, said that modern trade associations can have a major beneficial impact for their industry, particularly in influencing regulation.
“The model should be a body like the CBI which plays a key role in shaping public policy development and is consulted early and in depth by government on major issues,” he said.
“Every trade association should ensure, as the TTF has done, that it is involved in consultation at the outset, so those bright ideas that civil servants and ministers get are stopped or reshaped if they are likely to have adverse impacts on members.”
Trade bodies, he added, should also be executive-, rather than committee-led.
“They have to be able to step outside day-to-day issues and take a helicopter view of their sector, and represent and serve the whole of their industry,” he said, citing the government’s housing review and the EU Timber Regulation as instances where the TTF had influenced developments in the trade’s interests.
To wield maximum impact with decision makers, he said, the whole timber industry needed a unifying trade organisation. “In my nine years at the TTF I’ve increasingly felt that having so many trade bodies, while each in its own right is doing a lot of good work, is an ineffective way to represent the overall supply chain,” he said.
The proposal to form a Confederation of Timber Industries as an umbrella body for the sector, he said, was a “move in the right direction”. A model the sector could aim for was the Mineral Products Association, which represents the concrete, aggregates, cement and associated sectors.
“This has brought together 17 bodies into one organisation which is very powerful in getting its viewpoint across,” he said.
Ultimately, he concluded, a pan-industry body should be able strengthen its members’ place in the market. “What I’d like to see is recognition in law of timber’s carbon capture and wider environmental benefits to ensure it is a first choice material, particularly in construction,” he said.
“They have achieved this elsewhere, such as in France where timber must make up a certain percentage of building materials, and with strong enough influence and representation, we could do the same.”
LSC announced it is contributing £500 sponsorship for Mr White’s 100-mile cycle ride to raise money for the Hodgkins Lymphoma charity.
