The need for the wood and wood products industry to be more joined up could not be more apparent. The challenges laid down with the Low Carbon Construction Innovation & Growth Team Report published late last year can only be met by the timber sector if we recognise the golden opportunities it presents, and set out collectively to deliver the solutions to those challenges on behalf of, and with, our customers and their customers.

As my colleague, Richard Lambert, said in his comment on the Report, industry complacency stemming from wood’s carbon supremacy is a real danger to our chances of grabbing the market opportunities. In another comment on the Report (see the wood and wood products group on LinkedIn), Peter Travis, creator of the original UK generic promotion, said we need a champion to take the industry forward.

The difficulty is our industry structure of principally small and medium enterprises and many trade bodies. This mitigates against the kind of co-ordinated approach that we see in our competitor industries.

We have got better at working together – getting Proskills to address our training needs is a good example. Also, the collective approach in the development of the 2011 Wood for Good campaign is giving our generic promotional efforts a real base on which to build. And it is incumbent on every company to support it.

We need the same collective effort on our public affairs, which links in with education and promotion, and the technical support the industry gets from TRADA. With the efforts our representational bodies are making so effectively, from fighting the issues of timber frame site fires to power firms’ subsidies for burning wood, I can see a real conjunction of interests in 2011 that might just deliver the momentum we need to harness and co-ordinate our power.

We must take to the next stage the ambition to work collectively which was outlined at the Wood Industry Summit in 2006, and which has resulted in the above successes. To this end our president, Martin Gale, will be inviting industry bodies to a dinner to discuss what that next stage might look like. As I said in my latest blog, there is a strong case for a Wood Industry Council or the like to facilitate that collective effort.

? TTJ Industry Updates are a forum for trade bodies to address key issues.