My goodness, how governments love action plans. Each Friday, during my 23 years in Parliament, when I returned to my constituency office, the latest batch of these glossy documents awaited me piled up to a foot high on my desk, conveniently close to the recycling bin.

These days, having long ago retired as an MP, I am pleased to say I have moved beyond the world of action plans that usually offer little in the way of “action” – with one important exception.

As a member of the Northumberland National Park Authority, my colleagues and I awaited with interest the Government’s long overdue response to Julian Glover’s Landscapes Review. After many false starts it has finally been published and is now the subject of a 12-week consultation with interested parties.

The document contains many laudable sentiments. It is not enough, it says, for national parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty to be merely conserved and enhanced. To this must be added an additional duty to help degraded landscapes recover. The aim, it says, “is to increase the weight given to nature recovery by public bodies”.

Mercifully, Glover’s proposal for a National Landscape Service, some sort of centralised quango, has been quietly sidelined. Plans to centralise have not entirely disappeared, however. There is talk of park authorities surrendering to ministers the power to appoint their own chairmen. Be in no doubt that, if that comes to pass, it will be shamelessly abused.

All of this is being done in pursuit of an ambitious target to protect 30 per cent of the UK countryside by 2030. This even comes complete with a natty slogan, “30 by 30”. Yet achieving this will be dependent on restoring peat lands and planting trees. Inevitably, there is both a “Trees Action Plan” and a “Peat Action Plan”.

All this, however, ignores the elephant in the room: the role of the Forestry Commission. It is nowhere in the report, yet it is acting in direct contradiction to the Government’s plans for restoring peat land and sequestering carbon.

The Peat Action Plan aims to restore 35,000 hectares of peat land by 2025. Simultaneously, however, Forestry England, a division of the Commission, has spent decades carpeting the uplands with Sitka spruce, much of it planted in peat bogs. Even where it has harvested trees planted in peat, it is busy replanting again. The upshot is that public money is being used to fund both the restoration of peat and its destruction.

Recent adjustments to Forestry England’s planting policy do not begin to address the issue. Talk of diverse woodlands means nothing as long as much of our forests are made up of Sitka spruce, which has a deadening effect on both the landscape and wildlife.

Some idea of the scale of the problem may be gleaned from the fact that more than 20 per cent of the Northumberland National Park is covered in Sitka spruce. There is a danger that Forestry England will interpret the Government’s tree planting targets as an excuse to plant yet more. The problem extends well beyond the national parks. Northumberland’s Kielder Forest, only part of which is in the national park, already consists of 66,000 hectares of mainly spruce.

Obviously, this is an issue that disproportionately affects those national parks that embrace the uplands – Northumberland, the North York Moors and the Lakes. Unless this is addressed, warm words about “creating diverse landscapes” are meaningless.

One obvious short-term solution, at least so far as the parks are concerned, would be to extend the planning powers of the parks to cover forestry, but Glover did not address this and neither does the Government’s response. Until the Government plucks up the courage to tackle this anomaly, national parks such as that in Northumberland, which contains some of the country’s wildest and most beautiful landscapes, will struggle to implement the Government’s lofty aims.

Chris Mullin is a former environment minister and a member of the Northumberland National Park Authority. He is writing in a personal capacity