Repeat Offender: How Tony Blair's government continues to trash the world's rainforests

Publication date: 12 July 2006

Summary
In March 2001 Tony Blair pledged that the UK Government would only purchase timber from legal and sustainable sources. This followed the introduction of a policy the previous year requiring all UK Government departments and agencies to "actively seek" to buy such timber. Yet, since that time the UK Government has repeatedly failed to live up to its own standards. In 2002 Greenpeace exposed the Government's use of illegal and destructively logged African rainforest timber in the refurbishment of the Cabinet Office in Whitehall, and in 2003, Greenpeace investigations uncovered the Government's use of Indonesian rainforest plywood in the construction of the new Home Office.