Hundreds, if not thousands, of planning applications bombard Waverley Borough Council’s planning portal yearly with applications to fell trees. Many are covered with Tree Preservation Orders.
Below are just a few in one week on WBC’s planning portal. On and on they go…
Planners and conservationists, including the arboricultural officer at Your Waverly, grapple with this knotty dilemma every day.
The illegal felling of mature trees never fails to shock, from the incomprehensibility of the Sycamore Gap vandalism to Plymouth Council’s felling of 100 mature trees under cover of darkness!
The outrage has shown that we are, at heart, a nation of tree lovers—and Waverley has one of the country’s most significant numbers of trees.
But do we care enough to stop the charge of the chainsaw?
Nature is paying a considerable price in the bid to build more homes—and how many fines have been handed out to all those Waverley residents who chop trees down just before a planning application is posted?
How many residents move into new homes where a developer has been forced to retain trees, and then applications go in to fell or remove huge sections once the leaves fall? We heard from one resident who bought a new home because the garden had a beautiful tree. Then, she realised the leaves had fallen and needed clearing up, and it was, in her words, “a real nuisance.”
TPOs are the primary means of protecting valuable trees. They are most common in urban and semi-urban settings and for trees with high amenity value.
Dozens of these appear weekly on the council’s planning Portal.
While I sympathise with such owners, your image shows a house that has been built too close to a lovely, environment-enhancing tree; it is not the tree that is in the wrong place. An alternative approach is available to councils: property developers’ planning applications sometimes include felling healthy mature trees simply to squeeze more new houses into an acquired plot. They commission an arboriculturist to confirm that the developer’s house location plan shows that trees with their extensive root network are not sustainable close to a house, so will need to be felled. The planning authority then thinks it has done its job via a condition that stipulates that an arboriculturist’s advice must be taken and observed. Since the trees were there first, the solution would be that an arboriculturist should be commissioned by the planning authority (and the cost subsequently passed onto the developer) before the developer’s architect is asked to draw up a house plan that respects the trees and their climate carbon-sequestration contribution. Waverley should consider this reform.
That is an excellent comment with which we wholeheartedly agree.