To find out if your trees are protected, Chesterman Tree Care will contact your local Planning Authority – usually the local borough, unitary or district Council. If your trees are protected, Chesterman Tree Care can, on your behalf take care of all planning permission to do any tree surgery.
If you remove trees or do work to them without permission you could be prosecuted. You or your tree contractor can usually apply for work to protected trees on standard forms or online via the planning portal. You will usually receive a decision within 6 weeks for Conservation Areas and 2 months for TPOs and planning conditions. If you want to remove trees, you may be required to plant replacements of the same species and in the same location.
Not all trees are protected, and, despite ‘urban myths’ to the contrary no particular species or size of tree are protected. Any tree is eligible for protection, regardless of age, species or size. But no trees are automatically protected. There are three normal ways in which a tree or woodland might have some been given some sort of legal protection:
A Tree Preservation Order (TPO) has been made at some time to cover that tree;
A planning condition has been made at some time to cover that tree;
The tree is within a conservation area (in fact, this one is not strictly protection but merely requires that the owner gives notice to the council of their intention to do works).
Tree Preservation Orders (TPOs) are made under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and the Town and Country Planning (Trees) Regulations 1999. Planning conditions are normally conditions which are applied when planning applications affect existing trees – they are normally only temporary (for up to two years) but some last for longer, and indeed some have no time limit at all, so even if your tree is in an area where no planning permission has been granted recently it is worth checking.
Chesterman Tree Care will deal with this aspect for you to take the strain out of it.