Ancient Trees: Protections

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Thursday 24th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

Clearly, many people were shocked by the felling of this tree, coming on the back of what happened to the tree at Sycamore Gap. To someone who, like the noble Lord opposite, lives in Cumbria, it was really horrifying. It has opened up a nerve in the country about how important it is that our ancient trees are properly protected. At the moment, the Government are looking at the recommendations of a report from the Tree Council and Forest Research regarding measures that are needed to improve protections for ancient, veteran and culturally important trees. We are not in a position to outline what we are actually going to do, because we are in the process of going through those recommendations, but we are aware that there are great concerns.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, this was an unfortunate incident, but it seems there was no malintent: no one cut down a protected tree to expand a car park or a building. If there is a villain, I suspect it is the usual overreaction to health and safety concerns: someone reported that the tree was a risk and someone in the pub chain decided that they had better deal with it; then the contractor cut off excessive branches, leaving this bare stump. It is a catalogue of genuine mistakes and I note the profuse apology of the chief executive of the pub chain.

However, if the tree was on the Woodland Trust’s ancient tree inventory as a nationally significant pedunculate oak, why did Enfield Council not have a tree preservation order on it beforehand and why were the pub owners not informed of its significance? I was going to ask the noble Baroness what steps the Government will now take to strengthen the enforcement of existing provisions for ancient trees of national significance. I and the whole House look forward to getting the report from Defra as soon as possible on new steps to protect trees like this in the future.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes some good points. The issue here is that Toby Carvery said that the tree needed to be felled because it was already dead and posed health and safety concerns. The matter was then referred to the police by Enfield Council, which was clearly concerned by what had happened, and to the Forestry Commission. The Metropolitan Police closed its inquiry because it said it was a civil matter; because of that, the Forestry Commission is now carrying out the investigation into exactly what happened and whether the tree was dead or not. It looks like a very heavily pollarded tree at the moment; the question of whether it is dead is for us to consider further.