‘The council is creating a city which will be unliveable in the climate crisis’

Bristol City Council celebrated National Tree Week by chainsawing two of Bristol’s most loved trees. Highly visible and right next to Temple Meads Station, the trees should have had Tree Preservation Orders but Bristol City Council does not TPO its own trees, claiming that it is a responsible landlord and that its trees are safe.

Martin Booth filmed the destruction for Bristol 24/7 and it received lots of media coverage, but in reality it was just another ordinary day of tree removal in Bristol.

I’m sorry for what follows but after more than a decade since the Bristol Tree Forum was established by me and others to avoid exactly this kind of disaster it is clear that the time for politeness is past.

That they were significant trees was evidenced by the sheer number of people who witnessed their felling and commented on Twitter or to me in person. Thousands of people walk past them every day. The destruction of trees in this way has a negative effect on the mental well-being of those who love them as evidenced by much of what I read on social media.

Worse still, the mayor’s office, in a comment to Bristol Live, doubled down and supported this crazy decision. With this mindset, many more important urban trees will be for the chop. Indeed, some are already in the felling pipeline.

Trees compete for space with other uses of the city. But in Bristol mature urban trees are given lowest priority, so when any new plans come up, the trees are removed. As this incident demonstrates, they have no value to the Local Planning Authority or the ruling administration.

This is despite the existence of planning policies in Bristol’s Core Plan stating that existing trees should be retained. They never are, not in Bristol. Other cities work around existing trees when new developments are planned.

The people in the council facilitating the destruction of Bristol should be ashamed of themselves. With so many large trees being removed in the centre of town, they are creating a city which will be unliveable in the climate crisis.

We are always told that replacement trees will be planted that will more than compensate for these losses. In the city centre this is not true. Instead, money is paid to the council but there are no sites for replacement and the money just languishes in the council bank account.

There is already hundreds of thousands of pounds supposedly dedicated for tree planting, but this remains unspent because there is nowhere to plant them. This shows clearly on the council’s own mapping.

Even if replacements are planted, we will have to wait 30 to 50 years to see the value of the trees recovered, assuming replacements survive that long. Professor Mary Gagen, (Swansea University) describes it as the equivalent of “… me offering you two 1p coins in exchange for a £1 coin and telling you you’ll end up with more coins. We need to stop falling for it”.

Indeed the planning permission was obtained simply with a vague promise that there would be some planting somewhere. Not even the most basic details were provided. This is contrary to the planning requirements, which clearly state that replacement sites should be identified.

However, this never went in front of the Planning Committee where such things can be raised, as this was a “delegated decision”. Effectively Bristol City Council was giving planning permission to itself.

So, the planning application (19/01050/F) was snuck through with virtually no mention of the trees, no arboricultural report from the developer, no tree officer report from the local planning authority (again, the council passing judgement on itself).

“In Bristol mature urban trees are given lowest priority, so when any new plans come up, the trees are removed” – photo: Martin Booth

There were just a couple of circles and a photograph on a drawing somewhere. There was no mention of trees in the title of the application. All of which made it easy for the council to give permission to itself with a delegated decision.

Delegated decisions are for planning applications deemed so unimportant that they do not need to be discussed by a planning committee. An individual officer took the decision with no involvement of our elected representatives.

It is considered bad form to mention the names of council officers so I won’t. Perhaps, watching the media coverage and outrage they are reflecting now on what they did but probably not, given the prevailing culture within the local planning authority. In the five page Planning Officer’s report, the trees merited a couple of sentences:

“The plans include the removal of two trees, although it was previously considered that the levels of replacement planting would more than compensate for the loss of the trees. Subject to a condition requiring details of the planting it is considered that the proposal is acceptable on these grounds”.

Dear planning officer, did you think to consider: Were the trees beautiful? Were they a significant part of the local environment? Did you not think anyone would notice? Will replacement trees actually be planted? Was there any consideration or discussion with colleagues as to whether the trees should be protected, as is your duty? More generally, should we stop chopping so many trees down, just for convenience?

The true nature of the application was completely hidden, with no mention of trees in the application, so The Bristol Tree Forum only learned about it after the event. We were not consulted in advance by the planning officer. Despite our strenuous objections, even a deeply-flawed process cannot apparently be revisited. Because in the immortal words from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the plans were “on display”:

“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

I wonder what it would take for planning officers and the rest of Bristol City Council to begin to understand the beauty of the natural environment and to protect what is important. The ghost of urban planners past who wanted to fill in Bristol Harbour and drive dual carriageways through the middle of the city is alive and well, residing in the ill-judged decisions that are now being taken.

At some point there will be a tipping point in Bristol and important mature urban trees will be protected. Then the council will take its responsibilities for future generations seriously by protecting not just its own trees, but also important trees on private development sites.

Decisions regarding important trees would be taken by a planning committee and not just an individual officer.

Vassili Papastavrou is secretary of the Bristol Tree Forum

Main photo: Martin Booth

Read next:

• ‘Barbaric behaviour’ as weeping willow trees chopped down
• Tree falls on car during overnight storms
• Endangered trees and local planning on agenda for Bristol Tree Forum
• ‘Bristol City Council needs to retain trees rather than fell them’

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