The Mayor of Bristol said he is ‘deeply disappointed’ in council officers after a series of gaffes at City Hall look set to allow part of a protected hedge in South Bristol to be cut down.
Council chiefs have admitted that they gave the go-ahead to a landowner to cut down the hedge at Yew Tree Farm on the A38 in Highridge by mistake, even though they weren’t supposed to and a different department was about to designate the hedge and the field behind it as a site of Special Nature Conservation Interest (SNCI).
Council planning chiefs today admitted mistakes but said there’s nothing they can do about it, because in another mistake, they left it too long to correct themselves and withdraw the permission they gave the landowners back in early spring.
Read next: Police called to Yew Tree Farm in day-long stand-off over hedge
The hedge in question is in a sensitive spot - police were called back in early April when contractors sent by the landowners from the Newcombe Estates Company first arrived to cut away some of the hedge to create a 12ft wide gateway, to provide access to the field.
The owners of the field and hedge had a letter from Bristol City Council that day telling them they didn’t need to obtain permission and could just go ahead - but they were met with a blockade of local residents and conservationists, who became involved in a stand-off for a day. In the end, they went away without doing the work, agreeing to let council chiefs investigate what was going on.
Now that investigation between all the different departments at City Hall has been completed, and council chiefs have confirmed that because of the errors in the way they handled the request to rip out part of the hedge, there’s nothing anyone can do about it now, and the landowners can go ahead and do it. That led to a withering statement from the Mayor’s Office today, Wednesday, May 10.
A spokesperson for the Mayor said: “We’re deeply disappointed that officers have taken decisions and actions in this case without any political input or oversight nor the due care and attention we expect.
“The Mayor has instructed the planning service to ensure that the appropriate level of ecological due diligence is undertaken and that officers work with the landowner to mitigate the damage of any future action. The Mayor’s Office are conducting inquiries into how this situation has arisen to seek assurances that any issues with process or procedure are fixed immediately,” he added.
In a series of emails seen by Bristol Live, a planning chief admitted that when Newcombe Estates and their planning agents asked if they needed permission to take out the hedge and create a new access back in February, they were told by the council within a day that they didn’t even need to ask.
That was wrong - they did need permission. Also, no one handling the request checked that there was anything special about this particular hedge. There was - the environmental team at the council had already decided the hedge and field needed to be included in a new SNCI designation, and were going through the admin at the time, to confirm that.
When this was all challenged following the stand-off in early April, when the contractors arrived and were blocked from cutting through the hedge, the council’s legal team investigated. The council’s chief planning officer has now admitted a series of mistakes were made. “It transpires that we did not properly realise what the application was and treated it like a request for info on proposed works to trees,” he wrote in an email to campaigners demanding answers.
“Our Administration and Business Support Team produced the letter and cancelled the submission/application - that was an error on our part – as such we had not processed the application,” he said.
“This is the first application of this type for many years, and we accept that our Administration and Business Support Team made a mistake – we have put in place a process to ensure that such an error is not repeated,” he added.
The final error was the one that now appears to give permission to the landowner to create the gateway - when a council officer told them they didn’t need to make a formal application to do the work, that letter didn’t constitute a formal notice giving them permission. And because the landowners waited from February to April to go ahead and try to do the work - alerting people to what they wanted to do - the 42 days the council legally has to decide on such a request had already passed, and it’s then granted by default.
When the stand-off happened in early April, a spokesperson for the landowners told Bristol Live all they wanted to do was create a standard agricultural entrance to a field they own, and they would only be cutting down enough of the hedge to create a 12ft wide gateway onto a private lane.
Why this small gateway has caused such controversy - with Bristol Tree Forum and other environmental groups getting involved, and people turning up to blockade the work - is because of the field’s location.
Until recently, it was a rented part of Yew Tree Farm, the last working farm in Bristol, and has long been the subject of a proposal to build around 200 new homes on it. Catherine Withers, who owns Yew Tree Farm and has been battling the new homes plan, had rented the large field between her farmhouse and the main A38. She has now offered to buy the field, which doesn’t have direct access to the main road or to the private shared lane - but is accessed through the farmyard.
She and her supporters say they fear creating a new access would do two things - cement the landowners’ separate use of the field, and make Yew Tree Farm far less economically viable without it, and longer-term, open up the field to make it easier for any future planning application for development there.
“This is an awful decision, I am devastated,” said Mrs Withers. “This is a protected and ancient hedgerow. I feel entirely let down by the whole process and am now living under even more pressure and more likely to lose my farm and livelihood thanks to incompetence from the council’s planning enforcement,” she added.
Read next:
- Police called to Yew Tree Farm in day-long stand-off over hedge
- Disputed hedge at Yew Tree Farm 'saved' by discovery of new kind of grass fly
- New species of grass fly with unusual genitalia discovered in South Bristol
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