Mature and veteran trees should have the same protections as heritage buildings to stop destruction on the scale carried out in Plymouth this week, campaigners have said.
The Woodland Trust is calling for an English Heritage-style body to enforce greater protection for trees – including those which have value to the attractiveness of a town or city.
Unlike those for heritage buildings, the protections for trees were weak, said Andy Egan, the head of conservation policy at the trust.
“We have more protections for buildings than trees,” he said. “Our oldest tree, the Fortingall Yew in Scotland is around 3,000–5,000 years old – it is the oldest living entity in Europe, but it does not have the same level of protection as St Paul’s Cathedral. No one would think it was acceptable to pull down St Paul’s to build another Shard but trees are not protected in the same way.”
Anger continued to grow on Thursday over the nighttime felling of more than 100 trees by the Conservative-run Plymouth city council. The tree removal was carried out despite significant local opposition and ongoing lobbying of the council by the Woodland Trust.
More than 16,000 people had signed a petition calling for the existing trees to be saved and incorporated into the new design for a pedestrian walkway leading from the sea to the city centre. A council survey carried out as part of community engagement revealed that 68% of respondents did not support its redevelopment plan; just 16% were in favour.
Protections for trees are limited in England and Wales. Tree protection orders can be overridden by planning permission. Egan said councils were responsible for issuing them, despite often leading the developments which put the trees under threat in the first place.
Italy recently passed a law granting 20,000 trees legal protection as natural monuments. The Woodland Trust is exploring whether similar legislation could be pursued in the UK.
“We are exploring how we can go about providing protections for trees which are similar to heritage buildings,” said Egan. “We want to raise public awareness that will help push forward stronger legislation and are investigating what the best options are.”
In Plymouth, the council moved in to fell the trees on Tuesday night, hours after a period of community engagement ended. Within a few hours, about 110 were destroyed as security guards patrolled the area. The move came days after the publication of a highly critical report into the needless felling of thousands of trees by Sheffield city council which found it had behaved dishonestly.
Plymouth city council argues its new £12.7m scheme will “revamp the main artery through the city centre and turn it into an urban park”, with 169 new trees planted along the route.
But, Egan said: “These trees in Plymouth were 40 or 50 years old, that’s a whole generation. The older a tree is, the more wildlife it supports, the more carbon it sequesters, and the better the canopy is.
“Mature trees are not replaceable with a sapling. There seems to be no appreciation that the starting point for regeneration or redevelopment should be designing around the nature that is already there.”
Luke Pollard, the Labour MP for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport, said: “There is so much anger here today. We are never going to get the trees back and it will take decades for replacement trees to be anywhere near the size of those taken down. We have got to look at what lessons we can learn from this. How do we ensure councils – especially those that have declared a climate emergency like Plymouth – how do we make that real and not just a press release?”
Straw, the local campaign group set up to save the trees, succeeded in getting an injunction at 1am on Wednesday to stop the felling. It prevented about 15 trees from being taken down.
The Plymouth development is part-funded by £2.7m from the Department of Transport’s Transforming Cities Fund to promote walking and cycling.
The Guardian has contacted the Department of Transport for comment.
