REVIEW OF TREE PRESERVATION ORDERS

“Is my tree protected?” is the question most frequently asked of the staff of the IW Council’s Trees Service. Anyone who made this enquiry prior to 2002 will remember the amount of time such a seemingly straight forward enquiry used to take to answer.

What was the problem?

The main hindrance to the Trees Service in those days was the state of the records. These were inherited from previous authorities – including Medina Borough Council and South Wight Borough Council - and date from the 1940's. The first Tree Preservation Order was made in 1949 and covers trees in Ryde. Since then there have been a further 1000+ Tree Preservation Orders made covering thousands of trees across the Island.

The staff in the Trees Section used to have a difficult time trying to locate specific TPOs due to the archaic filing system which indexed the TPOs by their grid reference on paper maps (printed in the early 1960's and which did not show any new developments). Government guidance is that all queries about protected trees should be answered within two working days – but this used to be a hard target to meet.

The combination of old records, haphazard filing and building development, made it extremely difficult to access the relevant Tree Preservation Order for a specific property, particularly if it was built after an Order was made.

What has the Council done about it?

Government guidance advises Local Planning Authorities to keep their TPOs under review. To start to address this problem a TPO Review Assistant was appointed in 2001, this position has now finished but the work goes on. The improvements to the service have been many and include:

A file audit of all Tree Preservation Orders has been systematically carried out;
A comprehensive report was written about the status of the Tree Preservation Orders;
All TPOs reindexed;
Each now has its own unique reference number.
The protected trees have also been plotted onto a digital map base which is linked to a property database;
The TPOs have been scanned and are available on-line.

Finding out if a tree is protected by a TPO is now significantly easier and can often be done from the desktop whilst the enquirer is on the phone.

Is the TPO Review over?

No! The benefits to the Trees Service and its customers are already being felt, but much work remains. Correspondence and digital files from the past are gradually being integrated into the new filing system, allowing the full protected tree history of each property to be quickly established. Procedures for making new TPOs have been radically changed as a result of lessons learnt in the review of old Orders - the Council of the future should not have to undertake an exercise like this ever again. But the biggest task of all still remains outstanding – a review of the protected trees themselves.

On-going reviews.

As the Tree Team come across older TPOs in areas that may have had drastic changes such as large developments, we will re-assess the trees and the type of TPO to better reflect the character of the area in question, very often a new TPO altogether will need to be made. This brings the benefit of better and stronger legislation, a more rigorous assessment, clarification of which trees are protected, improved plotting of trees and an updated map base and the removal of indistinct descriptions and mapping boundaries.

Page last updated on: 14/04/2011