205,000 Tree Preservation Orders and Counting — Why Checking Before You Prune Still Catches People Out

A customer near Ipplepen rang us last month wanting a big sycamore taken right back because it was shading the greenhouse. Fair enough request — except the tree turned out to be covered by a TPO nobody in the house knew existed. That’s not rare. The Arboricultural Association’s own research put the number of Tree Preservation Orders live across English councils at roughly 205,000, spread across 339 local authorities, and a lot of that paperwork is older and messier than most homeowners assume.

Some of it is genuinely old. Wealden council holds a confirmed TPO from 1935, and several authorities still have orders dating to the mid-1940s on their books. The maps that go with them were often hand-drawn decades ago, sometimes photocopied so many times the tree location is more guesswork than fact. A handful of the trees named on those orders aren’t even there any more — plenty of the protected elms died out with Dutch elm disease years back, but the order itself was never removed.

What that means on the ground: before we touch anything more than light deadwooding, we check with the local planning authority — Teignbridge in our case, or Torbay depending on where the job is. Crown reduction, crown lifting, thinning, even taking out included bark on a multi-stem specimen, all of it can need consent if a TPO or conservation area applies, and doing it without consent is a criminal offence that can run to a serious fine.

Veteran and mature trees get the least protection when the paperwork’s a mess, which is the real worry buried in the Association’s figures. Because a big oak in a hedgerow near Newton Abbot with no confirmed order and no conservation area status has nothing legally stopping someone taking a chainsaw to it — which is exactly the gap a proper tree survey is meant to close before work starts, not after.

We run tree surveys and TPO checks as standard before any job, whatever the size. If you’ve got a tree that needs looking at anywhere around Torquay, Newton Abbot or the wider South Devon area, Topp Tree Care is based in Kingskerswell — get in touch via topptreecare.co.uk.