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Tree Safety Inspections

Tree owners and managers have a duty of care under ‘common law’ to “take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which they can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure their neighbour”. Tree owners or managers also have a duty of care under The Occupiers’ Liability Acts to ensure visitors or trespassers on their land remain safe. Therefore, it is advisable for tree owners or managers to have their trees professionally inspected by a component Arboriculturist on a regular basis, so they can meet their legal duty of care, and are able to produce a defensible inspection record.

Trees are inspected from ground level to identify if any significant defects or features are present. Should significant defects or features be identified, a risk assessment is then undertaken to determine whether the defect or feature posses an unacceptable risk and whether remedial works to reduce the risk to an acceptable level are required, or whether a more specialised inspection is required. These can include climbing inspections or the use of high-tech decay detection devices. 

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Trees and Planning

The Town and Country Planning Act (1990) requires local authorities to ensure any planning applications that may have an impact on trees are thoroughly appraised and any such impact is assessed and appropriately mitigated. The standard for carrying out these surveys and impact assessments are set out in the British Standard 5837 : 2012 Trees in Relation to Design, Demolition and Construction.

We specialise in carrying out BS5837 tree surveys and producing compliant Impact Assessments, Method Statements and plans, required by the Local Panning Authority (LPA) to support your planning application where trees are on-site and could be impacted by the proposed design.

Once the initial site survey is complete, we produce a Tree Constraints Plan (TCP) displaying rooting zones that could pose a constraint to a design proposal. Ideally, the TCP is produced before the initial design, and the scheme layout can be designed around the tree constraints. Should this is not possible and the design impacts into rooting zones, for example, we can advise suitable technical solutions to accommodate this, if at all possible. Once the final design has been agreed, we then produce an Arboricultural Impact Assessment to assess any impact to trees or how trees may impact the proposed layout. An Arboricultural Method Statement (AMS) and Tree Protection Plan (TPP) is then required, these documents detail how any retained trees will be protected during the demolition and construction phases, and how any impact to trees above or below ground will be mitigated. The method statement will also detail how any tree removals that maybe required to enable the design will be mitigated.

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Discharging of Arboricultural Planning Conditions

Following planning approval, LPA’s may condition that certain operations within close proximity to trees are carried out under Arboricultural supervision or that further information is submitted for approval before a particular operation can take place.

We can help to discharge any Arboricultural conditions that may be included in your planning approval.

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Hi-Tech Equipment

We utilise high-tech and high-precision instruments to help record tree data, and state-of-the-art Computer Aided Design (CAD) software to produce our survey plans and drawing. This ensures that our captured data, plans, and drawings all remain as accurate as possible and are provided in a BS5837 : 2012 compliant format, suitable to accompany any planning application where trees maybe impacted.