Kristina Sodomkova
‘What piece of advice would you give to local authorities who might be at the beginning of this journey?’ This was one of the questions asked of the tree professionals interviewed.
Their answers were focused on dealing with ash dieback but may also be applicable to another tree health issue of analogous scale and impact. Collectively, the interviewees offered the following top tips.
Tips and quotes from interviewees2
1. Act sooner – don’t bury your head in the sand
‘Start sooner. … honestly, I think most local authorities …. It’s already a serious issue by the time they’re acting with it, and if we started sooner; hindsight is a wonderful thing. … people should be more than aware of [this] as an issue in the country. And if there [aren’t] local authorities dealing with it by now, where have they been for the last 10 years?’
‘I think if we’d started earlier, we’d have been spending less money, perhaps more frequently.’
‘We did need to do the work we did at the time [when we started to tackle ash dieback] because I think we’d still be picking up a legacy of tree failures. I suspect, just from the sheer volume, something would have fallen over.’
2. Importance of data – get your ducks in the row
‘A baseline data set is absolutely key because without that I would have no figures: I wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘I guess looking back, the lesson about all this was actually if you’ve got the data so [it’s] ready to go and you’re able to slice it and dice it to get what you need out of it then you’re in a pretty strong [position] going forward.’
3. Up your tree inspection frequency
‘The only reason we’ve tailored [inspection frequency] to 12 months for ash dieback [is] because we know how quickly things can change. … We’ve seen [situations] where you go to a site and the tree looks absolutely fantastic during the summer and you think, “Right. Great. Fine. I’ll come back next year and have a look.” You go back the following year – exactly the same time, July or something like that – and the tree is completely dead. And it happened so quickly. So, yes, every 12 months is a must really for sites with ash trees on.’
4. Remember, it is as much about tree safety and managing risk
‘Ash dieback is an issue, but also we have a legal responsibility, and as soon as you start to mention legal responsibilities senior management sit up and realise, and then there’s funding available.’
‘… somebody somewhere has to push those buttons and shake that tree to get this funding because the risk isn’t gonna go away.’
‘We survey according to risk, and I still think that’s the best way to do it in terms of time and resource for a tree officer. They haven’t got time to look at every single tree and they shouldn’t be looking at every single tree if it’s in the middle of a woodland … from a risk point of view, you don’t need to.’
5. Have the right staff in the right place and the right organisational structure
‘Just get the right people in post to deal with it.’
‘If they know they are going to be felling trees, they have to consider the environmental consequences of that and whether any sort of mitigation is required. That is now sort of built into the process. So it’s [about] having a single place within a local authority where you bring together those aspects.’
‘Basically, the planning functions and the tree management functions should sit in one team. I think by having them in one team, there’s no scope for divergence in terms of approach between how we manage a tree and the grass verge and how we expect someone to manage their private tree.’
6. Don’t reinvent the wheel – learn from others
‘I hope that other councils can learn a bit really from what we’ve done over the last four years.’ [Interviewee smiles]
‘I find it invaluable that I can pick up the phone now to other departments, other local authorities. We’re all finding similar issues, similar problems. Most of it is to do with funding, and the more we share things … If somebody finds an avenue where they’ve managed to apply and get some funding, share that knowledge.’
7. Don’t work in isolation – work with others
‘So we weren’t doing that alone, which meant that we were quite effective at getting a fairly strong message out across [our area].’
‘I think one of the biggest positive things that we did was officer and inspector training. … The more eyes on the ground, the better.’
8. Eyes wide open, not shut – never stop learning
‘My advice: never stop learning. If you’re doing this job, you really have to take an interest, you know?’
‘I think in terms of experience with ash dieback, I would say, sit back and look.’
‘It’s tricky. Obviously, it’s trees, isn’t it? Very dynamic. You haven’t really got a more dynamic asset … than trees.’
9. Evidence-based decision making – no panic stations or crying wolf
‘I’m not saying that ignoring it is the right thing to do or keeping every ash tree just because it’s an ash tree regardless of its condition. I think they should be circumstance- and condition-based decisions, the same as it would be with …other species in decline, rather than just basically either ignoring it, which is a terrible outcome, or felling them all because they’re “going to die anyway”.’
Discussing ash dieback as a lever for securing budgetary provision: ‘If you don’t realise that spend, or, God forbid, you start realising that spend by felling trees that don’t need to be [felled] and you realise your … prediction. There’ll be local authorities potentially making some crazy decisions around how you manage that issue.’
10. Record and celebrate outstanding trees amongst the doom and gloom of mass tree loss
‘A lot of highways trees, they are just run of the mill ... We don’t look at the nice stuff …, but we do come across some really nice veteran oaks, veteran ash, sycamores and trees that are worthy of retention anyway, so we are going to create a way to record them on our database [and give them recognition].’
11. Don’t forget about climate change and its impact on tree health
‘I think [that if] we get on top of ash dieback, something else is going to come in that the trees in the UK aren’t used to dealing with, but [there is also] climate change ... So there’s no resilience … With climate change and the climate emergency, we are trying to steer away from unnecessary tree work and [towards] better-quality surveys.’
‘I think biodiversity and climate change are much better drivers [for influencing change] … It’s not because trees are pretty and I don’t think it’s about worrying people about, you know, specific diseases. I think it’s their ecosystem service benefits as a whole [that are the most powerful message], and I think that’s the driver for change.’
12. Health and wellbeing support for tree officers
The final advice is about providing adequate support to tree officers. Health and Safety Executive guidance clearly states: ‘Employers have a legal duty to protect workers from stress at work by doing a risk assessment and acting on it.’3
Tree officers in local authorities perform their role in a suboptimal environment. As one interviewee set it out: ‘… there’s too few staff and too many pressures on people. … people are just so overwhelmed with stuff, … probably dropping our guard, I suppose, and just … firefighting in so many areas … until something becomes really big and bigger than everything else you’re trying to deal with.’ In the words of another interviewee: ‘And so even in our priority one list, we will have a priority list of priorities. Yeah, you know, because it’s just not enough money, basically.’
A single tree officer can be assigned responsibility for dealing with an ash dieback ‘emergency’ on top of other duties whilst having increasingly limited resources at their disposal. Their role is often too low down in hierarchy to make and influence key management and budgetary decisions. These adverse conditions can be a source of work-related stress. Impact of this was evident in the interviews, as illustrated by these quotes:
‘I’ve realised the responsibility of it, you know, and it all became a bit much for me some years ago when … I think I was trying to stop it in its tracks. I was trying to save my [area] from ash dieback. There’s no way I could have saved ash trees, but I felt a great personal responsibility and it didn’t do me a world of good, really, for my health.’
‘I’m the only internal inspector. But [we have] 10,000 kilometres of road.’
‘Because of the vacuum that clearly exists [in our organisation], I get dragged in every direction possible around trees.’
Footnotes
2 These quotes were gathered verbatim but have been edited here from the original transcription to aid reading.
3 Health and Safety Executive (undated). Work-related stress and how to manage it. www.hse.gov.uk/stress/overview.htm. Accessed 10th October 2024.
This article was taken from Issue 207 Winter 2024 of the ARB Magazine, which is available to view free to members by simply logging in to the website and viewing your profile area.