Tree Maintenance: Guidance to Local Authorities

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Wednesday 15th October 2025 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mary Creagh)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairship today, Ms Lewell. I commend the right hon. Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) for securing this debate, and thank other hon. Members for their thoughtful contributions.

Let me begin by saying how incredibly sorry and sad I am to hear about Mr Hall’s death. I offer my profound sympathies to his family—to Fiona, his wife, and to Sam, his son—on their tragic loss, as well as to other families who have lost loved ones in similar circumstances. I also pay tribute to their courage and commitment in their selfless campaigning to reduce the risk of other families suffering such a grievous tragedy. We are all here today to think about how we can prevent that from happening to anybody else. Nothing we can say today can make up for their loss, but it is right that we are having this debate.

Health and safety matters to everyone in this country, and this Government are dedicated to protecting people. The Health and Safety Executive is Britain’s national regulator for workplace health and safety; it works to ensure that people feel safe where they live, where they work and in their environment. It prosecuted Cheshire East council over Mr Hall’s tragic death, which led to the £500,000 fine.

When those responsible for controlling risks to public safety fail to do so, they will be held to account. As in this case, the Health and Safety Executive will not hesitate to take appropriate enforcement action where necessary, but I do not want us to be in that position. Local authorities, just like any landowner, must ensure that the land they own or occupy is not in a condition that could cause injury or damage to people who might reasonably be expected to enter it. They must not allow activities or conditions on their land that could foreseeably cause harm. If someone is injured due to negligence, the authority may be liable, as was the case with Mr Hall’s death.

There is current guidance available from the National Tree Safety Group, the membership of which is made up of organisations with an interest in tree risk management, including the Forestry Commission. Its publication, “Common sense risk management of trees”, was updated last year, and provides guidance on trees and public safety in the UK for owners, managers and advisers. It recommends that tree owners follow a plan for zoning their tree stock, based on frequency of access, and implementing tree management according to risk. Where trees pose a higher level of risk—for example, a tree with faults that likely make it unstable, such as the oak described by the right hon. Lady, that is in an area frequently visited by the public, such as a park—they will require a higher level of assessment and monitoring.

I have visited parks where veteran trees have been cordoned off. Cordoning off very large trees with known defects from public access during periods of very hot weather, when branches may be more likely to fall, and similarly advising the public not to sit under or next to such trees when wind speeds are higher than normal, is a sensible, common-sense response to changing conditions.

Trees are important to our society and to us intrinsically —we come from the forests—and they are particularly important in this changing climate. However, that does not absolve tree owners from their legal duty of care and the need to prevent reasonably foreseeable risks of injury to people or property. For the breach of its responsibilities leading to Mr Hall’s death, the council was handed a significant fine.

I agree with the right hon. Lady that maintenance and prevention are cost effective. This Government have given more money to councils. There has been a long period of reduction in council budgets, but we have made more than £69 billion available to local government, and Cheshire East, the council in question, has had a 6.6% cash terms increase in its core spending power on the previous year. The majority of the funding is un-ringfenced—we removed central Government controls on that—and can be used to address a range of pressures facing local government. I hope that some of it will have been spent on long-overdue tree maintenance work.

As mentioned, National Tree Safety Group guidance provides a nationally recognised, evidence-based framework for managing tree safety, balancing public safety with the environmental and social benefits of trees. It is grounded in legal precedent and supported by the Health and Safety Executive. Local tree strategies, such as the one in Bromley, play an important role. I encourage councils to use the existing Government-endorsed trees and woodlands strategy toolkit, which has been developed to support local authorities and stakeholders to create and deliver a local tree strategy. These strategies can help to safeguard people from harm. However, it is also important to remember that trees are living organisms and that things can change depending on the weather. They undergo natural processes of growth and development, and eventually fall.

As the right hon. Lady says, we are spending a record £816 million on tree planting. Many of those trees will be in forests, so that involves a different set of risks and limited public access. However, we need to think about street or park trees. I live in Islington, which was planting street trees back in the ’90s. I can think of two street trees, one in my street and one in the neighbouring street, that have fallen over in the past three years. Thankfully, they landed on walls and not on cars or people, but of course from one day to the next, they simply go—often in very hot weather.

As we increase canopy cover, we need to understand what we are doing. We are giving grants to local authorities, but what is the accountability mechanism? As with flood defence assets, it is no good building the asset if we are not going to look after it. Flood defence assets were not in good shape when we came in, so we have spent a lot of extra money—tens of millions—to make sure that fail-safe mechanisms are put in place and that assets are kept up to date.

[Sarah Dyke]

On tree canopy cover, I was lead member for environment and climate change at Somerset council when it was developing the tree strategy. The county is 8% tree canopy—way below the national average, which is about 13%. Obviously, increased canopy cover helps to reduce storm water run-off, prevent flooding, and improve biodiversity and habitats for local wildlife. Will the Minister commit to setting targets for neighbourhood tree cover to help to ensure equal resilience to flooding and stronger biodiversity in areas with below-average tree canopy cover?

[Mary Creagh]

Of course, the hon. Member’s area is benefiting, under this Government, from the first national forest to be planted for 30 years. The Western forest will stretch from the Mendip hills up to Bristol, Gloucester—for the flood prevention—and the Forest of Dean, so there will be a huge increase. [Interruption.] She has quite a bit in her area, I hear her say—good. The canopy cover will increase there, with 20 million trees planted over the next 25 years. Some of that will be agroforestry and some restoration of ancient woodland.

[Esther McVey]

I know that the Minister cares passionately and knows a lot about this issue. Would she meet me and my constituent so that we can discuss Chris’s law?

[Mary Creagh]

The right hon. Lady is correct to bring me back to my conclusion. We have got five minutes, so I had a little tour via the Western Forest. On the point about 13% coverage, we are trying to get to 16% over the country by 2050. That has been a cross-party agreement under the Climate Change Act 2008 on the number of trees we need to plant to tackle climate change. It is important to look at tree access and tree equity as part of that. That is certainly in my processes as I think about where the next two national forests are going to be.

Let me bring this debate to an end. I thank the right hon. Lady for the debate and for bringing this tragic incident to my attention. I would like to take this opportunity to encourage local authorities to follow our guidance on tree risk management, issued by the National Tree Safety Group, and to develop tree and woodland strategies, taking advantage of the toolkit that has been developed specifically for them. We know that better management of trees can deliver improved outcomes, particularly for public health and safety.

I welcome the attention that Fiona and Sam Hall’s tireless campaigning has brought to this issue. I again express my heartfelt sympathies on their devastating loss. I am, of course, happy to meet the right hon. Member for Tatton and her constituent to discuss those issues further. I would be happy to meet Mrs Hall and Sam Hall. I invite the right hon. Lady to contact my private office to get a meeting in the diary.

Question put and agreed to.