This request concerns breaches of TPOs and action taken by WBC in the 2 years to 9 October 2025. This does not need to include breaches in relation to work carried out on protected trees where these were not destroyed.

1. Please send me the following information in tabular form for each instance of a TPO breach for the stated period:
- Location of breach,
- Area affected,
- Number of trees illegally felled (approximately where known),
- Action taken by WBC - none, letters of caution, prosecution, etc
- Outcome of any prosecution (convictions and fines),
- Whether planning permission was subsequently granted on the site and the reference.
In the past two years, we have record of 10 enforcement cases that involved removal of protected trees. Some of them were reported by the public and some initiated by council staff. A summary of the cases is enclosed in the Excel spreadsheet for your information.

You will see that there are a number of cases that remain active. This situation has been influenced in part by our current staffing shortage, and in part by a large increase in Freedom of Information Act requests by landowners, developers, planning agents and residents, which has limited our capacity to investigate enforcement cases as promptly as we would wish. The tree team consists of two tree officers concentrating on core duties to process tree work applications on protected trees and serving new Tree Preservation Orders to protect trees under threat. The Council estimates that it currently protects a quarter of a million trees in the borough with Individual, Group and Woodland TPOs. We are pleased to note that a new tree and landscape officer is expected to join the Trees and Landscape team early next year and they will spend two days a week working on such matters.
We were not able to estimate the “area affected” because of a lack of evidence. But we have included the number of trees removed in cases where the evidence was clear.