Plymouth tree felling fiasco cost more than £3.3m

A Devon council's decision to cut down more than 100 trees at night has cost more than £3.3m, a damning report has found.

The "shock to the organisation" of the tree-felling carried out by Plymouth City Council in March 2023 "still reverberates today", according to an independent review into the council's actions.

The review, carried out by local government organisation Solace, said there were still "significant tensions" as a result of the tree felling, both within the council and between the groups and individuals involved with "wounds still to be healed".

Plymouth City Council acknowledged weaknesses in the delivery of the project and said lessons would be learned.

The council provided an estimate of the costs involved including legal costs, inflationary increases, staff time and the £130,000 spent on the review itself.

The review's authors said there had been no quantification of the "reputational damage or the cost of re-building trust" which "have the potential to add costs to future council projects and endeavours".

The report added: "More significantly, no assessment has been made of the costs to business and the lost revenue to the local economy from having the key artery of the city centre so impacted."

It said the £3.3m figure was "the lower end of the likely cost" and said this showed the importance of major projects being "adequately resourced with "thorough political and senior officer oversight".

The original scheme was set to cost £12.7m.

Plymouth City Council has brought forward a new scheme for Armada Way at a cost of about £30m which is currently being worked on.

The review was highly critical of the management of the council by both politicians and the paid officers.

It said "sustained managerial grip by senior politicians and officers" was "lacking at crucial points".

The report said: "When issues came to a head, senior politicians ducked and senior officers failed to anticipate the media frenzy and the impact of [anticipated] legal action."

It said staff did not feel protected by managers and said: "In this instance, the reflection was almost unanimous that the managerial response was both too little and too late."

The review explored how decisions were made, how the project was managed and how the council communicated with the public.

Campaigners brought a case to the High Court in March 2024 claiming that Plymouth City Council had acted unlawfully.

The case was dismissed but Judge David Elvin KC was scathing of the council's conduct relating to the hearing and said the local authority's production of evidence had been "highly unsatisfactory".

The review published on Thursday said it was "apparent that there are wounds still to be healed for those individuals most directly impacted".

It said there were "pockets of regret, remorse, guilt, blame and defiance" and the council needed to find a way "to rebuild trust, internally and externally".

The city council's £185,000-a-year chief executive, Tracey Lee, apologised and said the authority "came up short of where we needed to be".

She said the issues in the report were "not reflective of the vast majority of what we do" but showed where improvement was needed.

She said: "We are committed to being a learning organisation - one that reflects honestly, adapts and grows from experience.

"That's not just important for us as a council - it's vital for the people we serve.

"When we learn, we improve and when we improve, we deliver better outcomes for our communities."

Ms Lee said Plymouth was not "anti-tree" and she added that there were now "35,000 new trees growing and establishing across the city".

Ali White, who campaigned against the removal of the trees, said the report "tells us that it was managed poorly".

She added: "The senior management weren't doing their job properly.

"There wasn't enough ability and transparency."

Lawyers for Ms White, who applied for the council to be committed for contempt in November 2023, argued the local authority did not give protesters sufficient time to challenge the felling of the trees.

That claim was dismissed in November 2024.

A previous, separate application by Ms White to the High Court for a judicial review into the felling was dismissed in March 2024.

Council leader Tudor Evans said at the time that the legal challenges had been "frustrating" and each case had "cost the taxpayer thousands of pounds".

Ms White said: "I think a lot of the the issues that we raised, including the legal challenges, were justified."

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