Highways Act 1980

Sure.

So we have a few kind of areas of the work that we do around trees, but our biggest one is focused on the Highways Act 1980 and the role that plays in preventing or making it much more difficult to plant trees along our streets in the built environment.

Hmm.

and that has taken on so many different forms but most recently it saw us over the summer towards the end of July walking through Lambeth and Southwark with a thermal imaging camera recording the temperatures that we experienced um the underneath trees and then versus this parts of the street that didn't have them and inevitably i mean it told us nothing new unsurprisingly it's much warmer where there aren't any streets but i think that data is very powerful to communicate the value of streets because i think something potentially that people get wrong about trees is that they're benefits begin and end with the carbon they sequester and often policy is kind of focuses so squarely on that but you forget about all the other amazing benefits that trees can deliver to communities

And that seems to be increasingly the case for councils across the country.

that there is this risk aversion.

And the kind of more boring side of that story is, as I alluded to earlier, the Highways Act 1980.

So in its current form, I think it's section 142 for anybody that would like to have a read.

So you still need your council to say yes.

The government's own response says you still need consent under the Highways Act.

That's why the league table matters even more today than it did last week.

That's our league table of councils because we're collating the information on which councils are being searched.

Effectively, yeah, yeah.

It's all against the backdrop of the Highways Act, which authorities must comply with.

But within that, in terms of delivering a risk-based approach, there's flexibility there for authorities to make local decisions based on their local context and local needs.

What the Code is very big on, though, is making sure that there's the right governance behind those decisions, that they can be evidenced and demonstrated that they are achieving the outcomes that the authority wants within their constraints.

David Sidwick began with the legal position.

There's a thing called the Highways Act.

It's an offense to attach unauthorized items to a highway structure, such as lamppost, railing, or bridge, without the explicit consent of the landowner or local authority.

Perpetrators can face fines up to two and a half thousand pounds or more should the cost of taking down the illegal display exceed that figure.