“Deluded” councillors in Sheffield behaved dishonestly and destroyed public trust by mishandling a dispute over the unnecessarily felling of thousands of healthy trees in the city, an independent inquiry has found.
Sheffield city council twice misled the high court during the fierce row, during which elderly residents were arrested when trying to protect trees from the chainsaws.
During one particularly contentious episode in autumn 2016, council contractors began work at 4.45am, dragging residents out of bed to move their cars before protesters arrived, scenes compared by Nick Clegg, the former Sheffield Hallam MP, to “something you’d expect to see in Putin’s Russia”.
On another occasion, the council applied for an injunction against one of its own councillors, Green member Alison Teal. The council took her to court for breaching the injunction, only for her to be found not guilty.
The council’s behaviour “amounted to a serious and sustained failure of strategic leadership”, the inquiry chairman, Sir Mark Lowcock,concluded in his 227-page report.
The dispute, described in 2017 as “bonkers” by the then communities secretary, Michael Gove, was “a dark episode in Sheffield”, writes Lowcock. He found the council “lacked transparency, and repeatedly said things that were economical with the truth, misleading and, in some cases, were ultimately exposed as dishonest”.
The battle over Sheffield’s street trees began in 2012 when the council signed a 25-year contract with the outsourcing firm Amey, which included the removal and replacement of 17,500 street trees. It was financed by a £1.2bn private finance initiative (PFI) deal, in which private sector expertise and finance deliver public sector infrastructure and services.
Public opposition to what became known locally as the “chainsaw massacre” grew, but senior council leaders paid no attention. “Out of touch with what significant numbers of local people thought, and how the strength of feeling was growing, they were deluded into believing all was well,” writes Lowcock.
He heard evidence of a “bunker mentality” within the council’s senior leadership team which hardened as opposition grew, and “a culture that was unreceptive to external views, discouraging of internal dissent and prone to group-think.”
In 2015, the council decided to set up an “independent tree panel” (ITP) to adjudicate on the dispute. But Lowcock found that the council then “misled” not just the ITP over what could be done at Amey’s cost under the contract, but also the public and, later, the courts.
“From 2016, the council rejected many of the recommendations the ITP made in good faith to save trees. Setting up an independent panel, misleading it and then ignoring substantial numbers of its recommendations was destructive of public trust and confidence,” writes Lowcock.
He found that the council misled two high court judges by passively allowing the court to rely on something it knew to be false and not correcting the record – namely the council’s five-year tree management strategy, which it knew was flawed.
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“While it did not affect the outcome in either case, it is still a serious matter that the court was misled,” writes Lowcock. He said he had taken legal advice as to whether any individuals from the council had committed perjury but decided they had not.
Between June 2016 and March 2018, police attended 40 tree protests in Sheffield, and arrested 41 people. Of these, no further action was taken on more than half of occasions.
South Yorkshire police came under fierce criticism for the arrests, particularly the use of an obscure clause in trade union legislation, which the police watchdog ultimately ruled was wrongly applied. When the force said it wanted to stop the arrests and that they were taking up too much police time, the council replied with a “strongly worded letter” in March 2017.
The local authority felt “very let down by the force” and that it was, “a dereliction of the police’s obligations to fail to support the council in its delivery of its public law duties by failing to make arrests when the criminal law is breached”.
The dispute raged for years. By March 2018 the council’s head of press was warning his chief executive of the reputational damage being done to the local authority. “Put simply, there is no good picture of older residents being arrested. There is no good way to photograph a tree lying in the street,” wrote James Henderson.
Lowcock concluded: “The dispute did significant harm. Thousands of healthy and loved trees were lost. Many more could have been. Sheffield’s reputation was damaged. Public trust and confidence in the council was undermined. It has not been fully rebuilt.”
Many of the senior officers and councillors involved in the dispute declined to attend the public hearing. They included Julie Dore, the Labour leader of Sheffield council from 2011 to 2021, who spoke to Lowcock in private.
In a statement, Sheffield council said: “The council has already acknowledged that it got many things wrong in the handling of the street trees dispute, and we wish to reiterate our previous apologies for our failings. We have taken huge steps already to ensure past mistakes are not repeated and we hope the release of this report will further help us to learn lessons as we move forward from the dispute.”
