Sheffield Council bosses considered mass killing of street trees to 'defeat' protesters
The inquiry reveals that on February 10, 2018, then director of place Paul Billington wrote to council cabinet member Bryan Lodge with an options paper in an email entitled ‘Please print and delete’.
The email referred to the same document being sent to then chief executive John Mothersole and Amey account director Darren Butt.
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Hide AdThe inquiry said: "The paper looks to find a way to deal with the trees outstanding from the Core Investment Period – around 250 trees, most of which fell into the category of damaging – and ‘several thousand more’ projected to need replacement during the rest of the contract. The paper focuses on options available to the Council to complete the programme as intended.”
At the time, around 5,000 trees had been felled with the contract setting a target of 17,500 ultimately being replaced.
The paper analyses the potential of using a practice called ‘ring-barking’, which kills a tree over a number of months.
It stated: “It would move all trees into the ‘dying’ category and mean that STAG could no longer claim they were defending ‘healthy’ trees. It would be unprecedented for a council to adopt this approach across a large number of street trees and would probably result in howls of protest from lay people, the media and an escalation in protests. It would therefore best be done with an element of surprise over a short period of time.”
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Hide AdThe paper suggested initially relying on law enforcement of protests and then considering changing the timeline of the tree replacement programme. It said if that failed, ringbarking should be considered.
The inquiry said the idea was rejected by Mr Mothersole. Sir Mark’s inquiry said the document was “indicative of the mindset of a number of important Council decision-makers at the time” and “the author’s request that the paper and its covering email be deleted from the email system once printed speaks for itself”.
He added: “While the extreme option of ring barking trees is not recommended as the next step, the approach that is recommended involved tactics which had already been shown to have failed and conveys a strong impression that a main objective was to defeat the protesters.”