The two kinds of protection
A Tree Preservation Order (TPO) is made by your district or borough council on a specific tree, a group of trees, or a woodland. Once one is in force, cutting down, topping, lopping, uprooting or deliberately damaging the tree is a criminal offence unless the council has given written consent. An application takes up to eight weeks to determine, and consent for sensible management work is usually granted — a TPO is not a ban on touching the tree, it is a requirement to do the work properly and with permission.
A conservation area protects trees differently: not individually, but as a blanket. Any tree with a stem over 75mm in diameter (measured at 1.5m from the ground) inside a conservation area requires six weeks' written notice to the council before work — a section 211 notice — whether or not it carries its own TPO. The council uses that window to decide whether to make a new TPO. If it stays silent for six weeks, you may proceed.
Which council covers your address
Tree protection in Leicestershire is administered by the district and borough councils, not the county council — so the authority you deal with depends on where the tree stands, not your postcode. Oadby & Wigston Borough Council, Blaby District Council, Harborough District Council, Leicester City Council and Charnwood Borough Council each hold their own TPO register and draw their own conservation-area boundaries, and the boundaries do not follow logic you can guess: one side of a street can be inside a conservation area while the other is not.
Both checks are free and take minutes for someone who does them regularly. We run them for every address before quoting — see the areas we cover for which authority applies in each town we work in.
The penalties are not theoretical
Destroying a protected tree, or damaging it in a way likely to kill it, can be tried in the Crown Court where the fine is unlimited — and courts are directed to set fines that strip out the financial benefit, which for a development site can mean the uplift in land value. Lesser offences carry fines of up to £2,500 per tree in the magistrates' court. There is also usually a legal duty to plant a replacement, and the replacement is automatically protected by the same order.
It is not only the contractor who is prosecuted. The householder who instructed the work is commonly charged alongside them, "I didn't know" is no defence, and a contractor who tells you the tree "probably isn't protected" is telling you whose risk he is happy to take: yours.
The dead-and-dangerous exemption, honestly explained
There is a genuine exemption for dead trees and for trees posing an urgent, serious safety risk — but it is narrower than the trade folklore suggests. Unless the danger is immediate, you must still give the council five working days' written notice. And the burden of proof sits with you: if the council later disputes that the tree qualified, you need evidence it did, gathered before the work.
This is why we photograph and document the defect — the crack, the fungal bracket, the lean with fresh soil heave — before starting any exempt work. A tree that was "obviously dangerous" on the day has a way of becoming "a healthy tree" in the retelling, and the photographs are the only version that matters.
How we handle protected trees
- TPO register and conservation-area boundary checked for your address before any quote
- Application or section 211 notice prepared and submitted as part of the job — no extra charge
- Specifications written in terms council tree officers expect (BS3998), which is why ours are rarely refused
- Exempt dead or dangerous trees photographed and documented before work starts
- If consent is refused, we tell you what the officer would accept instead — there is usually a version of the work that gets approved