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Terror of the trees
THE independent inquiry into the Sheffield ‘chainsaw massacre’ has found that councillors in the South Yorkshire city behaved dishonestly and destroyed public trust. In a 227-page report, Sir Mark Lowcock, inquiry chairman, found that the council’s behaviour around the incident, which began in 2012, ‘amounted to a serious and sustained failure of strategic leadership’. His report also concluded that 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 scandal began when Sheffield’s council signed a 25-year contract with infrastructure-support service provider Amey, which included the removal and replacement of 17,500 street trees. Public opposition against the felling grew and reached a climax in 2016, when campaigners and residents were arrested by South Yorkshire Police. Further arrests were made when eight trees were cut down at 4.30am. Two residents, Freda Brayshaw and Jenny Hockey, aged 71 and 70 respectively, were among those detained. Both were later released and charges dropped. Nick Clegg, who was then Sheffield Hallam MP, described the scenes as ‘something you’d see in Putin’s Russia’. Further disputes continued until 2020, when a ‘peace deal’ between Sheffield City Council and the protestors was struck.
The inquiry heard that, in 2018, councillors considered killing thousands of healthy trees to justify cutting them down. In emails published in the inquiry, councillors contemplated ‘ring barking’ trees to ‘defeat’ protestors. Ring barking is a method of killing healthy trees by removing the bark around the circumference of the trunk. ‘The tree is killed and dies over a number of months,’ the email said. ‘It would move all trees into the “dying” category and mean that STAG [Sheffield Trees Action Group] could
