Tree Risk Management Strategy

The Council has a statutory duty of care under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Occupiers Liability Act 1999 to ensure that members of the public and staff are not to be put at risk because of any failure by the Council to take all reasonable precautions to ensure their safety.

A Risk Assessment is required under the Management of Health and Safety Regulations 1999. There is a need to inspect trees in or near public places, or adjacent to buildings or working areas to assess whether they represent a risk to life or property, and to take remedial action as appropriate.

The Local Authority, either in its capacity as owner or manager, is responsible for trees located on land for which it manages or has total control over. As such, it has a common law and statutory duty of care in relation to its trees. Compliance with the duty will require the operation of a reasonable systematic inspection of all its trees, which has been determined in accordance with a sufficient and informed risk assessment.

This document sets out minimum standards of inspection, competence and record keeping that the Council will commit to and is in accordance with the industry guideline document.

The System

Torbay Council has adopted a system known as Quantified Tree Risk Assessment (QTRA). This methodology has led the way in the field of tree safety management with a risk assessment approach that is led by the usage and value of the targets having potential to be affected by trees. The target led approach to tree safety management is a considerable shift from the generally accepted wisdom where the tree assessor focuses on identifying defects in trees and then seeks to avoid legal liability by removing or modifying the tree.

This defect led approach results in the allocation of disproportionate resources to both tree safety surveys, inspections and to the remediation of defective trees where the risks are low if only they were actually assessed.

One of the greatest benefits of QTRA is that it enables an informed overview of the risks associated with a tree population to be carried out as a desktop exercise before the survey of trees. When the risk overview is complete, the assessment will usually record only the general attributes of groups or collections of trees.

Assessing and recording individual trees will be necessary only where they are likely to be significant in relation to the targets.