A Tree Preservation Order makes it a criminal offence to cut down, top, lop, uproot, wilfully damage or wilfully destroy a protected tree without the council’s written consent. The fine is unlimited, the court is directed to take account of any financial benefit you gained, and a duty to replant the tree attaches to the land and passes to whoever owns it next.
Trees are also the constraint most often discovered after exchange, because nothing about a TPO appears on the ground. This guide covers the four categories of Order, what protection a conservation area gives instead, the exemptions that actually work, and how a planning permission can override an Order.
What a Tree Preservation Order is
A local planning authority makes an Order under section 198 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 where it is expedient in the interests of amenity. Amenity is not defined in law, which is why the test is broad in practice: the Planning Practice Guidance asks whether the trees are visible from a public place and whether protection would bring a reasonable degree of public benefit.
Two consequences for site sourcing. An Order can be made on any tree, of any size or species — there is no minimum. And the guidance expressly contemplates councils making Orders because trees are thought to be at risk from development pressure. Buying a site and then telling the council what you intend is, on its own, a reason for an Order to appear.
An Order takes effect provisionally on the day it is made, and the council has six months to confirm it. Miss that deadline and it has to start again with a new Order. Either way, protection bites from day one.
The four categories, and why the boundary matters
The Planning Practice Guidance is specific: an Order must specify trees within four categories, and any combination may be used in a single Order.
- Individual — a named tree that merits protection in its own right.
- Group — trees where the group’s overall impact and quality merits protection, rather than any one specimen.
- Woodland — every tree and sapling within the identified area, of whatever size, including those that grow or are planted after the Order was made. Woodland classification protects the woodland as a whole, so natural regeneration is covered.
- Area — all trees, or named species, standing within a mapped area at the time the Order was made. Nothing planted afterwards is protected.
The area category is the one to interrogate. The guidance describes it as intended for short-term protection in an emergency, says it may not provide appropriate long-term protection, and advises authorities to use it only as a temporary measure until they can survey and reclassify the trees. Many area Orders are decades old and nobody has ever gone back.
In practice that means an old area Order protects a set of trees that existed on a date in, say, 1978, and not the ones growing there now. Establishing which is which is an arboricultural job, and it is occasionally the job that unlocks a site.
Trees in conservation areas are not covered by a TPO
This is the most common mistake in circulation, and it leads people to the wrong application form.
Trees in a conservation area that are not already subject to an Order are protected by section 211 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 instead. That is a different mechanism with a different process:
- You serve a section 211 notice on the council at least six weeks before the work.
- You do not apply for permission and there is no decision to wait for. Once the six weeks expire you may carry out the work, at any point up to two years from the notice. The council can consent sooner.
- What the council does with those six weeks is decide whether to make an Order. That is the entire purpose of the notice period.
- Doing the work without serving the notice is an offence, carrying the same penalties as breaching an Order.
There is a size threshold here that does not exist for TPOs. The section 211 requirement does not apply to a tree whose diameter does not exceed 75mm, or 100mm where the work is solely to improve the growth of other trees, measured over the bark at 1.5 metres above ground level.
The penalties, and the figure that is out of date
Section 210 of the 1990 Act creates two offences, and the first one is the serious one.
- Cutting down, uprooting or wilfully destroying a protected tree, or damaging, topping or lopping it in a manner likely to destroy it, or causing or permitting any of that: liable to a fine on summary conviction or on indictment. The fine is unlimited in both courts, and the court must in particular have regard to any financial benefit that has accrued or appears likely to accrue from the offence.
- Any other contravention of the Order: a fine not exceeding level 4 on the standard scale, currently £2,500.
If you have read that the maximum is £20,000, that figure is pre-2015. Section 85 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 removed the summary-conviction cap with effect from 12 March 2015. The Planning Practice Guidance page on TPOs was last revised in 2014 and still quotes the old figure; the statute is what a court applies.
The replanting duty runs with the land
Under section 206, where a protected tree is removed, uprooted or destroyed in contravention of an Order, it is the duty of the owner of the land to plant another tree of appropriate size and species in the same place as soon as reasonably practicable. The Order then applies to the replacement as it applied to the original. The duty also bites where a tree is removed under the dangerous-tree exemption or dies.
Two things follow. The council can dispense with the duty on application, so it is worth asking. And the duty attaches to the land — buy a site where a previous owner felled a protected tree and you inherit the obligation along with the title. It is not covered by the previous owner’s conviction.
The exemptions that actually work
Consent is not needed for some work, but the exemptions are narrower than people assume and several require notice.
- Dead trees and branches. Five working days’ written notice before felling a dead tree; no notice or consent needed to remove dead branches from a living tree.
- Dangerous trees. Only where the tree presents an immediate risk of serious harm and work is urgently needed to remove it. Written notice must go to the council as soon as practicable after the work becomes necessary, and the work must be limited to what removes the risk. If the danger is not immediate, the exemption does not apply.
- Complying with an Act of Parliament, or preventing or abating a nuisance.
The dead and dangerous routes both trigger the section 206 replanting duty where the tree is not part of a woodland. An exemption gets you out of the offence, not out of the tree.
How planning permission overrides an Order
This is the mechanism that makes a TPO survivable on a development site, and its limits are exact.
The council’s consent is not required for work on a tree subject to an Order so far as that work is necessary to implement a full planning permission. The Planning Practice Guidance gives the example directly: the Order is overridden if a tree has to be removed to make way for a new building for which full planning permission has been granted.
Three qualifications do the damage:
- Outline permission is not enough. The exemption does not apply where only outline permission has been granted.
- Only work that is necessary. Felling a protected tree that sits outside the building footprint, because it is inconvenient, is not covered.
- Conditions bite. Permissions on treed sites routinely carry tree protection conditions, and section 197 lets the council require new planting. A tree planted under such a condition and marked “C” in the Order’s schedule becomes protected the moment it is planted.
Where you cannot rely on a permission, the route is a consent application under the Order. Councils have eight weeks; past that you can appeal on non-determination. A consent lasts two years from grant by default and passes to a subsequent owner, so an unused consent obtained by a seller is worth asking about.
Where trees sit in the wider constraint picture
A TPO is a tree-level constraint. It sits alongside, and is separate from, the habitat designations that take a whole site off the table — ancient woodland is irreplaceable habitat in national policy and does not respond to a consent application at all. Establish which one you are dealing with before you commission an arboricultural survey, because the answers are not interchangeable.
TPO data in BOOM!
Two layers sit in the Environmental Layers panel of Data Studio: Tree Preservation Orders and Tree Preservation Zones. Both are also available as SiteSeeker constraints, so you can screen a search area rather than checking sites one at a time. As at the June 2025 update they held 375,231 Orders and 517,772 zones.
“Zone” follows the naming used by the government’s own planning data platform for mapped tree protection areas; the statutory category is “area”. If a site returns a zone hit, the question to answer is which of the four categories the underlying Order actually uses, because a woodland Order and a 1970s area Order lead to completely different conclusions about the trees standing there today.
Screen for trees before you price the scheme, not after. A mature protected oak in the middle of a plot is a layout constraint you can design around cheaply at concept stage and an expensive redesign once the drawings are done.
