Checking a Tree Preservation Order against the council map

A tree preservation order check has two halves, and most people only do the first. The council's online constraints map will tell you whether a TPO covers the land. It will not reliably tell you whether it covers the particular tree you want to prune, because the legal document is the order itself, made under sections 198 to 214 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and the Town and Country Planning (Tree Preservation) (England) Regulations 2012, and the map layer is only a rendering of it.

Start with the map. Then get the order and its schedule, and read both together.

Where the order actually lives

Every local planning authority has to keep its tree preservation orders available for public inspection free of charge. In practice that means one of three routes, and it is worth trying them in this order.

The council's own map viewer, usually badged as a constraints map or a planning policy map, with a TPO layer you can switch on. Some authorities publish their TPO data to the national planning data platform as well, which is useful if you are checking several sites.

The local land charges register, which is where a TPO is registered as a charge against the land. This is what a conveyancing search picks up, and it gives you the order reference and the date it was made.

A direct request to the tree officer or arboricultural officer. If the first two routes give you a reference without a document, this is the one that works.

The four classifications and what each protects

The 2012 Regulations introduced a single standard form of order with a schedule that classifies every protected tree into one of four types. The classification decides what is protected, and the differences are substantial.

Area and woodland classifications look similar on a map and behave very differently. A woodland order is dynamic: a sapling that germinates thirty years after the order is protected. An area order is a snapshot: only the trees that were standing on the date the order was made are protected, and a tree planted the following spring is not.

Reading an area order made decades ago

Area orders were the quick option for councils in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, and government guidance has discouraged them since, precisely because they age badly. Fifty years on, nobody can say with confidence which trees were standing when the order was made.

If your tree sits inside an area classification, the questions to answer are the date of the order, the likely age of the tree, and whether there is any photographic or documentary evidence of what was there at the time. Aerial photography held by the county record office or the council's own historic imagery can settle it. A tree with a girth that clearly postdates the order is probably outside it, but that is a judgement, and the burden falls on you if the council disagrees.

Where the stakes are high, the honest answer is that an area order creates real uncertainty. Many councils will replace an old area order with a fresh individual or group order if you ask them to survey the site, and that is often the cleanest resolution.

Confirming that one specific tree is covered

Cross-check three things. The plan attached to the order, which is the definitive spatial record and is usually at a larger scale than the online layer. The schedule, which names species and, for group orders, states how many trees of each species are included. And the site itself, because trees are removed, die and are replaced without the order being updated.

A common trap: a group order for "5 x Lime" protects five limes. If there are now seven limes in the group, two of them are not protected, and nobody can tell you which two. Another: the order plan marks a T-numbered dot beside a boundary, and there are two trees within a few metres of it. Position on the plan is indicative, and the species in the schedule is what settles the argument.

Before any work near a protected tree, a survey to BS 5837:2012 will give you root protection areas and a tree category for each stem, and that is the document a council expects with an application. Our page on the tree survey and Arboricultural Impact Assessment sets out what the report has to cover.

Trees in a conservation area and the six week notice

Trees in a conservation area that are not already covered by a TPO have their own regime under section 211. You must give the council six weeks written notice before carrying out work to any tree with a stem diameter of more than 75mm measured at 1.5 metres above ground level, or more than 100mm where you are thinning to help the growth of other trees.

The council then either does nothing, in which case you may proceed within two years of the notice, or it makes a tree preservation order to protect the tree properly. Six weeks is not an approval period. It is a window in which the authority decides whether to take the tree into formal protection.

The exemptions are narrow. Dead trees can be removed, but you must give the authority five days notice beforehand unless there is an urgent risk of serious harm, in which case notice is given as soon as practicable afterwards. Dangerous is a high bar and it is assessed on the facts, not on your opinion of the tree. If the property is also in a conservation area for heritage reasons, the tree may be contributing to the character that a Heritage Statement has to describe.

Asking for the order document itself

Request the order by its reference and ask for three things: the order as made, the confirmation notice, and the plan and schedule. Councils sometimes send only the front sheet, which tells you nothing useful.

If the order was made under the pre-2012 regime, the format will differ and the schedule may be laid out under the old first, second, third and fourth schedule structure. The substance is the same. What matters is the classification, the species and the plan.

Keep the date the order was confirmed. An order takes effect provisionally when made and must normally be confirmed within six months, and an unconfirmed order that has lapsed protects nothing.

When the map and the schedule disagree

The order document prevails. The online layer is a convenience, published without warranty, and digitisation errors from paper plans are common, particularly where an old plan was drawn at 1:2500 and the modern layer renders it over aerial imagery.

Put the discrepancy in writing to the tree officer, attach both versions, and ask for a written confirmation of whether the tree is protected. That reply is what you rely on, and it is what you attach to any subsequent application. Working to an unprotected-looking map layer is no defence: cutting down or wilfully destroying a protected tree is an offence under section 210, with an unlimited fine on conviction on indictment, and section 206 imposes a duty to replace the tree.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it.

If trees are going to shape your scheme, enter your postcode on PlanScope to see which reports your site is likely to need. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.