‘Sorry’ doesn’t cut it, say Sheffield Tree Massacre campaigners

A new grovelling apology from city leaders still finds residents angry about the scandal nearly a decade later, writes Colin Drury

Protesters stand next to a rare Huntingdon elm on Chelsea Road in Sheffield (PA)

As he stands on Abbeydale Park Rise in Sheffield, Justin Buxton considers the empty space where two of his favourite trees had once stood.

They were a pair of cherry blossoms planted in the Fifties as part of a residents’ scheme to improve the street. For six decades, they had brought colour and life to this suburban road. At Christmas, they were decked out in lights to raise money for the local children’s hospital.

Then in 2015 contractors working on behalf of Sheffield City Council came in and chopped them down.

“People begged the council not to do it,” says Justin, a design consultant who lives in Sheffield. “But there was no reasoning. On the day they got cut down, 30 police officers were sent to keep protesters back. Sixty years of life – gone in an hour.”

A tree cut down by contractors in Rustlings Road on 17 November 2016 (PA)

The two cherry blossoms were among 6,000 specimens axed in the city between 2015 and 2018 in what the Woodland Trust labelled the Sheffield Tree Massacre.

In a secret clause of a £2.2bn road improvements contract, the Labour-run council agreed for 17,500 of the city’s 36,000 street trees to be exterminated.

When residents realised what was happening and began to rally against the destruction, they were ignored. When they protested, they were met with riot police and faced arrest. In one especially chilling episode, officers ordered residents to leave their homes at 5am so contractors could get to work. At least two who refused were taken away and locked up. Nick Clegg – then a city MP – described it as “like something from Putin’s Russia”.

Then Sheffield Hallam Liberal Democrat MP Nick Clegg speaks with members of the public in 2016 (PA)

Now, the scandal has come sharply into the spotlight again after Sheffield City Council issued an unreserved apology for its role in the affair following a recommendation from an independent report.

In an excoriating four-page statement – signed by new council leader Tom Hunt and his chief executive Kate Josephs – the authority owned up to multiple failures, confessed to both lying and to flawed decision-making and, in one jaw-dropping section, effectively admitted perjury by accepting it misled the courts. “We recognise,” it says at one point, “that we got so much of this wrong.”

As mea culpas go, it may be unparalleled in British local government. Yet, for many here in the Steel City, the apology is not enough.

For the dozens arrested and for the thousands who saw the very character of their street unalterably changed, “sorry” is only a starting point towards closure. If this is an official admission of institutional wrongdoing, campaigners now believe individuals – both elected councillors and their senior officials – must be held responsible for their role in that wrongdoing.

“I think they imagine this apology will draw a line under the whole sorry episode,” said Buxton who was himself arrested four times though never charged. “But there are so many questions left unanswered. How was this ever allowed to happen in the first place? Who made these scandalous decisions that saw people being arrested? And why do we still not have a single person being held accountable?”

Resident Pamela Hanrahan by a tree that was cut down in Abbeydale Park Rise in Dore, Sheffield, as part of the council’s controversial felling programme (PA)

‘We wanted to protect something we loved’

Sheffield has long boasted of being Europe’s greenest city – in part because a third of it sits in the Peak District. But it is also due to the sheer number of trees that line the roads. In 2015, some 36,000 of them arched over highways and pavements.

But, that year, residents noticed they were starting to go missing. “People were going to work in the morning and coming home to entirely different-looking streets,” city resident Paul Selby later told The Independent. “It was ecological destruction.”

The arboreta was, it emerged, being axed under the terms of a massive £2.2bn road improvement scheme being carried out by the infrastructure giant Amey. While company and council both insisted that only dying or dangerous trees were being felled, residents were unconvinced. Evidence spread of perfectly healthy and safe trees being chopped down too. Despite repeated official denials, it would eventually be revealed – through tenacious investigations by the Sheffield Tree Action Groups (Stag) – that there was a target for 17,500 trees to be gotten rid of.

Why? Because, so ran the theory, it would allow Amey to increase its profit margins: over the length of the company’s 25-year highway maintenance obligations, campaigners pointed out a newly planted sapling would be far cheaper to look after than older, larger trees.

As the chopping continued – and with the council refusing to pause for consultation – demonstrations began. People at home would spot Amey vans and go out to stand under nearby trees so they couldn’t be axed. Others started taking the bus to work, leaving their cars blocking access to endangered specimens. Stag was founded and took to organising daily spotter patrols and flying pickets across the city.

The council responded by requesting police help. It led to the sight of riot officers arriving on mass in some of Sheffield’s leafiest suburbs to hold back – and arrest – oft-elderly residents. In the city’s affluent Rustlings Road, two retired residents – both in their seventies – were arrested by police after refusing to move away from a 100-year-old lime.

“We wanted to protect something we loved,” says one of them, Jenny Hockey. “And our right to do that – our democratic right – was taken away, really, by state force. It was so horrible and disempowering.”

So bad did things become that the council took one of its own councillors to court (wrongly) for breaking an injunction designed to stop protesters. Green Party member Alison Teal had the threat of prison hanging over her for several months before a judge struck off the case.

“It was bullying pure and simple,” the 58-year-old says. “I had the council’s most senior legal officer sending me the most intimidating legal letters, and it was frightening.

“They were riding roughshod over democracy by having these trees cut down, and then, when people tried to stop that happening, they were targeted with the full force of the council’s powers. We were put through years of hell simply for trying to do what we knew was right.”

Teal, like Buxton and others, does not believe the new apology is enough.

“Individuals made these decisions,” she says. “And many of those individuals have now moved jobs or been retired off on six-figure pensions while we continue to pick up the pieces of our lives. The apology – no matter how grovelling – doesn’t change that if there is no sense of responsibility being taken.”

The council’s leader at the time, Julie Dore, has long since stood down and is no longer a councillor. The then chief executive, John Mothersole, has retired. The director of legal and governance, Gillian Duckworth, has moved on to another job at Greater Manchester Combined Authority.

The arboreta was being axed under the terms of a massive £2.2bn road improvement scheme being carried out by the infrastructure giant Amey (PA)

‘I’m now interested in going forward’

“What campaigners will now do,” says Teal, “is study the apology and consider our options regarding further action.”

This is probably not what Tom Hunt, elected leader of the council in May, wants to hear. He co-authored the apology after digesting an independent report into the episode by Sir Mark Lowcock.

“What Sir Mark said at an extraordinary general meeting [of the council] is that it’s not the time to relitigate battles of the past,” Hunt said on Friday. “I’m a new councillor, I’m a new council leader. The Labour Party accepts all the findings of the report and ... as the new council leader I’m now interested in going forward.”

The authority is putting in place all recommendations from Sir Mark’s report, he says.

New methods of consultancy – spearheaded by new local area committees – will be implemented to ensure no similar dispute can ever escalate again. Individuals who have faced criminal proceedings will be offered meetings where the council says it will look at ways it can help them, although compensation, for now, appears to be off the table. And a plaque is to be installed in Sheffield Town Hall commemorating the fact the protesters, ultimately, managed to save 11,500 trees.

Yet back with Buxton in Abbeydale Park Rise, such actions appear little more than tokenistic.