Protesters repaid £30,000 in tree scandal

SHEFFIELD Council has repaid more than £30,000 to four antitreefelling protesters it controversially took legal action against, The Yorkshire Post can reveal.

The council has repaid the money after a damning inquiry by Sir Mark Lowcock found the council had misled the courts and public over its strategy to remove thousands of street trees and replace them with saplings.

The council had secretly created a contract with a company called Amey to remove half the city's street trees as part of highways improvements – but spent years insisting the removals were done only as a "last resort". As protests increased at the height of the dispute, Sheffield Council won a High Court injunction barring protests directly under threatened trees and pursued legal action against several protesters.

One of those to get money back, who asked not to be named, said they had had £11,000 returned by the council.

Sheffield Council confirmed this was one of four payments made to people who have now been reimbursed in relation to court costs.

The council said it had repaid a total of £31,918.16. A spokesperson for the authority said: “The recommendation in Sir Mark Lowcock’s report was to end all outstanding financial disputes but we wanted to go beyond those recommendations and felt it important that those people ordered to pay court costs to us were reimbursed.”

The council’s £2bn Streets Ahead highways-improvement contract with Amey did include a target to replace 17,500 trees and replace them with saplings after a misinterpretation of a consultant’s report.

The report said three-quarters of the city’s 35,000 street trees were mature or over-mature – but this was wrongly interpreted as meaning they were “ready for replacement”.