Tree safety before the storms, and the record you can produce

Most compliance duties get more attention the more dangerous they are. Trees are the exception. They are one of the lowest risks on a site and one of the most litigated, and the reason is that the duty is not really about the tree. It is about whether you can show you looked.

The Met Office storm naming season runs from early September to late August. The 2025/26 list opened with Amy, Bram and Chandra, and the next set of names is usually published as the season turns. Whatever this winter brings, the useful window for walking your grounds is the one that is open now, in the settled weeks before the first amber warning.

The number that should shape the response

The National Tree Safety Group's guidance, produced with the Health and Safety Executive, puts the overall risk to an individual of being killed by a falling tree or branch at roughly one in ten million in any given year. Around six people a year die this way in the UK, of whom about three are in publicly accessible spaces.

That figure cuts both ways, and it is worth sitting with before you commission anything.

It means a programme of frequent, detailed, tree-by-tree surveying across every parcel of land you hold is not proportionate, and the guidance says so directly. Unnecessary intervention, survey and cost are named as failures, not as caution. A landowner who fells healthy mature trees to remove a theoretical risk has managed the paperwork and damaged the site.

It also means that when something does go wrong, the question in the room afterwards is narrow. Not "was this tree safe", which nobody can promise, but "what system did you have, and what did it say about this tree".

What the duty actually is

There is no single Tree Safety Act. The duty comes from ordinary negligence at common law and from the Occupiers' Liability Act 1957 for visitors, with the 1984 Act covering people who are on the land without permission. In all of them the test is reasonable care in the circumstances, and the circumstances are set mostly by how many people are near the tree and how often.

That gives you the shape of a defensible programme, which is zoning rather than uniformity.

A tree overhanging a car park, a main entrance, a play area, a footpath or a bin store is in a high occupancy zone and earns a regular look. A tree in the middle of a field at the back of the site, with no path and no target, does not need the same attention, and pretending otherwise dilutes the effort that should go to the first group. Write the zones down once. They rarely change, and they justify every frequency decision that follows.

Between formal inspections, the triggers are the events. After a storm, after a long dry spell, after ground works near the roots, and whenever somebody reports something visible: a crack, a fungal bracket at the base, a limb that has dropped, a lean that was not there last year, soil lifting on one side of the trunk. Most of these are noticed by a caretaker or a resident rather than an arborist, which is only useful if there is somewhere for them to report it that is not a passing conversation.

The record is the deliverable

An inspection that nobody wrote down did not happen, in the only forum where it matters. A tree record that holds up is short but complete.

It carries the date and the name of whoever inspected, and what they are qualified to assess, because a visual walk round by a competent member of staff and a detailed assessment by an arboriculturist are different things and should not be filed as if they were the same. It identifies the tree well enough that the next person can find it, which in practice means a position on a plan rather than "the big oak by the gate". It records the zone, what was found, what was recommended, what was actually done, who did it, and the date the next inspection falls due.

That last field is the one that fails most often. The inspection gets done, the recommendation gets made, and the work order either never opens or closes without evidence. The gap between finding a defect and fixing it is where liability actually lives, because you have documented that you knew.

Protected trees make the record do double duty

If a tree carries a Tree Preservation Order or stands in a conservation area, the record stops being purely defensive and becomes the thing that lets you act.

Under the Town and Country Planning (Tree Preservation) (England) Regulations 2012, consent is still needed for work to a protected tree, with a narrow exemption for trees that are dead or dangerous. The exemption for dying trees was removed. Five working days of written notice must be given to the authority before work on a dead tree, unless the work is urgently necessary because there is an immediate risk of serious harm, and where a protected tree is dangerous only the urgently necessary work can be done without consent.

Read that back as an evidence requirement. You are permitted to act first and explain afterwards, and the explanation has to stand up. A dated photograph, an inspection note and the name of the person who made the call are the difference between an exempt emergency and unauthorised works to a protected tree, which is a criminal offence. Deciding to keep that evidence after the chainsaw has gone is too late.

The same applies in reverse. Knowing which of your trees are protected, before somebody schedules routine crown reduction, prevents the more common version of the same problem.

Where this sits in SAMRISK

SAMRISK treats the land as part of the asset rather than as context around it, so the grounds are recorded the way the building is.

The TPO register holds which trees are protected and what the order covers. Grounds and landscape carries the inspection regime, and site risks is where a defect gets logged against a location on the plan rather than in an inbox. Recommendations become tasks with an owner and a due date, maintenance holds the recurring inspection so the next one is already scheduled when this one closes, and the photographs and reports sit in documents attached to the tree rather than to a folder somebody has to remember.

None of that makes a tree safer on its own. It means that when the wind takes a limb down in November, the answer to what you knew and when you knew it takes a minute to produce instead of a fortnight.

The walk round is a summer job. The record is the year-round one.