Jump to content

Log in or register to remove this advert

daltontrees

Veteran Member
  • Posts

    4,833
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    4

Everything posted by daltontrees

  1. It's worth thinking about, though, as a lot of ADB surveys and recommendations are not based on any systematic approach. VALID has really just taken QTRA and the HSE's hierarchy of risk to get its accceptable/tolerable/unacceptable categories. A professional assessment is only possible if these terms and their legal implications are understood by the assessor.
  2. The overall law is quite simple. If you are not the customer, BT needs a wayleave to use your land. A wayleave is an anual agreement that allows access to install and maintain equipment. There is usually an annual or commuted payment for this. If you refuse to sign a wayleave then BT can get a court order allowing it to use your land anyway. If you disagree with the proposed arragements of poles and wires etc. don't speak to the contractor, put it on written notice to whoever sent you the wayleave. If you don't do this, and if there are only unrecorded verbal disagreements, BT could apply for a court order and you will lose any say in the matter. You don't need fancy lawyers or anything, just write that you do not agree to the proposal and would like reassurances about precise positions or, better still, propose an alternative that won't inconvenience you so much. Felling poles is for vandals, maniacs and idiots. I can only imagine and hope the suggestions of this you have had are not serious. You would probably go immediately from smug self-righteousness to defendant in a prosecution, wayleave or no wayleave. I had your situation a few years ago, a pole was proposed in (my) road verge right in front of my house where I propsed to build a crossover and driveway. I suggested an alternative position 5 metres to the side and that's what happened. Made absolutely no difference to BT. When the guy came to remove the old disused pole, he got out a chainsaw with the chain swinging an inch off the bottom of the bar, and set about felling the pole with alarming lack of PPE, or any real expectation of where it was going to land up. On the road was most likely. I popped out, tightened and sharpened his cahin and in the end I felled the pole safely as he manned a pull-rope. Happy outcome. There's some burning in those old poles, plus I got to use the upper undecayed part for a fencepost.
  3. A couple of thigs to add here. In Scotland the nuisance exemption has been removed, inexplicably. Do not rely on it. There never has been a windthrow (windblow) exemption, it was just never enforced. In Scotland the whole rationale for Licenses and for protecting trees has been rewritten in to the 2018 Act, and it's not got a lot to do with strategic timber reserves any more. In England the rationale has drifted, without statutory authority, towards sustainability and habitat considerations (and in one case it was reported that prosecution was based on loss of amenity) and one day the legislation might catch up with that. Windthrow is enforced in Scotland almost certainly to ensure restocking obligations.
  4. Endless argument to be had, a lot of tree case law is about this very subject. The standard for noticing, discovering and understanding the significance of tree defects expected of householders is not very high, but the law expects you to act on anything you (or a hypothetical average person) would be expected to notice or discover. If ther neighbour brings it to your attention and you do nothing, there's trouble ahead. Big complicated subject, but only a few basic principles.
  5. I am reminded that you are unable to hold a discussion without resorting to antagonism. I am not a braveheart chest beater, you don't know me, and I have no intention of wasting another moment of my time on you. I will stick to discussing tree issues. Try it some time.
  6. Betting's for mugs. And how do we predict when there would be a votre for independence? It's a massive Catch 22, Westminster olnly allows a vote when it thinks or knows it will win. We should set the date for a vote is say 4 years' time. no going back on it. Personaly I'd have one on every general election day. How utterly ridiculous that Scotland has to ask? And that England can refuse to let us choose? I was borderline for independence but the utter sham of Brexit pushed me over.
  7. Come now, play fair. If you get to vote Scotland out we get to vote you out. Then we cna all decide tyo get back in minus the repulsive middle England and London monopoly of democracy. Would you vote for Scotland to be set free (or is it adrift) because you feel our pain or because we are such a financial basket case tha twe are dragging you down?
  8. Have you not figured it out? Get independence then get shot of the SNP. The very next day. People who don't vote for independence because they don't like the SNP or Sturgeon are short-sighted beyond belief.
  9. Bring it on. I've been advocating it for years. Engand threw us out of the EU against our will, we always get what England wants anyway. Hay, votew for us to leave England and I'll vote for Cornwall to leave England too. Then we can all renegotiate trading terms with each other. We'll sell water and electricity. You can send some granite and scrumpy. It'll be fun and it'll be fair.
  10. Basket case my ****************ing arse! It would be hard at first, but Scotland would have to become a different entity, not a mini-England. I think it would do quite well as it has several niches it could carve out. The UK is a basket case already, it just borrows and borrows and has built its entire financial markets around the permanence of government borrowing. Call me biased, but I am sick to my guts of old Etonian arrogant pricks trying to make us feel grateful to get a share of what is already ours. As I always say, I'd rather we made an arse of it ourselves than had an arse made of it for us by unaccountable wankers that we haven't chosen and never can oust even when the whole of Scotland votes against the UK majority. It might even cure scots of their unhealthy reliance on blaming England for all its woes. In fairness, England's only to blame for some of them. Some of them are universal woes, and we are resilient enough to manage them as competently as Bojo and his bumbling cohorts. With or withour EU. With or without russian gas. With or prefereably without nukes. Now there's a book-balancer in one stroke of the pen.
  11. It's called a 'Felling Permission' and it is not that different to a 'Felling License' in England and Wales. The rules are bit more strict though, and windthrow didn't used to need a License, but this was because of lax application of the law rather than the law itself. Trees in gardens and public open spaces are always exempt. The idiots at the Scottish Parliament removed the 'nuisance' exemption, which still applies in E&W. So a tree lying into a garden may be exempt as a 'nuisance'.
  12. This question always comes up and it continues to be surprising how ill-defined the answer is. Attempts to answer it always drift off into pragmatic advice, matters of insurance and of responsibility for harm or damage, and horror stories about spiralling legal costs. I believe the answer is clear and simple as long as these distractions are ignored, or at least answered as special cases to the general rule. If your tree falls into a neighbour's garden, it's still yours so get it removed. IF THERE WAS ALSO DAMAGE OR HARM TO NEIGHBOUR If it caused damage or harm that could not have been reasonably foreseen, the tree owner is not responsible for compensation. If harm or damage was reasonably foreseeable, the tree owner may be held negligent and compensation would be payable. IF THERE ARE ALSO INSURERS INVOLVED If there are insurances in place, the insurers may step in and deal with negligence claims. It doesn't change the rights or responsibilites of the parties. Purely depending on what the policy or policies say, insurance may or may not pay out for unforeseeable damage. This is not a rule of law, it depends on the policy. It doesn't change the rights or responsibilites of the parties. Policies differ as to liability for damage to 3rd party property, whether by negligence or bad luck. They also differ as to cover for damage to boundary structures, which oddly are often excluded from insurance on cheap policies.
  13. Aye but the difference between shark/crevasse deaths and tree deaths is that unlike crevasses and sharks, trees are almost everywhere and most peple are exposed involuntarily to risk from trees regularly. If the law allows it, a landowner can ensure tree risk free occupation by removing all trees in and near a property. So yes the odds can be reduced until you leave the property to go to work or the shops or to visit someone. Funnily enough, I'd bet less people are killed by their own trees than by other people's trees. I want to know if anyone's ever been attacked by a shark on a glacier.
  14. R.u. much more common on Horse Chestnut. P.f. may be possible but I've never seen it on Horse Chestnut. Cut a slice from it, if it's R.u. the pore area t the base wiill be orange, if it's P.f. it will be white or off-white.
  15. That's goign to take a week to digest. I agree about fallacious reasoning, there's some really dubious ideas that have been embedded in arboriculture that never did pass the test in the first place but have been pushed by their proponents. Dangerous.
  16. OK, here it is. There is nothing in the thread last year that states that an actual TPO application for removal was ever submitted. What was submitted was a CA notification. The meeting of a s211 CA notification with a TPO does not constitute refusal of a TPO application. Indeed, there has been no TPO application (that we know of so far). If so, there can be no basis for compensation. If anything I am surprised that an appeal has been accepted. Apeal against what? A challenge to a TPO being made is a whole different thing. A challenge to the validity of a TPO based on defective service of notices is yet another thing. That was the subject of last year's discussion.
  17. Maybe I'm missing something here.... A Council will only be responsible for damage following a refusal if the damage was foreseeable at the time of refusal (or maybe at time of application). But in this case, according to the link we have been given, a CA notification was put in and was countered with a TPO. In that case there had been, strictly speaking, no TPO application. I am going to have to read the whole saga again...
  18. The COuncil in specific circumstances would be responsible for damage, but I cannot see any interpretation of the legislation that would make it responsible for the costs of removing a fallen tree. I think Johnelle made this distuinction in his questions.
  19. Yes it is £150 a year and Autocad is £250 a month! I'll give it a try. Thanks for the recommendation.
  20. Interesting, thanks. Apparently doesn't support the latest vertions of .dwg drawings but I can give it a shot with a recent dwg and see whether it still works minus features or whether it doesnt' work at all.
  21. Thanks it looks like a good solid application, but unfortunately it would leave me witht eh same issue I have just now in that it doesn't accept .dwg files.
  22. Hello can anyone recommed a CAD programme for general map work? I currntly have PT Mapper which only works with very limited functionality with dxf drawings and seesm to have issues with many of the drawings I am sent by architects. I am having to convert from their dwgs to dxf using an on-line convertor which is not ideal. AutoCAD seems to be the industry leader but it is shockingly expensive if only being used occasionally, There seem to be zillions of cheap or free substitutes (some of the free ones just mean the trial version is free) and I have used LibreCAD for a while but it does not like dwgs and does not let in anything bigger than 10MB.There are so many to choose from I don't know where to start. CorelDraw, TurboCAD, Vectorworks...
  23. Risk of ivy growing in the countryside? It's probably been growing in the contryside for as along as trees have. The trees it kills are really good habitat. The idea of a nice clean tree with branches only above 8 feet is a human fantasy. Nature's nature, and it's brutal. Personally I loathe ivy on trees, from my climbing days, but it exists and is nearly impossible to get rid of so it just has to be seen as part of ecology. The range of leaf shapes and sizes for H.h is perplexing, hard to believe it's the same species sometimes let alone part of the same individual. I pause to ponder ivy occasionaly, and I have planted some variegated ones in my garden, but I'm not losing any sleep over this issue, and good luck with your quest.
  24. Prevent recurrence (a bit of chicken wire would do) and see how it recovers. Apple growers routinely deliberately sever bark to promote particular growth habits of apple trees. It might well recover. Keep it fed. Keep the rabbit fed too.

About

Arbtalk.co.uk is a hub for the arboriculture industry in the UK.  
If you're just starting out and you need business, equipment, tech or training support you're in the right place.  If you've done it, made it, got a van load of oily t-shirts and have decided to give something back by sharing your knowledge or wisdom,  then you're welcome too.
If you would like to contribute to making this industry more effective and safe then welcome.
Just like a living tree, it'll always be a work in progress.
Please have a look around, sign up, share and contribute the best you have.

See you inside.

The Arbtalk Team

Follow us

Articles

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.