1. How many trees were felled by either your employees or contractors in (a) 2016-17, (b) 2017-18 and (c) 2018-19? 2. How many trees were planted by your employees or contractors in (a) 2016-17, (b) 2017-18 and (c) 2018-19? 3. How many trees subject to a Tree Preservation Order were felled in the 18-19 financial year by employees or contractors working for you? Please provide me with a list showing the number of each species involved.

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TfL Ref: FOI-2252-1920

Thank you for your email received by Transport for London (TfL) on 24 October 2019.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Environmental Information Regulations and our information access policy.  I can confirm we hold some of the information you require. You asked:

1. How many trees were felled by either your employees or contractors in (a) 2016-17, (b) 2017-18 and (c) 2018-19?
2. 2. How many trees were planted by your employees or contractors in (a) 2016-17, (b) 2017-18 and (c) 2018-19?

Year	Planted	Removed	Est. no. of trees
	TOTAL	TOTAL	TOTAL
16/17	1173	757	23,523
17/18	339	632	23,230
18/19	359	530	23,059

TfL is committed to planting at least 1,000 street trees by the end of this financial year, in line with the Mayor’s Transport Strategy target of a 1 per cent increase compared to 2017/18.

Please note the above figures relate to street trees. TfL also manages vegetation on the rail and light rail networks it operates but these are not included in the above figures.

3. How many trees subject to a Tree Preservation Order were felled in the 18-19 financial year by employees or contractors working for you? Please provide me with a list showing the number of each species involved.

We are unable to provide data on whether felled trees may have had a Tree Preservation Order (TPO) as we do not record this specific information separately. 

We have established that in order to locate and retrieve this detail, we would have to manually review a large volume of documents we hold in relation to our trees to determine whether they were subject to a TPO. This process would take an excessive amount of staff time and resources as we have over 23,000 trees. Therefore, we are refusing to provide this in accordance with the Environmental Information Regulations under Regulation 12(4)(b) as we believe it’s ‘manifestly unreasonable’.

The use of this exception is subject to a public interest test, which requires us to consider whether the public interest in applying the exception outweighs the public interest in disclosure. We recognise that the release of information would promote accountability and transparency in public services. However, the time it would take to provide the information you have requested would divert a disproportionate amount of our resources from its core functions and, on balance we consider that the public interest currently favours the use of the exception.

To help us to respond to your request, you may wish to consider narrowing the scope of the question so that we can more easily locate, retrieve and extract the information you are seeking.

If this is not the information you are looking for, or if you are unable to access it for some reason, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.

Yours sincerely

Eva Hextall

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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