Sheffield City Council suffered “a serious and sustained failure of strategic leadership” under various administrations in an acrimonious dispute with residents over felling trees.
That finding has come from an independent inquiry report by former United Nations official Sir Mark Lowcock, who also said the council misled the High Court.
The dispute had its origins in a private finance initiative contract with highways contractor Amey to improve roads and pavements but led to a mass tree felling programme that provoked intense public opposition.
Sir Mark said the Streets Ahead programme had been devised because roads, pavements and street lighting were in a poor state and in 2007 the council received an analysis from Elliott Consulting, which found that 74% of the city’s 35,000 street trees were mature or overmature.
The council produced an outline business case for Streets Ahead which said “a large proportion” of these trees were “now ready for replacement”.
Sir Mark said: “That is not what Elliott said or intended. The inquiry did not find evidence that in saying what they did the council was malign or intending to mislead.
“The assertion was more likely a result of misinterpretation, arising from the fact that the people making the key judgments on design issues were highway engineers not tree specialists.”
Successful bidder Amey proposed to remove and replace 17,500 street trees over the 25 years of Streets Ahead but with one-third to be completed within the first five years.
Although Sheffield had had little option but to use a PFI contract, it need not have used the approach it did and “developing and then adopting a flawed plan was a failure of strategic leadership.
“Responsibility for that rests primarily with senior council officers and senior politicians in the administrations of the governing groups between 2008 and 2012.”
Neither the council nor Amey expected the tree replacement programme to attract the opposition it did, Sir Mark said.
“Obvious facts, for example that people saw a world of difference between a newly planted tree and a large mature one, were overlooked,” he said.
“A failure to ask the right questions of the right people helps to account for that. A consequence of failing to identify the risk was that nothing was done to mitigate it.”
Even then, the severity of the later dispute “was not inevitable” but leading politicians “ignored those who said the dispute needed a political solution” and did not get adequate advice from senior officers “partly because the political direction and mood within the council was increasingly to prevail in the dispute not to find a compromise”.
Sir Mark found campaigners saw the council as “irrational, unreasonable, deceitful, dishonest, bullying and intimidating behaviour [which] is what generated the determination, persistence, creativity and ingenuity that the campaigners displayed”.
He said that by early 2018, “the council had united almost everyone against them: it was hard to find any influential outsider willing to defend what they were doing”.
Sheffield in 2015 set up an Independent Tree Panel but this was “misled over what could be done at Amey's cost under the contract as were the public and, later, the courts”.
The inquiry did not find that any individual committed perjury but Sir Mark noted: “The fact that this cannot be attributed to an individual should not take away from the gravity of the court being misled by a document produced by the council.”
Sir Mark said: “Our conclusion is that the council’s behaviour amounted to a serious and sustained failure of strategic leadership. Responsibility for that ultimately rests with the political leadership, in particular the relevant cabinet member and the council leader: they were responsible for setting the direction and tone.” These posts were held by different councillors from different parties over this period.
Problems only began to be resolved after a new cabinet member was appointed in 2018 and a Street Tree Partnership was set up the following year.
Sir Mark said: “The partnership has been successful in developing a new, more consultative approach, to the extent that Sheffield has now earned external plaudits for its approach.
“But the council and Amey have yet to resolve a number of issues hanging over from the dispute for streets not so far covered by the Streets Ahead.”
A joint statement by chief executive Kate Josephs and leader Terry Fox (Lab) said: "The council has already acknowledged that it got many things wrong in the handling of the street trees dispute, and we wish to reiterate our previous apologies for our failings.
“We have taken huge steps already to ensure past mistakes are not repeated and we hope the release of this report will further help us to learn lessons as we move forward from the dispute.”
Comments