Labour Council outsources tree felling to Amey / Ferrovial*
The outsource companies currently contracted to Sheffield City Council include:
- Amey manage the city's 'Streets Ahead' project including management of highways.
- Kier Sheffield maintains and repairs the social housing stock.**
- Veolia manages household waste disposal.
- Capita provides HR, payroll and IT services for council employees. ***
* Amey, is a subsidiary of the massive Spanish company grupo Ferrovial
** Kier is one of the seven companies that in 2015 admitted to blacklisting building workers.
*** Capita has been compared to Carillion, and its share price has plunged from around £11 to £2 in just two years and it dropped out of the FTSE 100 last March.
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OVER 5,000 trees have been cut down in Sheffield since 2012, as part the city council's £2bn Streets
Ahead project with the excuse of improving roads and footpaths in the city.
The council, which is planting sapling trees after removing existing
mature ones, insists the trees earmarked for felling are either
'dangerous,
dead, diseased, dying, damaging or discriminatory'.
Yet it seems many of the trees condemned by the council as
'damaging'
or
'discriminatory' are healthy specimens which campaigners
say should be saved. They say that alterations should be made to
surrounding pavements and roads instead.
Today an event
'Get Off Our Tree!' is being held at
Sheffield City Hall. Also playing are local artists The Everly
Pregnant Brothers, lead singer of Reverend and the Makers, Jon
McClure, and former Pulp drummer Nick Banks and the Compare is Jason Cocker , who was interviewed on
Radio Four's 'Today' program.
These are just some of Sheffield’s tree protesters, members of local
groups coordinated by the
Sheffield
Tree Action Groups (Stag), which are claiming that this is another example of local government gone wrong. Stag have made it their mission
to protect the trees from council-backed felling crews in what is
often hailed, with more than a pinch of Yorkshire hyperbole, as Europe’s
greenest city.
Labour Council's PFI Contract
The fellings are part of a 25-year, £2.2bn
Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contract. Signed
in 2012 between the Labour-led council and a private company, Amey,
the
Streets Ahead programme is intended to upgrade
'the condition
of our city’s roads, pavements, streetlights, bridges …' – no
small feat in a place that was known as
'pothole city'.
The contract has serious implications for the city’s 36,000
roadside trees, which have in effect been privatised until the late
2030s. Amey, a subsidiary of the massive Spanish company Ferrovial,
has so far removed around 5,350, including oaks, elms and limes.
Alison Teal, a local Green party councillor, believes she knows why
many were chosen:
'I can only assume that because it’s a 25-year
contract, they’re felling mature trees because they are more
expensive. They cause pavement and road disruption and a hell of a
lot of leaves fall off them.'
Loose and wonky kerbstones and cracked pavements owing to tree roots are among
the reasons given for the fellings. But there is a belief among
the Sheffield protesters that the 14 alternatives priced into Amey’s contract –
from flexible paving to root pruning and pollarding – are being
underused.
The council says it only resorts to removing trees if they are
'dangerous, dying, diseased, dead, damaging or discriminatory'
(meaning that they damage pavements and potentially obstruct disabled
residents). Of the
eight
mature limes destroyed on Rustlings Road, however, the council’s
own independent tree panel found that seven were
in
good condition with a good life expectancy.
The
heavy
redaction of the contract between Amey and Sheffield council
doesn’t help clarify things. With many details kept from the public in the name of
'commercial confidentiality', there is no way of verifying, for
instance, the council’s warnings of
“catastrophic
financial consequences” if the fellings are delayed. The gaps
leave room for conjecture about why the PFI deal isn’t being called
off, or its terms renegotiated. Protesters think they have found
legal reasons that would allow the council to annul the contract –
a
recent petition focuses on Amey’s alleged failure to disclose a
2011 health and safety conviction following the death of an employee.
A council spokesperson said it was aware of the death before the
contract was awarded, but it failed to provide written evidence of
that knowledge in response to
Freedom
of Information requests made by campaigners.
Thatcherite Law Used by Labour Council
Many cite
“the
battle for Rustlings Road” as a turning point – following a
pre-dawn raid and scenes that the former local MP Nick Clegg
described as
“something
you’d expect in Putin’s Russia”, pensioners were arrested
for peacefully protesting.
Eight
trees were chopped down.
It has been a long and gnarly road to today’s situation, with
frustrations running high. In 2016, arrests of peaceful protesters
started under the
1992
Trade Union and Labour Relations Act, which criminalises anyone
who persistently stops someone from carrying out lawful work – in
this case, tree surgeons contracted by Amey.
'We have the harsh
irony of Thatcherite anti-union law being used by a Labour council
against its own citizens,' says Ian Rotherham, professor of
environmental geography at Sheffield Hallam university.
'Only about
30 years on from Orgreave, our local councillors seem to not see the
bitter twist in all this.'
We have the harsh
irony of Thatcherite anti-union law being used by a Labour council
against its own citizens.
None of those
arrested
have ever been prosecuted, however, with the Crown Prosecution
Service saying there was insufficient evidence. Then, last summer,
the
council
brought an injunction against nine named protesters – including the Greens Alison
Teal, and Brook, as well as
'persons unknown'. It
prohibits
protesters from entering safety zones around condemned trees, or
encouraging others to do so, either on social media or in person.
Labour's 'One Party State' !
In Ms. Teal’s opinion of local democracy is low – and no wonder,
after a year in which the council on which she sits took her to court
for breaking the injunction,
only
for the case to be thrown out.
'This is a one-party state,'
she says.
'Sheffield has 84 councillors; 56 are Labour. They can’t
be outvoted.' She mentions Nasima Akther, a Labour councillor who
defied the whip to abstain on a vote about the fellings.
'For her
courage she
was suspended from the party. It’s bullying and she
subsequently resigned.'
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