Tree law in England, in plain English.

There is no single “tree law”

The first thing to know is that there isn’t one. People ring up asking about the tree law and there isn’t one to point at. What we have in England is a patchwork.

You’ve got common law nuisance, centuries old, governing what happens when one person’s tree affects another person’s land. Sitting over that, the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 is where Tree Preservation Orders and conservation areas live. The Highways Act 1980 deals with trees overhanging roads and pavements. The Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 added a high-hedges regime that lets councils step in on hedges over two metres if mediation has failed. The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 controls nesting-bird protection, which puts a real seasonal limit on tree work. The Forestry Act 1967 brings in Felling Licences for anything over a small volume of timber.

Six pieces of law, each handling a different bit, none written in a way a homeowner can pick up and use. So when a hedge gets too tall, or a root cracks a wall, or a branch hangs over the fence, nobody knows what their rights are. That’s where most disputes start.

This guide is the version we’d give a customer over a cup of tea after a site visit. It is not legal advice. If you have a real dispute on your hands, see a solicitor. What follows is what’s true in practice, written by a qualified tree surgeon called in to both sides of these arguments more times than is comfortable.

Who owns the tree

The owner of a tree in England is the owner of the land where the trunk meets the ground.

Not the boundary line. Not the canopy. Not the roots. The trunk, at ground level. If the trunk is on your side of the fence, the tree is yours, even if half the canopy hangs over next door. If the trunk is on their side, it’s theirs, even if it’s leaning into your garden and dropping every leaf it owns into your gutter.

A tree that straddles the boundary, with the trunk sitting on the line itself, becomes a shared tree. Decisions on a shared tree need agreement from both owners, which in practice means the work doesn’t happen until one of you concedes or pays.

We get asked all the time who owns the tree on the boundary. The answer is usually one of you, not both, and the deeds and an honest look at where the trunk actually emerges from the soil will tell you which.

Overhanging branches

The single most common question we get. The branch is over your garden. What can you do.

Under common law, you can cut anything that crosses the boundary back to the boundary line. You don’t need permission. You don’t need to ask. You can prune the branch back to where it crosses the vertical plane of the fence.

What you can’t do:

• Reach across the boundary and prune beyond your own land
• Climb the tree from your side without the owner’s permission
• Damage the tree’s health with the cuts you make
• Keep the cuttings without offering them back

That last one catches people out. Legally, the branches you cut off still belong to the tree’s owner. You’re expected to offer them back. In practice most neighbours don’t want a pile of arisings, but you have to make the offer, and you can’t just lob them back over the fence either, because that’s fly-tipping on private land.

The “damage to the tree’s health” bit is the one we end up explaining most. If you cut a branch back to the boundary line in the wrong place, mid-limb, with no thought to the tree’s structure, and the tree dies, the owner can claim. The work you can do up to the boundary still has to be done to a reasonable standard. A qualified tree surgeon makes the cut at the right point in the branch’s structure so the wound heals and the tree carries on. A homeowner with a bow saw can cause real damage and create real liability.

If your neighbour’s tree has a TPO on it, or sits in a conservation area, your common-law right to prune the overhanging parts is overridden. You need the council’s permission before you start. We cover this lower down.

Roots

The same principle covers roots. If a root grows under your land you can cut it at the boundary, you can’t dig further, and you must offer it back. Same reasonableness rule applies.

The bigger question with roots is damage. Tree roots cracking foundations, lifting paths, blocking drains, drying the clay subsoil to the point where the house moves. Genuine cases happen. So do imagined ones. If you’re trying to work out which one you’ve got, our tree distance checker puts your species and distance against the standard the construction industry screens on, and reads the geology under your postcode.

If a neighbour’s tree roots have actually damaged your property, you may have a claim in nuisance. The bar is higher than people think. You need to show the damage, show the cause, and show the owner knew or should have known the tree posed a risk. Insurance gets involved on subsidence claims, and the insurers will commission their own arboricultural report. Sometimes the answer is the tree comes down. Sometimes the answer is a root barrier or a crown reduction to slow the water demand. Sometimes the answer is the soil’s clay and the tree isn’t really at fault.

What we’d tell a homeowner who thinks roots are damaging the house: get a structural engineer to look at the cracking, get a tree surgeon to look at the tree, and don’t start cutting roots yourself until you know what you’re dealing with. Cutting roots in the wrong place can destabilise the tree and create a bigger problem than the one you started with.

TPOs and conservation areas

A Tree Preservation Order is the council’s way of saying this tree is important to the area, you can’t touch it without our say-so. A conservation area gives every tree above 75mm diameter at 1.5m broadly the same protection by default, even without an individual order.

If you do tree work on a protected tree without permission, the fine can run into tens of thousands of pounds per tree, and the tree surgeon who carried out the work is liable separately. We’ve been called out to assess trees that had been worked on by someone else and then reported. Both times the homeowner ended up paying for proper follow-up work and a council process on top.

When we quote on a protected tree, the Section 211 notice or full TPO application is on us. We file it with the council, we wait the clock out, and we work to whatever conditions get attached. There’s a separate guide on this at TPOs and Section 211, explained covering the paperwork, the timescales, and what councils typically approve.

For now, the short version: if you’re not sure whether your tree is protected, check it by postcode or send us the address and we’ll check the council’s planning map before quoting. There’s more on how we handle protected tree work, including the Section 211 notice and the TPO application.

Dangerous trees

If a tree is genuinely dangerous, the protection rules step back. A TPO does not stop you taking emergency action to make a tree safe. You can carry out the minimum work necessary to remove the danger, and you must then notify the council within five working days with a full account of what was done and why.

We’ve made that notification a couple of times on storm-damage callouts. The council expects photos before and after, a written assessment, and ideally the report of a qualified person on site. The bar is “real and imminent danger”, not “we’d rather it wasn’t there”. A hung-up limb over a kitchen roof is emergency work. A leaning tree that’s been leaning for ten years is not.

Councils also have their own powers. Under the Highways Act 1980 they can require you to deal with a tree that’s encroaching on the highway. Under the Building Act 1984 and various local powers, they can step in on dangerous trees on private land if the owner won’t. None of this happens quickly, but the powers exist.

Hedge disputes

The Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 added a high-hedges regime that almost nobody knows about.

If a neighbour has a hedge of two or more mostly-evergreen species, over two metres tall, and it’s adversely affecting the reasonable enjoyment of your property, you can ask the council to step in. The catch is you have to show you’ve tried to resolve it directly first. The council can then issue a remedial notice requiring the hedge owner to reduce the height. There’s a fee, set by the council and often a few hundred pounds, which sometimes gets refunded if the case succeeds.

In practice this is rarely the first move and shouldn’t be. A formal complaint hardens both sides. The chance of a friendly relationship after a council notice is zero. Mediation, a letter, even a chat over the fence almost always works better. The hedge legislation is the backstop, not the opener.

What to do when you and your neighbour disagree

There’s an order to these things and it’s worth following it. We’ve watched plenty of disputes escalate because someone jumped to step four before trying step one.

1. Talk. Knock on the door. Don’t lead with the law. Lead with the problem. “The fig is blocking the light over my kitchen window, can we sort it.” Most jobs we go to that started as a dispute could have ended at this step.

2. Write. If talking doesn’t land, write. A polite letter that names the issue, the impact, and the outcome you’d like. Keep a copy. This is what your solicitor will want to see if it goes further.

3. Mediate. Several charities and community mediation services across the South East will sit down with both sides for free or a small fee. Worth doing before money gets involved.

4. Solicitor letter. A formal letter from a solicitor changes the temperature. Sometimes that’s what’s needed. Sometimes it makes everything worse. Take advice on which.

5. Court. Last resort, expensive, slow, and rarely produces a happy ending even for the winner. We’ve seen one neighbour win on the law and lose every other thing they cared about. Almost never worth getting here.

What we do when we’re called into a dispute

Honest answer. We don’t pick sides.

When we get the phone call from one neighbour about the other’s tree, we book a site visit. We look at the tree. We tell that homeowner what we think about its condition, what work would be appropriate to BS3998, and what the legal position is as we understand it on the day. If there’s a TPO we check. If there’s a council issue we flag it. If the work is genuinely up to the boundary and within their common-law rights, we’ll quote.

What we won’t do is quote for work that crosses the boundary without the tree owner’s written permission, and we won’t quote for work that wouldn’t pass BS3998 on a healthy tree. If the answer the customer wants is “we’ll come and lop the whole lot back from your side”, we’ll explain why we won’t do that and recommend they speak to the tree’s owner first.

If the dispute is genuinely hot, we sometimes write a short condition report on the tree itself. Not a legal opinion, just a qualified arborist’s view of structure, health and risk. Both neighbours can have a copy. It’s not a solicitor’s job but it’s often what’s needed for the conversation to move on.

The short version, if you’re skim-reading

• The owner of a tree is whoever owns the land where the trunk emerges from the ground. The boundary line doesn’t matter, only the trunk position does.
• You can prune anything that crosses the boundary back to the line, without permission, but you can’t damage the tree’s health and you must offer the cuttings back.
• Roots follow the same rule. Real root damage to your property gives you a possible claim in nuisance, but the bar is higher than people think.
• TPOs and conservation areas override your common-law pruning right. Check the council’s planning map before you touch a protected tree.
• Emergency works to make a tree safe are allowed even on protected trees. You must notify the council within five working days.
• High-hedge disputes have their own regime under the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003, but mediation almost always beats a formal complaint.
• The order is: talk, write, mediate, solicitor letter, court. Try not to skip steps.
• A qualified tree surgeon will tell you what’s true about the tree, what’s possible within the law, and won’t take work that’s wrong just because the customer wants it done.

If you’re somewhere between Hastings, Battle, Bexhill, Rye and Heathfield and you’ve got a tree question that’s turned into a neighbour question, send us a note with the address and a sentence about what’s going on. We’ll have a look.

There are linked deeper guides on Tree Preservation Orders and Section 211 notices and on crown reduction versus topping. Both are worth reading if a protected tree is part of your situation.

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This guide is not legal advice. It’s a tree surgeon’s plain-English summary of what we encounter on the job. For a binding view on your specific situation, see a solicitor, and ideally one who actually handles tree disputes, because there are a handful in the UK who specialise.