Hedges for animal habitats, hedges as history, hedges for soil erosion, hedges for biodiversity, hedges as carbon sinks, hedges as flood defences, hedges for winter food, hedges for rare plants, hedges as regional features, it seems everybody loves English hedgerows and surely every farmer knows that hedgerows are well protected by The Hedgerows Regulations of 1997 which make unauthorised removal of a hedge a criminal offence with the Planning Authority named as the prosecuting body.
Friends of the Quantocks were surprised then to see that a length of hedge had gone from a maize field within the highly protected landscape of the AONB and was gone without the necessary permission from the Planning Authority, at that time the District Council. We reported it to the Council who said that they could do nothing without good evidence so we began to look at the record of satellite images on the internet and found that in fact nearly half a mile of hedgerow had disappeared from the surrounding fields, bit by bit, over twenty years, all without the required permissions and for no obvious reason other than to avoid the inconvenience of turning a tractor round.
Concentrating on the longest and most recently missing stretch of hedge we were able to provide timestamped before and after satellite views, dated photographs from the roadside, Ordnance Survey Maps, a nineteenth century Tithe map and even a recent archeologists’ Lidar survey, between them showing 360m of missing hedgerow about 3m wide, on a bank and consisting of many species of woody deciduous shrubs which was there in 2020 and gone in 2021. The Council’s officers visited the landowner who accepted that a ‘boundary’ had been removed but said that it was only a fence with some brambles growing on it. He showed them a photograph of a fence with brambles on it and at that the Council officers tipped their hats, thanked him for his trouble and declared the matter closed. They explained to Friends of the Quantocks their reasons for inaction as follows:
To date there is no evidence of when the alleged offence took place and by whom. There is no evidence as to whether the alleged offence took place all at once or whether there has been a gradual removal of the hedge over a period of time by a number of people.
Which is simply to deny the plain truth. The landowner (or tenant) is responsible regardless of who drove the digger. The exact date is an irrelevance and besides the landowner had already accepted that he had removed the ‘boundary’. They also said:
it is inconclusive as to whether the hedgerow in question even meets the criteria laid down in the legislation for protection
but criteria for protection in the Regulations only apply as guidance for granting or denying permission to remove a hedge; removing one without permission remains an offence regardless of the quality of the hedge precisely because once it’s gone it’s gone and any discussion of the nature of the hedge will be moot.
So we are faced with a Council determined not to do its job. The very purpose of Friends of the Quantocks is to protect the landscape for the people of Somerset so we cannot let this lie and we are considering making formal complaints of maladministration. The preferred and obvious way ahead however is that the elected councillors of Somerset Council should simply instruct the Council’s officers to act to deal properly with this matter.
In the mean time heavy rains wash topsoil off the maize fields into the lanes, we read in the news of the disastrous depletion of English species and habitats and we hear about landowners removing hedges elsewhere secure in the knowledge that Somerset Council will do nothing to prevent them.
