Labour Sheffield City Councils Secret Plan to Fell 50% of Street Trees Exposed!
Local / Sheffield Mar 12, 2018 - 04:35 AM GMTBy: N_Walayat
The mainstream press has finally awoken up to the fact that Sheffield city council and it's contractor had all along planned to fell half of Sheffield's street trees. Having kept the information contained within the Streets Ahead PFI contract with Spanish owned Amey secret for over 5 years, previously only releasing heavily redacted pages that failed to answer key questions raised by tree campaigners. Where even towards the end of 2017 the council in the face of growing public opposition and protests on the streets, the Labour councilors still stuck to their mantra of having a target of felling fewer than 6000 trees, following which the contract was said to enter a maintenance phase.
However, given the scale of fellings underway, my conclusion for well over a year has been that the Council's contractor would never just stop at just 6,000 tree's just as they never stopped at 1,000 then 2000 became 3000 and so on, so it was highly likely that as per what was written in the contract the felling of street trees would continue to total at least 16,000 street trees, or about 50% of the original total of 35,000 as my following documentary from Mid 2017 illustrates.
This whilst the establishment media, from local the Star to BBC's Look North amongst many others propagated SCC / Amey propaganda that had deliberately held secret the true magnitude of the amount of planned felling of street trees contained within the contract from the Sheffield people. For instance in the following 2013 Star article the Council propaganda painted a picture of only 1250 trees needing to be felled out of Sheffield's 36k total, despite the Labour council having earlier signed a contract that stated 50%, 17,500 would be felled!
Feb 2013 - Biggest ever scheme to improve Sheffield’s 36,000 street trees
Steve Robinson, head of highway maintenance at the council, which is working with contractor Amey on the project, said: “Overall there are 36,000 highway trees and there are 1,250 across the city which we are taking out and replacing.
Mr Robinson said the replacement of dead and dying trees will be among an initial five-year phase, while maintenance and pruning of the remaining trees will be over the 25 years of the contract with Amey.
The Council has now been FORCED by the Information Commissioner to release some of the highly redacted contract pages into the public domain, something it should have done right from the the very start in the interests of transparency! And what stands out from the release of the documents is the fact that the contract stipulates that Amey would fell 17,500 street trees, which amounts to 50% of the initial number of just over 35,000 street trees.
“The service provider [Amey] shall replace highway trees in accordance with the annual tree management programme at a rate of not less than 200 per year so that 17,500 highway trees are replaced by the end of the term, such replacement to be in accordance with the Highway Tree Replacement Policy, unless authority [Sheffield Council] approval has been obtained for deviation from this policy.”
What this means is that the Labour council had planned to strip formerly Europe's greenest city of half of its street trees, having already felled near 6,000 street trees would mean Sheffield is set to lose another 11,500 street trees, and therefore killing the city in terms of being Europe's greenest city. This exposure of what effectively amount to lies that have been emanating out of the city councilors mouths for these past few years has now galvanised the establishment mainstream media to do a 180 on the story they had been pedaling for the duration, hence the headlines in today's mainstream media critical of the Labour city council for its propaganda and programme for misinformation.
The following video illustrates exactly what it means when Amey comes to a street and fells ALL of its tree's, turning a formerly majestic tree lined desirable suburban street into just another run down Labour voting council estate.
As for the impact of the felling to date, apart from the impact on the health of Sheffielders by the removable of 6 thousand of trees that had been soaking up vehicle pollution, one unintended consequence is being felt in Sheffield's housing market in the wake of leafy suburban streets being stripped of many of their street trees house prices have also been felled. Sheffield's tree lined leafy suburbs that the estate agents so welcoming advertise are increasingly becoming no more. Trees that have taken more than a 100 years to reach their adult splendour have been felled in there thousands leaving behind either voids or saplings that can fail to survive or are prone to vandalism, all in exchange for large trees with capital values of between £50k and £150k now permanently gone!
And as I a warned right at the start of 2017 (03 Jan 2017 - Sheffield Tree Felling's - Labour City Council Outsourcing Local Democracy to Amey)(and for much of 2016 across many youtube videos) that such ongoing capital destruction would have consequences not just for the streets that were being stripped bare by a council that has OUTSOURCED DEMOCRACY TO A MULTINATIONAL but that the rampant out of control tree felling's were DEVALUING THE WHOLE CITY! Where Amey in effect was felling Sheffield house prices, a forecast that is coming to pass as Sheffield house prices bucked the national bullish trend by falling by 3% during 2017.
Whilst the response to the protests against Sheffield's ruling political and corporate establishment has increased exponentially over the past few months from the deployment of a private militia, an army of bob the builders onto Sheffield streets assaulting protestors.
To the current state of the deployment of massive Police numbers of at least 35 officers per felling site, with snatch squads in operation grabbing protestors on their way home from street felling sites.
Video footage by N Walayat and C Andrews.
Again Abbeydale Park Rise saw numerous arrests, and at least one person injured as a consequence the deployment of such huge Police manpower against peacefully demonstrating residents.
Here a police officer explains to protestors why they will be arrested under Highways Act legislation.
So this weeks police and security presence and protestor response represents a major escalation on what had gone before, resembling a revolution of sorts underway on Sheffield's streets in the countdown to the May 2018 Local elections when it will be seen if the ruling Labour regime pays a price at the ballot box for its increasingly unpopular actions on Sheffield's streets that now resemble what one would find in a totalitarian eastern european state.
So as someone who frequents a felling site at least once per week, I have to now be prepared for the possibility of being arrested by Sheffield's Gestapo Police for nothing more than observing, documenting and holding those who abuse the protestors to account through publication of video evidence. As apparently standing peacefully at a tree protest is now a crime as the Labour council appears to have sold Sheffield to Amey, a Spanish multinational and then the establishment wonders why the people of Sheffield voted for BrExit!
By Nadeem Walayat
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