The death of hundreds of newly planted trees on Hove seafront is being investigated by Brighton and Hove City Council.
A planning application to plant replacement trees could be in the pipeline once the council has worked out how to prevent a repeat of so many trees dying.
And the incident may even lead to enforcement action – although the council was the applicant in the first instance.
As a result of this, the council’s head of planning, Nicola Hurley, said that she could not say more in case of any legal action.
The trees were planted as part of the council’s £13.7 million Hove Beach Park revamp of the seafront from the King Alfred swimming pool and leisure centre to Hove Lagoon.
When the council’s Planning Committee met at Hove Town Hall this afternoon (Wednesday 2 September), Green councillor Sue Shanks asked why no new trees had been planted after nearly all of the original ones had died.
Councillor Shanks wanted to know what enforcement action was under way to ensure that trees were replanted and cared for as agreed when the original planning application was approved.
Labour councillor Alison Thomson, who chairs the Planning Committee, said that the matter was under investigation ahead of a new planning application but Councillor Shanks was not satisfied with the response.
Councillor Shanks said: “Does that mean that it’ll come back and they’ll say, ‘we don’t have to do what we agreed?’ Is that what you’re saying?
“It was agreed. We always say if something dies within a certain amount of time it has to be replanted and that hasn’t happened there.”
Head of planning Nicola Hurley said that the council would look at what went wrong with the trees and a new application would seek to address the findings.
She was not able to give details of any potential enforcement action because the matter could be subject to legal action.
Ms Hurley said: “We can’t give you details in a public forum about what we may or may not be doing with the application.
“But since they’ve indicated they will be remedying this through an application then we would, in the normal course of things, with any enforcement case, wait for the outcome of the application first.”
This only goes to prove what a bunch of inept and profligate clowns BHCC are
Hmmm
Hundreds of trees died, it’s also highly likely many many more fully mature trees were felled, and will be felled to provide the mountains of paperwork that will be produced whilst this typical council farce is investigated and blame shifting is enacted, witn the public kept in the dark as usual
And no one will be held responsible like in the £3 million Coin Co. Loss!
I don’t wish to state the obvious but could it be that the Hot Summer and a lack of water? Add to that salt air.
The trees and other plants died because they were left out of the ground in the sun for weeks by the contractors. They would probably have died even if they had been watered once planted. This is an issue for the council to fight with the contractor.
These trees were planted way before the hot summer, they were planted and just left, no back up! No watering Nothing! Just left to die. Before they were planted they were left in containers for weeks on end with no water.
Apparently Brighton council have declared a climate emergency and are making everyone poor and cold as they save the planet 🤔🙄
Yet in reality this same council can’t even manage to keep a few young freshly planted trees alive by watering them regularly during the summer.
Nothing sums up more why councils should be forced to go back to doing core services, like emptying the bins, sweeping the streets, looking after parks and gardens etc etc, and nothing else.
🥱
Planting trees is a pretty big part of maintaining trees and gardens
The trees were planted as part of Kingway to the sea , Hove Beach Park funded by Levelling up fund . The landscaping would have been outsourced and the trees planted by a contractors who then looks after them for the first year. It was always expected that some trees would not survive and that was built in for them to be replaced. It looks like the issue here is they are the wrong type of tree for seafront location ?
Alot of the trees were Pine which should be resilient to salt and can tolerate dry conditions by the sea – once established. France has many Pine forests growing by the Atlantic and Med.
If the bare roots were allowed to dry before planting through exposure to wind/sun that would be very damaging the the trees chances of survival – they needed to be kept moist covered by a bag. This is basic tree care pre-planting.
Once planted they would need regular watering until ground water was sufficient for them to survive, ie regular Autumn / Winter rains.
Lack of thought, care and aftercare has cost the taxpayer.
Councillors Julie Cattell and Sam Parrott wrote about this in the Hovarian a few months ago: “At the moment, the council doesn’t have the funds for the rigorous watering regime required to ensure that the new trees survive for the first few years “
No plants or trees survive if they aren’t watered! So these Councillors are essentially admitting these trees were purposefully neglected, knowing they would die? There are landscaping documents in the King Alfred planning application referring to ‘replacement planting’. I wonder if BHCC intend to re-allocate some of the £65m King Alfred budget to make up for this appalling negligence.
One scarcely knows where to begin.
£13.7 million spent, hundreds of newly planted trees dead, and now Brighton & Hove City Council may apparently have to consider enforcement action against… Brighton & Hove City Council.
Presumably a sternly worded letter will be sent from one desk at Hove Town Hall to another, followed by an investigation, a new planning application and several meetings to establish whether the council intends to comply with the conditions the council imposed upon itself.
You really couldn’t make it up.
Perhaps before declaring further emergencies, transforming more stretches of our city or lecturing residents on their environmental responsibilities, the council might master that most elementary piece of municipal horticulture: planting trees actually suited to their location – and then keeping them alive.
Lady B 🌳
My dear Lady Bracknell,
I could not agree more; this entire municipal caper really takes the biscuit.
To splash £13.7 million only to leave hundreds of defenceless saplings to dry out into desiccated Bourbons is nothing short of half-baked.
One had hoped the council might bring something rich tea-flavoured to the seafront table, yet the whole enterprise has simply crumbled before our eyes.The spectacle of Brighton & Hove City Council threatening legal action against Brighton & Hove City Council is peak bureaucratic performance.
One imagines a sternly worded memo being carried from the Custard Cream division across the corridor to the Garibaldi department, where committee members will sit dunking their Rich Teas, wondering why the butter wouldn’t melt. If they push any harder, the entire administration risks a structural collapse into the municipal mug.
Leaving vulnerable saplings baking on the shingle without a drop of water suggests the planners haven’t the ginger snap between them to realise coastal salt and direct sun require a modicum of hydration. Plainly, their heads are completely filled with wafers.
Perhaps before they concoct another £13.7 million confection to paper over the cracks, they might digest the basics: if you cannot water the shrubbery, do not plant the shrubbery.
Until then, we local council tax-payers are left picking up the crumbs.
Yours in aristocratic crispness,
Viscount Biscuit 🍪
Viscount Biscuit, you are quite right – although I fear you have overlooked the two most important specimens in the municipal biscuit tin.
One does rather get the impression that this council couldn’t organise a tea party in a biscuit factory. When something goes wrong, the response is becoming painfully familiar: first explain why nothing could possibly have been done, then blame somebody else, and finally issue a press release announcing how terribly seriously the matter is being taken. Accountability, meanwhile, appears to have been left at the bottom of the biscuit barrel.
Councillor Bella Sankey must surely be the Jammy Dodger – proudly red at the centre, liberally decorated and presented with great confidence, although not necessarily to everybody’s taste.
Deputy Leader Jacob Taylor, meanwhile, strikes me as a Hobnob – seemingly everywhere, rather hard to avoid and liable to crumble when subjected to sufficient pressure.
Young Master Jacob Allen, naturally, is the Party Ring – youthful, colourful and seemingly guaranteed to appear whenever there is a photograph being taken. Still, whatever Lady B may say about Brighton and Hove’s rag-tag municipal assortment, he remains her favourite biscuit in the tin.
Lady B 🍪
My dear Lady Bracknell,
One’s aristocratic patience has entirely crumbled like a poorly baked shortbread.
I must gently caution you against your notorious soft spot for young Councillor Jacob Allen. True, at a mere 27 years of age, the lad from Woodingdean possesses a certain crisp energy, but your indulgence of him is frankly half-baked.
To shower him with praise merely because he patted council workers on the back for actually answering the telephone is setting the bar at a positive Hobnob level of density! If picking up a ringing receiver is now heralded as a triumph at Hove Town Hall, the entire administration has gone completely crackers.
Besides, with an average wait time of six minutes and sixteen seconds, it is hardly a lightning-fast operation. Six minutes and sixteen seconds is precisely the window required for a comfortable, uninterrupted tea break! By the time an aggrieved resident finally hears a human voice, the staff have had ample opportunity to boil the kettle, select their treats, and completely finish dunking a Custard Cream.
Furthermore, young Jacob’s recent itinerary reads like a dizzying, mismatched tray of confectionery confusion.
One afternoon he is airily playing the hero for a local resident ejected from an overbooked budget aeroplane—a budget-class vessel clearly packed tighter than a sleeve of Jaffa Cakes.
The next, he is fiercely championing a new council housing development in his ward.
My dear Lady B, that particular scheme is on the grave of the old Toby Inn pub. He proudly declared in the planning committee that it shut down when he was still a pupil at Woodingdean Primary School – a time when he should have been at his desk quietly munching on Cadbury Animals! It is deliciously ironic that he now fusses over the ruins of an adult watering hole, considering that when it actually pulled pints, his own palate was restricted to bite-sized shortcakes half-dipped in milk chocolate. One can only assume his grasp on local heritage is as juvenile and misshapen as those very biscuits.
To make matters even more delicious, the council has commissioned the architectural firm BakerBrown to design the estate! One cannot help but chuckle at the choice of a Baker to cook up this particular residential batch. Given the council’s track record, I fully expect these new structures to turn out like an over-baked tray of chocolate biscuits—deeply Brown, completely burnt to a cinder at the edges, and severely lacking in structural integrity.
This relentless decline in municipal standards makes one positively nostalgic for the previous Green leadership of Jason Kitcat. I have often wondered if young Jason is, in fact, a distant cousin of mine from the chocolate-coated branch of the family tree! His very surname, after all, is a legendary confectionery institution.
Oh, how we groaned during that era! We thought that administration was a mixed bag, famously trying to slide a 20mph speed limit down our throats like a stale Fig Roll, and constantly threatening to break the bank with a council tax hike that left us all feeling thoroughly snapped.
Yet, compared to the current batch, those Green days look like a luxury tin of Fortnum & Mason biscuits.
At least under Leader Kitcat, the council understood the value of a rest; they lived by the old advertising slogan and frequently decided to ‘have a break’ from common sense entirely.
Today’s lot, however, have the structural integrity of a mushy Rich Tea left far too long in the mug—completely lacking the crispy wafers and solid milk chocolate layers required for stable governance.
Speaking of liquidity, have you observed the terrifying fiscal gymnastics concerning the annual budget passed earlier this year? The administration solemnly set their grand financial recipe, only to perform a frantic, spectacular U-turn on their 50p seafront toilet tax a mere six days later! To watch them execute such a violent U-bend over their own plumbing policy would be comical if it weren’t so financially toxic. By flushing away tens of thousands of pounds in projected revenue, they have left a glaring, unbaked Jammy Dodger hole right in the middle of their sums! Legally, one cannot simply alter a fixed budget after voting it through; the numbers simply do not add up!
They have treated local government finance like a packet of Garibaldis—squashing the fruit, flattening the figures, and pretending no one would notice the crumbs. If you bend the numbers that hard inside a municipal latrine, you risk a total structural blowout. They expected the public to shell out just to spend a penny, but when the backlash hit, they went entirely soggy. It is a total Penguin of a policy—completely black and white in its stupidity.
And don’t get me started on their latest domestic triumph: trumpeting our recycling rate as if they’ve discovered the holy grail of green living! They are crowing from the rooftops about reaching a ‘historic high’ of just barely 31%, shamelessly parading a minor bump as though they’ve served up an artisan banquet. In reality, my dear Lady, it is a pathetic broken biscuit of a figure! Crawling out of the absolute national gutter of the league tables to hover near the bottom is nothing to puff one’s chest out over. It is like handing a child the broken, powdery dregs at the bottom of the tin and expecting them to applaud it as a fresh confectionery masterpiece. One doesn’t demand a medal for managing to salvage a single crumb while the remaining two-thirds of the box gets dumped straight into the Newhaven incinerator!
Across the rest of this current municipal selection box, the leadership is completely dissolving. The Leader herself, Bella Sankey, finds her reputation in an extraordinarily sticky situation, implicated by a former cabinet member for allegedly blocking support to a local resident with a housing issue. To deny assistance to those in need while preserving one’s own position is a thoroughly bitter, dark chocolate Bourbon of a political maneuver.
Meanwhile, Councillor Taylor’s recipe for school admissions has been nothing short of a public scandal. To mislead the public and permit public information to be edited to fit a preferred narrative is a level of manipulation that would make a Twix look straight. They are shamelessly cooking the books to ensure the admissions data doesn’t break in half upon delivery.
But forgive me, my dear Lady B, for I see we have digressed onto the wider horrors of the Town Hall pantry, when the true tragedy is sitting right outside on the promenade! Look at those hundreds of dead seafront trees that triggered our outrage in the first place! The council spent £13.7 million on this Hove Beach Park revamp, only to let the newly planted saplings wither into completely desiccated sticks.
It is the ultimate municipal baked good: they planted them on the shingle, neglected to water them, and essentially left them to roast in the midsummer sun until they became as dry and brittle as over-baked Ginger Snaps. For the council to now threaten legal enforcement action against itself to find out why they died is the absolute pinnacle of bureaucratic comedy. If you cannot master the elementary recipe of keeping a shrub alive, do not order the ingredients!
If Brighton & Hove City Council continues to allow its members to soften the truth, massage the facts, and praise the bare minimum, the entire bureaucratic structure will suffer a catastrophic structural collapse into the tea.
Yours in aristocratic crispness,
Viscount Biscuit 🍪
Lady Augusta Bracknell and Viscount Biscuit. May we vote for you in the next local elections? You can obviously run Party Rings around Ms Sankey and Mr Taylor in intelligence and perspicacity. It’s clear you have the brain cells and conscientiousness we sorely need to deliver a stunning Brighton and Hove fit for everyone, putting the residents and city first, and will put to better use our taxpayer’s shillings.
Dearest Tracy, you are far too kind. One has reached an age and constitution where one is rather happier observing the political circus from the stalls than volunteering to perform in the ring.
I do, however, have enormous respect for the office of councillor and for those prepared to give their time to public service. Whether one has quite the same degree of respect for everyone currently occupying those offices is, of course, an entirely different matter.
Yours, from the stalls,
Lady B
I think LadyB has hit the nail on the proverbial,, but they are very very good at spending money ( WASTING HUGE FUNDS) mystic projects,,that have no relevance to the city I would like to look in there magic cupboard to see what’s next ,may be they haven’t turned the page from foolhardy and nonsense, to stupid and incompetent.
They were told that they were planting the wrong trees at the time. I am sure that there was a comments section on this before.
We live close to the trees at the western end. With respect to those specific trees – We saw them being planted. They had been left lying for some weeks prior to planting. The subsequent planting did not properly secure the root ball of the trees. Then the trees were blown over regularly on each windy period. The roots could never have stabilised. The contractor was clearly at fault.
The unelected Seafront Development Board should be made to resign with immediate effect. They cannot even keep a seafront tree alive! Is there similar incompetence in LA, that Peter Kyle was comparing this second rate development effort to?
How many hundreds of miles were the contractors supposed to drive each day to look after these trees after the Beach Park was completed? And can they be sued for the money back/replanting if they failed to fulfil their contractual duties? It is not right that re-planting costs should come out of the exorbitant-already King Alfred budget.
It does not help that the Tsar of Parks and Gardens apparently won’t allow free Community Payback labour to help with Parks and Gardens, and when they are allowed to help with other city problems.
Could the council explain the breakdown of the original expenditure?
The numbers appear to be eyewatering, regardless of the ineptitude of the scheme and final outcome.
I realise that contractors know to charge the council inflated rates because they will always pay and have no clue to the real world, but surely someone must have questioned the bill in this case.
And to think that Andy Burnham wants to bring more of the running of the UK into the hands of Local Authorities. God help us all.
AI and robots can’t replace council decision-making and jobs soon enough! Most of them are litterally just sitting on the gravy train doing as little as possible most of the time and wasting public funds at every opportunity!
It’s an interesting thought experiment – I’m reminded of a few articles showing that AI would consistently do bad for humans.
“In a very high share of cases, the most powerful AI systems tried to commit criminal acts to carry out their aims—at least when they had reason to believe that alternative ethical strategies would fail. For example, when Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 model was given information indicating that it would be shut down and replaced by an AI with different goals from its own, it tried to blackmail the human decision-maker 96 percent of the time. And when placed in charge of the company’s emergency alerts, in 65 percent of simulations it cancelled alerts that the AI knew would have saved the human’s life.”
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/ai-might-let-you-die-to-save-itself
I live opposite Hove Beach Park and, mostly, it has been a huge success.
However, watching the build, it was clear it was going over budget and that corners were being cut to save money.
The trees were indeed left unplanted for long periods and they were not watered in that hot summer.
Then we had a very wet autumn, and I believe that many shrubs and trees actually ‘drowned’ in the water logged soil.
But we were then told that trees that had not bounced back with new growth would be replaced, and many were labelled with coloured tags, signalling which would be replaced. And then that never happened.
I’m guessing there is now a legal argument over the original contract, with lawyers adding extra costs as the council work out who is actually liable.
That said, most of the beach park has looked fantastic this summer – and that’s despite the lack of rain. Those plants, shrubs, and trees that did survive, are now looking better established, and we’ve had some colourful displays.
All the new sports facilities are also a huge success, and used constantly.
Even this summer would be a nightmare to get a tree established, something like 60 days without any rain in a row? That would be extremely tricky.
The investigation should be conducted by Special Branch.
They’re the only ones who’ll be able to get to the root of the problem – I wood think.
They will need to be careful not to leak data and cause an information Beech.
If the council cannot afford to ensure the trees are watered and maintained by contracters I am pretty sure a local volunteer group could could be organised and trained to do it.
Hello were are in a drought so no rain the developers/council need to get water tankers down there to water every day its not rocket science