Goodbye Acacia Avenue. Councils across Britain have embarked on what environmentalists have called a “chainsaw massacre”, chopping down thousands of trees in once-leafy streets. Many are being felled because of fears of costly claims over subsidence or health and safety.

According to an unpublished government report, Trees in Towns II, local authorities are also failing to plant new trees at a fast enough rate to keep the country’s streets leafy.

Even when new trees are planted, they are often far smaller species than those they replace, leading to what Mark Johnston — research fellow in urban forestry at Myerscough College, Lancashire and co-author of the report — labelled a “lollipop landscape”.

The investigation, carried out for the Department of Communities and Local Government, covered samples of trees in 140 towns and cities. It found that planting programmes have almost ground to a halt in many areas — just 0.4% of urban trees in London and the Southeast have been planted in the past five years.

Areas of extensive tree-felling include parts of Manchester, Edinburgh and Harrogate in North Yorkshire. In two London boroughs alone — Croydon and Harrow — 7,600 trees have been felled in the past five years with just 2,600 replacements planted.

“There is no question this is a chainsaw massacre and while London is where it is most acute it is a huge problem across the country,” said David Lloyd-Jones, chairman of the Consulting Arborist Society. “We have got to be losing thousands — if not tens of thousands — of street trees every year.”

The government report, which studied only those trees still standing, found that around Britain, just 1% of the estimated 197m trees in towns and cities were planted in the past five years. More than three-quarters (78%) were aged between 10 and 50 years.

In London, the Southeast and eastern England, the “birth rate” for new trees is even lower, with just 0.4% planted in the last five years.

“There is a significant decrease in the number of young trees,” said Peter Ashworth, who researched the report. “The level of tree planting which was happening in the 1980s has not been maintained.”

Two weeks ago, the problem reached Parliament Square in central London when 12 mature plane trees were chopped down to make way for new security barriers and CCTV cameras along Whitehall and on Parliament Street.

“Trees that have taken 60 years to grow and been part of the London landscape since the war have been simply removed and replaced with small ornamental trees,” said Pauline Buchanan-Black, chief executive of the Tree Council. “The government is hardly leading by example.”

Overall, a third of the capital’s boroughs have seen a net loss of trees in the last five years and 40,000 trees have been chopped down in total. In Manchester, the city council has earmarked 1,700 poplar trees for chainsawing because of disease. In Edinburgh, more than 100 trees — including 150-year-old horse chestnuts — are to be chopped down in an urban woodland close to the city centre for “regeneration”.

Others are removed over safety concerns. Andrew Horseman, 49, an aircraft engineer from Knaresborough, North Yorkshire, rushed into the street in his pyjamas one morning earlier this year after hearing a chainsaw being taken to a mature London plane tree outside his home. He could not prevent council tree surgeons removing the tree’s canopy but they did leave an 8ft stump after he complained that residents had not been consulted.

“I was furious,” he said. “The council says the trees are a trip hazard but as far as we can establish nobody has ever fallen over them. At the same time the council is paying about £2,000 of taxpayers’ money to remove each tree.

“This is a beautiful tree-lined street and the children play out at night under them. Some of them are 80 years old and without them this would be just another barren city road.” A spokesman for Harrogate borough council, which covers Knaresborough, said it was “indifferent” to the trees outside Horseman’s house. Around 1,500 of the borough’s 20,000 trees have been cut down in the last five years. Replacements have been promised in Knaresborough, as in Liverpool and Birmingham where councils said they were aiming to keep tree numbers steady.

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