Ros Hathorn's campaign

National Highways removed over 400,000 trees when building the A14 upgrade.  Ros campaigned at the time for more detail about their biodiversity and nature commitments and for them to commit to replace the lost barrier of trees which shielded Impington from the A14.  

In their planning documents National Highways committed to replace every tree lost with two new trees so it was with some horror to realise that up to 75% of the trees had not survived the first summer.    Whilst National Highways had made loose commitments to replace failed trees over a 5 year maintenance period we argued that planting trees with such a high failure rate cannot be good practise or cost effective.  After extensive work National Highways did investigate the issue, identified some of the problems, replanted the failed trees, restarted the 5 year maintenance period o give all the locations where trees were planted and fighting chance,  improved their forestry approach and started using biodegradable tree guards.  After 4 years some of those trees are establishing and areas are slowly returning to nature.