How will QTRA help me?
The legal duty
For most tree managers, trees are only part of their overall responsibilities and often only a small part. As well as a moral responsibility there is a legal duty to manage for the safety of people affected by your undertakings and the management of trees is part of that duty. When fatalities occur from tree accidents, they are such rare events that it is inevitable they will hit the press and that the scaremongers will use the opportunity to remind you how onerous and burdensome your duty really is. Well here is some good news. The duty of care need not be burdensome and the expectation of the regulators is actually quite a reasonable one.
QTRA Licenced User Training
You need not be an arborist or a forester to undertake the Licensed User training. Many landowners and managers, with only a general knowledge of trees, have gained immeasurably from becoming Licensed Users of QTRA. Most importantly, it must be recognised that those with an understanding of land-use and how people on your land interface with trees and the weather will bring a great deal to the tree risk assesment. You need never assess the stability of a single tree to benefit from the concepts and principles of tree risk assessment and management that you will take away from our training.
Sharing the responsibility
Arborists are engaged by landowners to assess the safety of trees, often with the express intention of establishing whether or not the trees are ‘safe’. Frequently, there is the expectation that liability can be shifted from the landowner onto the arborist and their professional indemnity insurer, but in reality, it is all too easy for the arborist to place the liability squarely back with the landowner by specifying some form of remedial work and by placing time limits on their advice. How else can the arborist reasonably deal with the question of ‘safe or unsafe’? An inevitable result of this ‘risk table-tennis’ is that many landowners spend far more on tree safety than is reasonable and many more spend nothing.
By sharing the risk management process between landowners and the arborists they employ, a reasonable position can be reached where both discharge their duty of care without disproportionate cost. The cost of tree safety management extends far beyond the financial, with potential degradation of the landscape, ecological resources and the wider amenity. As a tree manager, your position will be strengthened through a better understanding of the risks.
