This is one of those topics where IEL gets pulled in both directions.
As owners “in possession” of the roads we have a duty of care to ensure the roads are safe, and hedges are a factor if they were to encroach on to the road and block visibility. In many places the trees, hedges and shrubs are clearly on IEL verges and so we have our contractors cut them back where necessary. Sometimes the hedges form part a resident’s boundary and it is appreciated that residents take care of those individually. If the over-growth gets out of hand and does encroach across the road edge then in some cases we have needed to ask a resident to take some action.
There are some places where residents have planted trees and shrubs on IELs verge, and again while this personal touch to improve the communal amenity is appreciated, we do have to pause and think of the future maintenance implications. There are some places such as on the Ride where residents have planted conifers some decades ago, which have now become quite large at the road edge, and something of a liability. Guidance in the Highways Act sections 141-142 is to not plant within 15ft of the centre line of a road, which in many cases for Ifold would include part or all of the verge.
In contrast to the maintenance above, we also get some requests to NOT cut hedges and this is to preserve the natural habitat. There are some laws relating to this, specifically Wildlife & Countryside Act. It doesn’t prevent the cutting of hedges per se, rather the disturbance of birds during nesting season, which are rightly protected.
There is plenty of information for this online:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/countryside-hedgerows-regulation-and-management
Of all the conflicting topics IEL has to face, this one is easy to manage since there is guidance that nesting season runs for the 6 months from 1st March to 31st August, so we maintain in the autumn/winter and leave alone during spring/summer.