This piece is an extract from essentialARB's the Arborist newsletter, which is emailed out at 6PM on the first of every month, with a round-up of the latest goings-on in arboriculture. 

To receive our full, free newsletter straight to your email inbox, click here.

I WAS at an event recently when - several drinks in - I got talking to a family friend, who just so happens to be in quite a senior local authority role. Putting to one side the fact I don't envy the stress he always seems to be under, one interesting point arose during the course of our discussion.

Like many councils in the UK, his is one faced with tough, tough decisions on an almost daily basis. The money simply is not there. (We could spend all day debating on whether it really is there or not but for the purposes of this arb-focused newsletter, we'll assume it is not.) Cuts have to be made and they must have as limited an impact on essential services as possible.

Predictably, this means areas such as health are prioritised while others are given an even smaller slice of the pie. For some, the slice is barely a sliver, the kind of dish you'd expect to see served up in a Dickensian prison.

The reality is that it tends to be council arb departments that find themselves going back and begging, pleading, mooching for more, elbowing others out of the way for the final few crumbs.

Putting this plight to the family friend, I was encouraged that he agreed with many of the arguments I made in favour of caring for the UK's urban trees.

Yes, he nodded, trees do have a tangible effect on cooling our cities/towns, which, in turn, maintains the health of our population. Of course, he interjected, greenspaces are essential for cleaning our air and mitigating pollution.

But (and here's the big but) his council, like many others, is hamstrung by the need to deliver tangible, short-term results for the taxpaying public.

They will notice if their roads aren't tended to during the course of a budgetary year, but most of them will hardly blink an eye if their trees are cared for. That's before we get into making the case that money for an essential service would be better off being spent on planting trees that won't provide a benefit for several decades; a case few of us could sell to non-arb folk.

This is what we're up against. The significance of urban trees is understood by those making the decisions; they just can't prioritise them when short-term results (and essential services) take greater importance.