The six months that matter: provisional orders
When a council makes a new TPO it normally takes effect immediately, on a provisional basis. The council then has six months to confirm it, after considering any objections from the owner and others notified.
Confirmed, the order continues indefinitely. Not confirmed within six months, the provisional protection lapses — though nothing stops the council making a fresh order later. If you are dealing with a very recent TPO, whether it has been confirmed yet is worth establishing; for anything older, assume it stands.
Old orders are still real orders
Because confirmed orders never lapse, TPOs from the 1950s, 60s and 70s remain in force, and a mature garden can easily be covered by an order older than the house's current owners. Age changes nothing about enforceability.
What age does affect is the paperwork. Older orders were made under earlier regulations, may map trees imprecisely by modern standards, and may cover trees that have since died or been lawfully removed. Where an old order is unclear, ask the council for a copy of the order and its plan — that document, not memory or assumption, says what is protected.
Area orders: one wrinkle worth knowing
Most orders protect individual trees, groups or woodlands, but some — particularly older ones — protect an area: every tree standing within a marked boundary when the order was made.
The wrinkle is that an area order only covers trees that existed at the date of the order. Trees that have grown up since are not protected by it. With a 1970s area order, whether a particular tree is covered can turn on its age — a genuinely technical question where the council's tree officer, and sometimes an arborist's assessment, are the right sources of answers.
Can a TPO be removed?
Only deliberately, by the council. It can vary an order — for example to remove one tree from it — or revoke it entirely, and it may review orders when circumstances change. Owners can ask, but there is no formal right to demand revocation, and councils rarely remove protection from a healthy tree.
In practice, what most people who "want the TPO removed" actually need is consent for specific works. That route exists precisely so protection and reasonable management can coexist: apply, and if consent is refused or comes with conditions you consider wrong, there is a right of appeal to the national planning inspectorate.
When the tree dies or is removed
An order protects trees, so its practical effect ends with the tree — but not the obligations around it. Removing a dead protected tree still requires five working days' notice to the council, and a replacement duty usually follows, with the order attaching to the replacement tree.
This is how protection persists across generations of trees: the TPO on the fallen oak becomes, through the replanting duty, the TPO on its successor. An order also does not die with a change of land ownership — it binds the land through every sale.