A company which had to destroy 50,000 ash trees because of ash dieback disease said Monday it will sue the government amid fears that the fungus has spread too far to halt.
Crowders Nurseries in Horncastle, Lincolnshire, is taking action over the government’s failure to block imports sooner.
Managing director Simon Ellis said the company had written to ministers in 2009 to warn of the new, virulent strain of the disease, urging the closure of British borders to ash tree imports.
“They should have taken it seriously at the time,” Ellis told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday.
“They chose not to and now we have this really dramatic situation and unfortunately, by the sound of it, the ash tree disease has spread throughout the UK.”
He added the government had “cut off our income stream” by ordering destruction of the trees.
“What other action can we take?” he said.
The government banned ash tree imports a week ago and has destroyed 100,000 trees, while the high-level Cobra crisis committee met over the issue on Friday.
Plant experts have been surveying 1,000 sites that received saplings from contaminated nurseries, and government workers and volunteers checked 2,500 sites with mature ash trees at the weekend.
Ash dieback, or chalara, causes leaf loss and crown dieback — the dying of branches and branch tips — and can lead to the death of the tree. It has already been confirmed at 52 sites in Britain.
The new and especially virulent strain was first detected in Poland in 1992 and has more recently killed up to 90 percent of ash trees in parks of Denmark, leading to plant experts’ early warnings that it could also affect Britain.
They have compared its potential impact to that of Dutch elm disease, which killed most of Britain’s mature elms in the 1970s and 1980s.
The ash dieback fungus was first detected in Britain in March, with East Anglia the area worst affected.
Firm to sue government over ash tree disease
