Excellent idea 
There was one incident in the papers a while back where someone took down a large tree in their front garden that had a preservation order. The council took them to court, with court costs for the council and the fine it was circa £50k.
Having had to research (UK) Tree Preservation Orders (TPOs) a few years ago (long before Covid), as I had several recorded on my plot, all of which turned out to be due to poor record keeping and admin by the local council, it seems some local authorities are now considering blanking some legacy records, asking the public to review these and effectively nominate which ones they’d like to continue. It seems many of the legacy TPOs were established as ‘nice to haves’ rather than any essential need to maintain the tree/species. Councils are under a statutory obligation to conduct a regular review of TPOs but it seems many haven’t done this due to tightening resources - and the timescales of these ‘regular reviews’ appears to be ~25/30 years.
One reason for this is that the admin has become burdensome and some of the legacy records haven’t been updated as trees have naturally died (e.g. Elms going back to the 1970s). In other words, the whole piece can be a right mess.
It took me >3Y’s to get the council to act on mine which, eventually, required a submission to Planning C’tee, wherein the extent of the admin mess was revealed. No apology conveyed.
Of course, nothing in council-land is straightforward it seems, with very limited delegated authorities to officers from C’tee, even where the evidence of incorrectness is overwhelming. A bureaucracy in action through my lens, with so much time wasted. I was also advised TPOs were a low priority matter, which I pointed out was very odd given their importance in the legal conveyancing process and that the council could be giving out false information when responding to local planning searches.
I’ve also heard of cases where protected trees have been relatively close to developments/extensions, where councils have pushed the TPO aspect and the property owners have sought indemnities from the council for damage as a result of leaving the tree in situ - I suspect this also down to legacy TPO aspects. In each case the TPO was removed - although one would have thought this should have been addressed within the PP.
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