Does anyone have first-hand experience of gardening in a Conservation Area?

I have been discussing with the Council tree person the impact of their proposal to extend the Conservation Area to include our house and garden.

Very briefly:

All trees with a trunk of 3 inches dia or more at about 5ft high are covered, and for any work on them, I need to give six weeks notice, and fill in a form with a plan showing the trees' location and full details of the work I need to do.

This covers all work, including, eg annual pruning of fruit trees. He has told me that picking of bay leaves for culinary purposes, and picking holly for christmas decorations should, by law, be applied for similarly but will be overlooked.

I will have to apply every single year to carry out annual pruning - I cannot get an approval to annually prune.

There appears to be no way in which to get a particular tree exempted - eg for them to decide that a leylandii doesn't add to the conservation character of the area and therefore I may continue to cut it back to keep it within bounds.

Since I have around 40 trees over the size limit, are close to reaching it, this is going to cause me a considerable amount of paperwork, and, more importantly, it will cause them a lot of paperwork (I think he was very sensible to concede on bay leaves ;-) )

So - is this the attitude tree officers are taking elsewhere, or is my particular tree officer not quite au fait with the legislation (my father believes that there is something in the primary legislation saying that it shouldn't override good husbandry, and so annual pruning of fruit trees is allowed)?