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This comes up more than any other question on this page, and the short answer is usually yes. But the right is narrower than most people assume, and getting it wrong turns a hedge-trimming afternoon into a legal problem with somebody you live next to.
The General Position
Where branches from a neighbour's tree grow across the boundary into your property, you are generally entitled to cut back the part that overhangs. This is a long-standing common law right of abatement. You do not need the owner's permission to exercise it.
The Four Limits
1. Back to the boundary, and not past it
You may cut what is on your side. You may not cut into the tree beyond the boundary line, and you may not go onto your neighbour's land to do it — that would be trespass. In practice this means the cut is made at the vertical plane of the boundary.
2. The cuttings are not yours
What you cut off remains the property of the tree's owner. Strictly, it should be offered back. Tipping a load of branches over the fence is not the way to do that — it has been treated as fly-tipping. In practice most people ask the neighbour whether they want the material, and take it away if not.
3. Protection overrides all of it
If the tree has a Tree Preservation Order, or is in a conservation area, the right to cut back does not apply on its own. You need consent or must give notice first, exactly as the owner would. Cutting a protected tree is an offence and the fact that the branches were over your garden is not a defence. Check with the council before you start.
4. You can still be liable if you damage the tree
The right is to cut back overhanging growth, not to do whatever you like to the parts you can reach. Work that is carried out badly enough to kill or destabilise the tree can leave you liable for it. This matters most with large limbs: taking a major structural branch off one side of a tree can make it unbalanced, and that is your doing.
Roots Follow the Same Principle
Encroaching roots can be cut at the boundary on the same basis, with the same caveats — and one extra practical one. Cutting substantial roots is much more likely to destabilise a tree than cutting branches, so it is worth advice before doing anything to roots of any size.
Fruit Is Not Yours Either
Apples hanging over your garden belong to the tree's owner, and so do the ones that have fallen on your side. This is a small point that has caused a surprising number of arguments.
The Advice Nobody Wants but Everybody Should Take
Tell them first. Not because the law requires it — it does not — but because the cost of not doing so is a permanently difficult relationship with the person on the other side of the fence, over something they would very likely have agreed to.
It also tends to produce a better result. A tree cut back on one side only, to a flat plane at the boundary, looks exactly as odd as it sounds. Where a neighbour agrees, the same tree can be reduced properly and evenly for a similar cost, and both gardens end up better for it.
High hedges are a separate matter. Evergreen and semi-evergreen hedges over two metres that block light have their own complaints procedure through the council, which applies where reasonable attempts to resolve it directly have failed.
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