Jeremy, now you're getting offensive.Your 'friend' - what's their expertise ?. I'll give you mine, degree in town planning, postgraduate diploma in town ad country planning, 10 years experience at 5 different local authorities including 5 years at team leader level specialising in enforcement and appeals. 12 years working for housebuilders, a medium sized planning consultancy, a multi-disciplinary multinational consultancy, and the last 3.5 years as a self-employed planning consultant acting on behalf of developers, local authorities and objectors.I know my stuff. And I don't have any professional or personal interest or agenda in this matter to influence my posts. Quite frankly I couldn't care less about the sign, but it would be useful to everyone to have the matter cleared up once and for all.I don't know your friend from the next person and to be fair to them they can only comment based on however it is has been presented to them, so I'm not going to insult them the way you are insulting me.If you or your friend (as I have done) bother to look up the application online you will note that both the decision notice and the Officer report refers to 'advertising right outside 426 CHR'.The description of the development uses the word 'replacement' but at no point within the decision notice or the officer report does it expressly state that the sign was to replace the previous one in precisely the same position.That doesn't mean that it was necessarily approved in a different location to the sign which previously existed. That is where the absence of any kind of location plan on the website record for this application is a problem. And just to be clear there were plans submitted as part of the application because the decision notice expressly refers to them , i.e. 'unnumbered proposed block plan, unnumbered location plan'.So neither you nor I nor your friend know the precise position where the sign was approved, and nor will we until we have sight of that plan.As for the argument I'm putting forward, I recognise that human beings make mistakes. I go back to the very early days of my planning career and recall how I once wrote to someone advising that something they had built required planning permission and hadn't got planning permission, only for the recipient of that letter to point out that it had got planning permission. I'm not perfect, no-one is, and based on my 10 years in local government and 22 years of working in a sector that involves day-to-day interaction with local authorities I know that mistakes are made.As I keep saying, and it seems the only thing we agree on, Hounslow could and should clarify matters to put an end to this speculation.But as an ex-Head of Enforcement, my view is :(a) if the sign is in place as approved in 2018 then that's an end to the matter, or ;(b) if the sign isn't in place as approved, then Hounslow has to make a decision as to the expediency of taking formal action. The only 2 considerations are public safety and amenity. Whatever you or I or anyone else might think, the fact the Council has approved a replacement sign, regardless of the position of that sign, means that the Council couldn't justify taking legal action against the sign on amenity grounds.So that leaves public safety. As I've pointed out, there's 2.5 metres between the sign and the inside edge of the pavement (i.e. the shopfront). So the sign wouldn't be impeding anyone, were it not for the hoarding which has been recently installed on the public highway and which reduces that 2.5 metre distance significantly.But the Council cannot take action against the sign on the basis of public safety just because a hoarding has gone up on the pavement. In assessing action against the sign, the Council can only consider whether the positioning of the sign would cause impediment if the hoarding wasn't there, because the hoarding wouldn't normally be there.You might not like what I say, that's fine, you might think that Hounslow and Decaux have something going on, again that's your choice, but don't insult me.
Adam Beamish ● 2135d