7:40am Thursday 9th September 2010
Sir – CPRE has for years campaigned to roll back the clutter of unnecessary signs blighting our countryside and towns and it is very pleasing that Eric Pickles is now urging councils to take action against them.
Alas, some of the worst examples are perpetrated by the councils themselves.
South Oxfordshire District Council, for example, sponsors commercial advertising on roundabouts, which is not only distracting to motorists, inappropriate on rural roads, and contrary to its own policies against the spread of advertising into the countryside, but the council gains no financial advantage for taxpayers from the £4,000 per sign per year it allows its contractors to charge.
Further, the signs are unlawful. Planning permission should have been obtained but was not — a particularly flagrant breach of planning controls, given that South Oxfordshire District Council is itself the planning authority responsible for upholding them.
In response to CPRE’s complaints, the council persisted in claiming firstly the signs had planning permission when they did not, and secondly that in any case they had no power to control them, when they themselves had signed the contracts.
Although eventually forced to concede they were wrong, South Oxfordshire is still choosing (as your sister paper the Mail put it at the time) to turn a blind eye to its own flagrant breach of planning controls.
With councils as indifferent as this to the planning controls it is their duty to enforce, let us hope that Mr Pickles is carrying a big stick in his campaign against clutter.
Dr Helena Whall, Campaign manager, CPRE Oxfordshire
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