We are talking about local authorities fudging the issue. The committee has photographs of my hedge and I have brought some more that I can pass round to give people an idea. The photos are a large size because I do not know how good your eyes are.
The local authority came out to my property but did not tell me that it was coming out. I got a phone call from my daughter, who was 16 at the time, saying, “There are guys creeping around in the hedge. I think you should come and see,” so, of course, I shot home from work wondering what was going on. It turned out to be the council officers. They came into the house, looked at the hedge and agreed that it was a blight on the property.
In the submission, the council had a copy of our title plan that showed where the trees were planted and, in its decision, it said:
“The trees have been assessed by the Council as not being a hedge but instead a tree belt which forms one of the landscape features of the golf course. The trees would not appear to have been planted as a boundary treatment between the golf course and the site boundary and the planting is not in the form of a hedge.”
That flies in the face of everything that you see in the photos. If somebody wants to plant a hedge, they plant a double-row, staggered plantation and then they will get a thick, impenetrable hedge. The former captain of the golf club has recently planted a hedge at the end of the street with beech saplings and it follows exactly the type of thing that we have in the photographs, but I am talking about Sitka spruce that are now 35m high. They are massive.
I do not know whether the council made a mistake in saying that the trees are not on the boundary because we have a private road in front of us but we own the road. We also own a bunker—a sort of sit-out area—on the opposite side of the road but we would not sit there because it is now just dark and full of flies. The houses were built on the golf course to take account of the views. My house used to be called Fairways but that is just a laugh now.
I do not feel that the act has worked for me.