Hillingdon Planning Committee 6 Oct: Officers Back All 11

Hillingdon runs a long way north to south. Northwood, Eastcote, Ruislip and Ickenham at the top, Uxbridge and Cowley in the middle, then Hayes, Yiewsley, West Drayton, Harmondsworth and the airport at the bottom. Harefield and the Colne Valley sit out west. Uxbridge is the point they have in common, with the civic centre, the shopping streets and the end of two tube lines.

We report from the borough’s own record: the planning register, licensing notices, committee papers and crime data. Living next to Heathrow makes some of that paperwork matter more here than it would anywhere else, and a lot of it never reaches the households it affects. The other half of the site is the practical information you look up on a Tuesday morning and want right first time.

What you will find here

• Local Info: house prices, getting into London, roadworks and parking, plus bin collection days and council tax bands for the borough.
• News: what the record shows, including planning news from Northwood down to West Drayton.
• What’s On: things to do in Uxbridge and across Hillingdon.

Where Uxbridge news comes from, and how to check it yourself

Most Uxbridge news reaches people after the decision, when the hoardings go up or the road is already closed. It does not have to. Almost all of it is published in advance, in four places, and none of them need an account to read. These are the registers this site works from, so you can check anything here against the original.

• The planning register. Hillingdon does not run the Idox system most London boroughs use; its applications sit on Ocella, at planning.hillingdon.gov.uk. Searching by street or postcode brings back everything lodged at an address, decisions included, which makes it as useful before a house purchase as it is when something appears next door. We cover the significant ones in Uxbridge planning news.
• Committee papers, before the meeting. Council reports are published several days ahead of the meeting that decides them, and the fastest way in is the newly published documents list, which shows what has just landed rather than making you hunt through agendas. The meetings calendar has the dates, and meetings are open to the public.
• Roadworks and closures, on the council’s own roadworks page, which is the register behind our roadworks and parking guide.
• The council’s own announcements, at hillingdon.gov.uk/news. Worth reading, and worth reading against the committee papers, because the two do not always say the same thing.

Heathrow is the reason Hillingdon carries more of this paperwork than a borough its size normally would, from night-flight consultations to airport-related planning that lands on Harmondsworth and West Drayton rather than on Uxbridge itself.

Every fact carries a link to the official source it came from.