A bad day for Birmingham planning committee

The council will now have to pay Scottish Widows' not inconsiderable costs, which you might argue would be OK if the planning committee had been acting on some huge point of principle when it turned down the screen.
But that was not the case. It remains impossible to work out why the councillors behaved as they did over a relatively routine application.
The grounds for refusal were as follows:
1. The screen would spoil views from the Grade 11* listed statue of Lord Nelson, which is next to St Martin's Church some 300 yards from City Centre House and down a steep hill.
2. Even though the screen would feature only silent advertisements between 8am and 8pm, this would be enough to disturb people living in the Rotunda apartments and would have a "negative impact" on the surrounding area.
The committee also took into account, and this is the most bizarre aspect of the whole sorry affair, concerns raised by West Midlands Police that the screen might draw significant crowds in an already busy area and that this might somehow lead to trouble.
So there you have it. Someone wants to put up a silent advertising screen in the heart of one of the busiest and noisiest shopping centres in the country, and for some inexplicable reason the planning committee says no.
Yet another strange thing happened. Councillors refused the application without any discussion at all.
This does happen occasionally at planning committee meetings. When an application is so absurd that it has no chance of succeeding - opening a curry house next to a church, say - but in this instance you would have thought at least one elected member would have something to say.
A spokesman for Scottish Widows was allowed three minutes to put his case, but when it came to the turn of committee members to comment, there was complete silence. Perhaps they were too embarrassed to speak.
It was almost as if a decision had been taken before the meeting began. But this cannot have been the case since the planning committee, as chairman Peter Douglas Osborn points out at the start of every meeting, is a quasi-judicial body and no decisions are taken beforehand.
I suppose it all boils down to duff advice from council planning officers, who must have known there was little chance of defending a decision to refuse the screen at appeal.