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I wasn't trying to make that point. My point was that I don't think filtering should be imposed top-down. As for removal because of detail or politics, it's not always that clear-cut.
We had a case in Blackheath (which I think was further up in this thread, or if elsewhere will be easily findable) where the council tried to place a filter in what was clearly the wrong place. It kept getting removed by (presumably) locals and eventually the council gave in and didn't keep replacing it. Here, I would say the locals had a point that wasn't just anti-filtering or anti-council and the council had done shoddy work and was right to back down.
Remember also that the people doing the actual work of implementation are not politicians. They're technical people, and as in every profession, some are better, some are worse at their jobs. If you're a politician whose officers get filtering wrong, you might end up defending a very poor scheme, probably against very reasonable arguments, if you desperately want to stick it out and show political 'commitment'. (Most politicians don't understand the technical details in any case, which is fine, because they're generalists who have to deal with all sorts of things, like political GPs.)
I've seen plenty of schemes run into problems, often against prior warnings that weren't heeded. Not so much in my own borough, but certainly in others. Completely irrespective of the politics of it, councils should propose and implement good schemes as a very basic requirement. Imposing them in the way they have been doing only makes this harder.
Which ones have been removed because the details of the filters were bad rather than the lack of political commitment to seeing any scheme through?