U Turn or Double Cross?

Well, I’m still confused. On Wednesday night I attended the extraordinary council meeting at Salisbury City Hall, but I am not sure that I fully understand exactly what decisions were reached.

There has been a huge fuss about the size of the development that has been proposed for Salisbury and, in our little corner of Wiltshire, an even bigger fuss about one particular option - building a new village of 2,500 houses on a green field site between the villages of Winterslow and Firsdown. There have been petitions, village hall meetings, a demonstration in Salisbury market square, a poster campaign and a flood of written complaints to the council. The extraordinary council meeting had been called at short notice in response to the public outcry.

The councillors looked quite nervous when we trooped in, filling the hall to the back and muttering evilly. However, the English middle-class are normally quite restrained when sober so the public gallery limited itself to raucous shouts of agreement when pleased and hisses and whistles when we disagreed with a speaker.

After about two hours the councillors forgot about their unusually large audience and concentrated on political attacks and personal abuse. At the moment Salisbury District Council is controlled by a Labour / LibDem coalition. As a group they mainly sit for city wards and one of the more serious complaints about the whole of the planning consultation process is that their communication with the people who live in the villages around Salisbury has been poor, or non-existent. There have been threats to sue the council over this which may have concentrated their minds a little.

After some party political abuse and recrimination the Labour / LibDem group came up with a number of suggestions and offers.

They first suggested that the option of the Firdown-Winterslow settlement should be scrapped. They then offered to re-submit the entire Core Strategy document cutting the number of houses that would be built. When I left at 9.00pm (hunger overcame me) they were still wrangling about details.

On the face of it this looks like a big climb-down by the council – but I wonder. In April 2009 Salisbury District Council will cease to exist and will become part of the much larger Unitary Authority to be known as Wiltshire Council. Will decisions made by our District Council in 2008 be carried forward? Will the whole decision making process be passed to the, largely unelected, South West Regional Council? Will Whitehall have the final say? Will anyone take any notice of our opinions? Are they simply trying to shut us up until the Unitary Authority takes over?

One thing is certain, the Wiltshire Council meetings will be held in Trowbridge and it will be a lot harder for 500 residents of Firsdown and Winterslow to travel to Trowbridge to protest when we are not happy with their decisions.