Back in the early to mid-80s I watched the construction of the underpass linking West Ashton Road to Polebarn Road, Trowbridge. I got into conversation with a friendly engineer chap and I asked how flooding would be prevented, given that the drains were below the level of the Paxcroft Brook. He reassured me that it was a separate system and that it fed into the River Biss further downstream.

Within six months we had a few heavy storms and it always flooded to a depth of about a foot at the lower end. That worked well then. Since then it regularly becomes impassable and about eight weeks ago it flooded again, this time to a depth of about two feet.

A few days later a Balfour Beatty employee did a cursory clean-up with a brush but the drains weren’t cleared properly and neither was the crazy paving repaired where the water pressure had lifted it. A sign was erected warning of road works, although none were taking place.

During last Thursday’s extraordinary storms the water level in the underpass reached a record height of over five feet at the West Ashton Road end so, just as with their failure to keep the grass cut to a decent standard, when are Balfour Beatty going to be brought to task over drain clearance?

Cllr Jane Scott regularly tells us in the ‘free’ magazine we receive that things are great in Wiltshire. Well Ms Scott, they are not. I regularly have to travel to a village in Gloucestershire and yes, they too have potholes but far fewer and of less severity than ours and their drains are kept in a far superior state to the Wiltshire drains so, the next time I see a picture of Ms Scott in the dear old Wiltshire Times (a weekly occurrence) perhaps she could be dressed in high visibility workwear, hard hat and carrying some drain rods or a bucket of hot tar and a tamper. Perhaps she would then realise how bad things are and stop all the backslapping at County Hall.

Steve White, Ashton Street, Trowbridge.