On June 20 I attended a meeting of the cabinet of Wiltshire Council. As you reported last week, it was discussing potential sites for housing in western Wiltshire. I felt sorry for Baroness Scott, who chaired it. It was not an easy meeting to control. She was like Alice in Blunderland.
The cabinet had around 2,000 pages of report on this one item on their agenda. Who could expect them to read it all, never mind know it all?
One Wiltshire councillor, concerned about the proposals, suggested that Wiltshire Planning was in a desolate state, and I think there is some truth in that. It is clear to me that the 2,000 pages represent a lot of work.
Sadly it is not presented such that someone like me, interested in a particular parish, can easily find the information relating to my parish. To edit it would have required extra work and I think that may be the problem.
Wiltshire Council often seems to create confrontation with its consultation. A couple of years ago it started the housing site identification process relatively innocuously.
Since then some very contentious sites have been proposed, yet the council presented this present report as almost a done deal. Yes, further consultation was proposed, but there was little or no mention of compromise. And this often seems the weakness in Wiltshire planning proposals.
Take my parish, North Bradley, as an example. We are currently working on a neighbourhood plan covering the whole parish. We are trying to conform to the Wiltshire core strategy. However, this problematic report contains proposals that themselves do not conform to the Core Strategy, as Cllr Prickett pointed out at the meeting. Amazingly, one of the cabinet said that they were on core strategy version 2.
The fact that the parish council is working on a neighbourhood plan is known to the Wiltshire Council planners. They had to approve the plan area. Would it not have been sensible for the planners to discuss the problem sites with the parish council before putting their report together? If neighbourhood planning is to work, we have to feel that it is a partnership between planners and parish.
There are to be public exhibitions over the next few weeks and I would urge as many readers as possible to attend them and see what they think of the proposals. Then, when Wiltshire Council cabinet next considers the matter, let us have enough attending to require it to be held in the Civic Centre.
David Feather
Broadley Park
North Bradley
Trowbridge