LAST Tuesday Wiltshire councillors approved plans for building more than 1,000 houses in the villages around Trowbridge.
These are some of the totals in the council’s Draft Wiltshire Housing Site Allocations Plan:
North Bradley 150 dwellings; Southwick 205 + 180 = 385; Hilperton 205; Elm Grove Farm Drynham 200; Warminster is also to grow to the south with 100 homes planned east of The Dene and 70 at Bore Hill Farm, Bishopstrow.
Wiltshire Council is already blaming the endangered Bechstein’s bats that live in ancient woodlands to the east and south east of Trowbridge for holding up its biggest housing allocation, the urban extension of 2,600 homes at Ashton Park. It wants to distribute the shortfall to surrounding villages.
It is true that protecting these bats from extinction is a problem; but it is a problem entirely of the council’s own making.
In 2004 the County Ecologist warned the old district and county councils that proposed developments east of Trowbridge could threaten these bat colonies and the Bath and Bradford Special Area of Conservation established for their conservation.
In 2009 Natural England warned Wiltshire Council that its plans for the Ashton Park urban extension – a key proposal in its draft Core Strategy for the county to 2026 – could conflict with EU and British wildlife conservation laws.
In 2013 the WHA’s ecological adviser, Professor John Altringham, told the inquiry examining the council’s draft core strategy that the Ashton Park plan could lead to the extinction of the populations of Bechstein’s bats breeding in woodland next to the estate.
WC did not reduce the size of the urban extension or shrink it back from the woods. On the contrary, on the basis that housing on greenfields would pay for A350 improvements, Ashton Park had to stay big if the developer, Persimmon Homes, was to contribute more than £11m to the £17m cost of the A350 Yarnbrook-West Ashton ‘relief road.’
Turning the A350 into a strategic truck route between the M4 and the South Coast ports is at the heart of what passes for planning in Wiltshire. The Swindon and Wiltshire Local Enterprise Partnership  has committed £5.5m to the Yarnbrook-West Ashton Relief Road. 
It wants to support a Melksham bypass at a cost of £30m. After that it will want £50m for an eastern bypass for Westbury, already rejected by the government on environmental grounds in 2009.
It has set aside tens of thousands for consultancies and lobbying to promote its dream of the A350 as an economic growth corridor of ‘international significance’ between the Channel ports and the Midlands.
Each section of the road will be sold to local people as the solution to ‘their’ local traffic problems as they drive to work, shops and schools – for want of a bus or a safe walking or cycling route. 
Do they want what is really planned – a stream of container lorries thundering up from Poole and Southampton though what’s left of their countryside and past the suburban estates that helped pay for another section of this poisonous ‘growth corridor’?
There is always money for road-building in Wiltshire while at the same time the council cannot afford to keep youth centres and other badly needed services open. 
Meanwhile, for want of a few million and some real vision of what the neglected towns along the A350 ‘economic growth corridor’ through North and West Wiltshire could be like with proper planning, the Bowyers site in Trowbridge stands derelict next to the railway station, giving a very bad impression of the town. [See photo].
If Wiltshire Council wanted it, the SWLEP could fund a master plan for the Bowyers site and the first stages of its regeneration. There could be a transport interchange next to the station, perhaps two or three hundred homes in continental-style apartments, many for affordable rents, a leafy communal space, small workshop units. 
There could be a café-bar where people arriving by train or bus might begin to wonder if Trowbridge could after all be something better than a dump – a place where you might actually want to invest in something more imaginative than chain stores, junk food outlets and, of course, more car parks and access roads to bring customers in from villages denuded of local services and local transport.
Will the people of Trowbridge and surrounding villages embrace such a radically different vision for the future or will they let the council press on with its tawdry plans for the Swindonisation of North and West Wiltshire? If parish councils and the town council don’t build a united front to demand a better plan it will be rubber-stamped at a full council meeting in July. Only then will local people be given a say: a public consultation has been scheduled for September – just when hundreds of us will be on holiday.
One thing’s for sure: iIt’s not the endangered bats of West Ashton that stand in the way of a better future for Trowbridge. The bats did not vote for the wave of development heading towards the woods and fields where they roost and forage for food. But they provide a timely warning: If we build a world where they cannot survive, we build a world that is also unfit for humans.
Patrick Kinnersly, Secretary, 
White Horse Alliance
Ken McCall, 
Campaign For A Better Trowbridge