999 in the slow lane

THE more I think about it, the more I wonder how practical it will be for police cars answering 999 calls to be based at Five Rivers.

The junctions at either end of Ashley Road, with Castle Road and Devizes Road, don’t really allow for speed. I don’t know how the fire service manage it now with the existing traffic levels.

Once the ‘Community Campus’ is up and running there will be an awful lot more vehicles in the Ashley Road/Hulse Road area.

How do residents feel about that? Has anyone from Wiltshire Council asked them?

Unanswered questions over the loss of our police station

IT’S not exactly a surprise that Salisbury is to lose its police station. But it is a cause for concern while some questions remain unanswered.

The writing has been on the wall ever since it was suggested that the neighbourhood policing team might move into the community campus which is to be developed at Five Rivers leisure centre.

And when plans to open a University Technical College were announced, all became clear. A key requirement was that it had to be easily accessible from the railway station, and large enough sites weren’t exactly ten a penny.

Yet the authorities said very little in public about these issues, even when negotiations must have been at an advanced stage.

I’m sure some police functions can be housed, as the force suggests, within Wiltshire Council premises such as the library and Bourne Hill. With all the council job cuts going on, there’s bound to be plenty of spare space.

But then isn’t the library itself supposed to be moved when the Maltings/Central Car Park redevelopment gets going? What then?

We are told that 999 crews will be ‘temporarily’ based in Amesbury. It will be interesting to keep an eye on response times.

The fire service has had to reinstate full-time officers at Amesbury after wrongly imagining that it could react just as well to emergencies with reduced cover. What makes the police think it will work out better for them?

In due course, says the force, the 999 teams could move to the community campus. Well, just how big is this community campus going to be?

The extension to Five Rivers, as currently proposed, is going to swallow up 40 of the current leisure centre’s parking spaces. Yet more and more people will be going there to access essential services.

Wiltshire Council bosses have promised to fund some kind of shuttle bus to and from the city centre. I wonder whether that will survive the next round of spending cuts?

And even if it does, will people be willing to pay the council’s exorbitant parking charges just to leave their cars in town and hop on a bus to get to where they really want to be?

Perhaps they’ll take a bus in from home instead, and then another from town, instead of just taking the car to Five Rivers?

Of course they won’t. They’ll park in the roads around the leisure centre, residents will be in uproar and the traffic wardens will have a field day. The resulting fines might even fill all the holes in the council’s budget.

But above all, where are the police going to find cells in which to lock up miscreants for the night?

The new courts were built conveniently next to the police station, which now seems a bit of a wasted effort.

Apparently “options for providing custody within South Wiltshire” are being explored. Oh, that’s all right, then.

I've seen the future ... and it's utterly predictable

DO you think I’m psychic?

I suspected all along that the talk of co-operation between political parties after our inconclusive city council election results would turn out to be so much hot air.

It gives me no pleasure at all to say I was right.

Deputy leader Jo Broom has switched to the Tories just six weeks after 385 people in Fisherton and Bemerton Village elected her as their Liberal Democrat councillor. I wonder whether those voters feel their trip to the polling booth was worthwhile?

It seems to have happened because the LibDems, who lost their majority, didn’t want to be seen as agreeing to a coalition with the Conservatives. Given the way the LibDems nationally have become David Cameron’s fall guys, you might think they had a point.

But what we have here, as I’ve stressed repeatedly, is a parish council, not Parliament, and it desperately needs to find a unified voice to represent the city’s interests to our Wiltshire overlords.

You have to wonder why, when Ms Broom felt the need to resign from her party, she didn’t just carry on as an independent. If only my crystal ball could have shown me the behind-the-scenes manoeuvring in the Guildhall ….

Fortunately, one good thing has come out of this daft episode, and that’s the choice of Andrew Roberts, a widely respected independent thinker, as leader.  

Mystic Annie predicts he will prove to be the right man in the right place at the right time.

NOW here’s something it didn’t take paranormal ability to foresee.

Speaking of getting what you didn’t vote for, Sainsbury’s are at it again.

Having been inundated with objections to their proposed superstore on our Southampton Road flood plain, they withdrew it. Democracy in action?

Not likely. Having let things cool down a bit, they’ve now promised to come up with a new, improved plan for …. a superstore on our Southampton Road flood plain.

According to their spokesman, “residents, community organisations and council officers have had their say on the detail of our proposal” and “changes have been suggested”.

Well, the overwhelming majority of the 150-plus residents’ letters that I read on the Wiltshire Council website were against the whole idea, not some footling detail of design. As were the city council, Highways Agency and Environment Agency.

People weren’t just saying no for the sake of it. As well as voicing environmental concerns, many urged Sainsbury’s to build a store to the north or west of the town, where one is really needed.

But what ordinary folk want doesn’t seem to matter.

If at first you don’t succeed, try again and again and again and again until resistance is worn down and you get what you were after in the first place. That appears to be the guiding principle of our planning system for those who can afford it.

Save our verges from the mowers and save wildlife

I SYMPATHISE with the reader who wrote to Postbag in distress after seeing a bank of cowslips alongside the A338 casually massacred in the name of tidiness.

I know we’re a military community, but that doesn’t mean that every blade of grass needs a No.1 haircut and every flowerbed has to be planted with geometric precision like a regiment standing to attention.

It’s a pity that the pretty crocuses on the Harnham gyratory that used to spell out ‘Welcome Spring’ have died out.  When my sons were small, the whole family used to look out for the annual reappearance of this cheery little message as we drove by. Just thought I’d mention that in passing.

But the city’s naturalised daffodil displays remain a delight, and one thing I’ve been enjoying in recent weeks has been the sight of longer grasses left to wave in the breeze along the sides of the ring road while the spent bulbs die down.

I’ve noticed that wild flowers have started to show their heads on our roundabouts, too, and if Wiltshire Council is looking for ways to save money under its new £150million highways maintenance contract with Balfour Beatty Living Places, it could try leaving all these areas alone until the end of summer every year.

To my mind, verges look so much lovelier in a semi-natural state where they offer cover for birds and small mammals, and where the flowers provide food to help support our endangered populations of bees, butterflies and other insects.

I realise that there are some junctions where it is necessary to keep vegetation in check to allow sufficient visibility for motorists. But there are whole stretches of roadside where that’s not an issue.

These little strips of green are a world in themselves if they’re left to get on with it, without being menaced by mowers.

Salisbury City Council has shown imagination and done us all a favour by planting wild flower areas and community orchards in our parks and public spaces. Vandals permitting, these will be just the start of a wider network.

Let’s hope that any little green oases alongside our roads can be allowed to flourish, too, forming wildlife corridors around our city for the benefit of future generations.

While I’m on about it, why do the Harnham water meadows need to be managed to within an inch of their lives?

My husband and I watched recently as a rotten limb of an ash tree on the meadow across the river from us was reduced to a stump.

It was perfect for woodpeckers, and there was no danger of it falling on anybody, given that the public are excluded “by order of the trustees”, except on strictly supervised group visits.

Dead wood is a vital habitat for many species. But there’s none on the meadows these days. It’s all ‘tidied up’ as soon as it falls.

Pay cuts and dearer parking won't lure nurses to Salisbury

IF I had to go into hospital (touch wood) I’m pretty sure that the main thing preoccupying me wouldn’t be the nationality of the nurses.

As long as they were kind and competent and not too busy to talk to me, I’d be grateful.

So it’s welcome news that Salisbury District Hospital has managed to recruit 47 Portuguese nurses to bring its staff up to strength.

But it does beg the question why we aren’t able to train or retain enough healthcare workers in Britain for our own needs.

As taxpayers, you and I are forking out money that we can ill afford to keep young people, bored out of their minds, doing nothing.  In February the national NEET conference heard that there are more than a million 16-24 year olds who are not in education, employment or training.

And that’s not the full picture. What about the hundreds of graduates working in shops and bars while they spend months searching for employment commensurate with their qualifications?

Obviously, not all of them would have what it takes to work in the NHS. That demands a special type of person.

But the mismatch of supply and demand suggests such woeful workforce planning that somewhere in the Departments of Health and Education, whole legions of heads should surely roll.

Just six years ago NHS vacancies were so scarce that according to the BBC, one-third of newly-qualified nurses hadn’t found work after six months.

That same year – surprise, surprise - the Royal College of Nursing reported that 5,000 British nurses were planning to move to Australia.

This week the Nursing Times tells us that the number of district nurses nationally has been cut by 42 per cent in a decade.  Those who remain are overwhelmed. Yet these are the people who can prevent our increasingly elderly population becoming ‘bed blockers’. So, more pressure on our hospitals. Joined-up thinking doesn’t seem to come into it.

But what do we do about it? And how can we make working in the NHS a more appealing option?

It’s no time at all since SDH bosses were talking about joining a cartel to force through pay cuts - possibly not the best way to make employees feel valued. Now they are raising the cost of workplace parking, and there have been plenty of grumbles about that on the Journal website.

I don’t know what the answer to the problem is, but I know what it isn’t.