Who will buy the thousands of extra homes to be built in Salisbury?

AT the end of my three-year apprenticeship as a reporter I was on £50 a week. Not a lot, even in 1975.

But a little terraced home in the South Coast resort where I shared a flat would have cost about four times my annual salary.

I briefly considered it, decided to go to university instead, met my future husband on my first day there, blew my savings on having a good time, and I’ve never regretted it.

But in those days there were jobs aplenty and redundancy was a word rarely heard.

Now a two-bed house in that same town costs eight-and-a-half times the salary of a newly qualified senior reporter.

Even with two such incomes, the repayments are barely affordable. And what if interest rates rise, which they will? Salaries are nowhere near keeping up with the cost of living (unless you’re a Wiltshire Council boss, of course).

There’s a widening gulf in this country between the haves and the have-nots, and the possession of a middle-class upbringing and a decent education is no longer any guarantee that you will end up on the right side of the divide.

It doesn’t matter how many extra houses ( 7,000, county-wide) the government is ordering Wiltshire to find room for if young people haven’t got the cash to buy them. And by and large they haven’t, not on local wages.

They’re likely to end up renting many of these properties from private landlords. And that won’t leave much to save for a deposit.

Social housing? Fat chance.

Wiltshire’s target is that 40% of new homes should be affordable. But that’s “too challenging” according to the inspector, and must be reduced. In other words, developers won’t play ball.

The county’s housing spokesman, Richard Clewer, calls this “morally offensive”, and he’s right.

For once, I feel a smidgen of sympathy for our planners. Theirs is a mission impossible.

They were told that if, with due public consultation, they drew up a strategy for South Wiltshire allocating large chunks of land for development and got it approved at government level, we’d be legally protected against a builders’ free-for-all.

They played by the rules, and look where it got them.

The government’s moved the goalposts and imposed its own free-for-all instead.

Cllr Clewer’s view? “Don’t ask us to find out what people want if you aren’t going to listen.”



I couldn’t have put it better myself. Happy Christmas.