Can Salisbury afford to do without a youth hostel?

QUESTION: Does a city that depends upon tourism for a significant chunk of its income need a youth hostel?
Sounds a bit of a no-brainer? Yet Salisbury could lose its hostel in the near future, and with it the estimated £900,000 that its guests spend in our shops, pubs, restaurants and visitor attractions.
The Youth Hostel Association says its listed 19th century villa on Milford Hill needs modernisation and refurbishment, while a 20-bed annexe has “reached the end of its serviceable life”.
The organisation is barely covering its costs on the leafy three-acre site, and cannot afford to keep it.
Attempts to find somewhere else have failed (though it will keep looking) and it wants to sell up, appearing content to see Milford Hill turned into retirement homes.
A planning application to this effect is under consideration by Wiltshire Council.
A lot of people don’t like it, including Salisbury City Council, the traders’ organisation City Centre Management, VisitWiltshire, and the cyclists’ pressure group COGS.
City councillor Margaret Willmot - who first visited Salisbury as a youthful hosteller herself, back in the Sixties - is organising a petition against it.
Indeed, there are strong arguments against the scheme.
It flies in the face of the South Wiltshire Core Strategy’s policy that tourist beds should be retained unless there is proven to be no need for them.
With the hostel providing 15,000-20,000 overnight stays per year, no one can claim a lack of demand. And there’s no truly low-budget alternative.
Even the cheap and cheerful city centre hotel that Tesco hopes to build above its store is unlikely to offer beds at £13 a night.
VisitWiltshire says the hostel market is growing nationwide, and it sees scope to increase the number of ‘bed nights’ at Milford Hill to 30,000. Since its business is the promotion of tourism, we can presume it knows what it’s talking about.
A successful local company, Discover Adventure, is convinced it can not only make a go of the hostel but, with investment and the provision of activities such as cycling, walking and riding, turn it into an even greater asset to the city. It has tried to buy it but has been outbid.
The YHA says that, as a charity, it is obliged to get the best price it can.
So it would seem that a refusal of planning permission for retirement homes may be the city’s best hope of retaining a hostel.
Whatever happens, someone’s going to end up very unhappy.