Parking charge review adds insult to injury

WE’VE waited years for Wiltshire Council to review its parking charges – and for what?
The £9 all-day rate, with no compensating increase in park-and-ride opening hours, may be the headline-grabber.
But don’t be too distracted by that. The real devil is in the detail of this public consultation. Shoppers, tourists and business visitors park for much shorter periods.
And instead of heeding traders’ calls for significantly cheaper one, two and three-hour stays, the council is offering a measly 10p or 20p off in the central car park. Even then the Maltings isn’t included.
Short stays at Salt Lane, College Street and Brown Street will cost the same as now.
Lush House car park – where the income goes to the city council – will become more expensive, in order to “to manage demand”.
The only real reduction will be at the perennially unpopular Culver Street stack, scene of the recent ‘Free After Three’ initiative. I’ve seen no indication whether that has proved successful, or whether it will continue.
Until now, rather than pay Wiltshire a penny more than strictly necessary, some members of the Awkward Squad, like me, have taken advantage of on-street parking at 20p for 15 minutes.
So the council’s going to get rid of it.
It says 15-minute slots are “difficult to enforce”. Presumably when the wardens’ backs are turned, some shoppers are getting away with an extra five minutes free – and that would never do, would it?
It’s also contemplating raising the half-hour meter price to 80p. I suspect the principal beneficiary of that will be Waitrose.
Meanwhile over in Trowbridge, residents will benefit from cheaper all-day parking. I think that’s called rubbing our noses in it.
It’s interesting to see John Glen calling for the park and ride to be scrapped so we don’t have to subsidise it any more.
But I’m sure I heard somewhere, aeons ago, that it would mean the council having to repay the huge set-up costs to the government. And how could Wiltshire afford that?
Besides, it needs park and ride because it’s planning to provide fewer city centre spaces.
So here’s its nod to democracy: The new charges “should be seen as one possible solution”. You are “invited to propose alternative charges” and explain how they may be funded.
I acknowledge that a lot of time and effort on the part of council staff has gone into this consultation document.
We, the public, are not accountants, by and large. We don’t have the technical expertise to assess the cumulative effect of all the different parking charges across a large county, let alone reapportion them in a politically acceptable manner.
When we don’t come up with an alternative ‘cost neutral’ package, we’ll be told we had our chance.

'Unacceptable risk' of a store on Salisbury's floodplain

LAST week my aquarobics class (average age, wrong side of 50) was taught by a young, lithe and very quirky stand-in teacher.
He was a fantastic dancer, but most of us ended up with our feet tied in knots as we tried to copy his routines.
Gangnam Style looks so effortless when you’ve mastered the moves. I’d say that would take me six months, minimum.
Not that it mattered. We were all laughing at our own efforts, and it was great fun.
I can’t say I’ve ever waded through treacle, but attempting nifty footwork in a swimming pool can’t be that different.
The water resistance, especially when making a sudden change of direction, ensures that any attempt at elegance is doomed.
But hey, not much else happens on a Thursday morning (apart from the publication of the Journal, of course) that could brighten up my day like that.
Speaking of wading through treacle, Sainsbury’s application for a supermarket and petrol station on the Southampton Road meadows (587 documents so far!) is still wending its way through our tortuous planning system.
Someone recently drew my attention to the fundamental objection lodged by the Environment Agency, that the scheme is “against national planning policy as it would be within … functional floodplain”.
Just in case national planning policy turns out not to be worth the paper it’s written on, the Agency has also explained some of its technical issues with the scheme as it stands – on stilts, that is.
Not least, there are “strong concerns” about the void intended to hold floodwater beneath the store, and “whether designing a scheme with the need for regular inspection and maintenance of such a confined space (some 16,000m2 – 18,000m2 in area with approximate void height of 1m) is a safe, sustainable or even an achievable solution”.
Verdict: The development carries “an unacceptable degree of uncertainty and risk of possible future failure”.
Sorry to bore you with the detail, but few people will see this otherwise and in my view, everybody needs to.
Despite these deep misgivings, it’s also been suggested to me that only the Highways Agency has the clout to stop this scheme dead in its tracks.
And its staff are still working with the developers on traffic modelling.
The tone of their correspondence with Wiltshire Council troubles me. They talk about matters having “not yet” reached the stage where they can impose planning conditions, as if envisaging that the scheme could eventually be acceptable to them.
It’s very definitely not a definite no.
As I write this, the rain’s pouring down outside my window.
I recall last winter’s floods only too clearly – my garden was submerged for weeks on end - and I ask myself what on earth has to happen before our society learns anything at all.

Trust the public, a Wiltshire fire merger will save lives

YOU can fool some of the people some of the time.

But it’s reassuring to see that you can’t bamboozle the Great British Public when something is patently not in its interests.
I refer to the consultation on whether our fire service should merge with Dorset’s.
Not so long ago our political leaders at Trowbridge ousted fellow-Conservative Graham Payne as Wiltshire and Swindon Fire Authority chairman because he favoured the merger.
They then had the public consultation document redrafted to try to ensure that the options on offer gave them a bigger stake in running the service.
But by an overwhelming majority, folk didn’t fall for it.
Countywide, 77 per cent backed the merger plan, which would save £4million a year and save jobs.
In Salisbury, not a single person said they would prefer to keep a Wiltshire-only service once they learned that it would mean slashing the numbers not only of firefighters, but of appliances and stations.
The degree of consensus was “remarkable”, according to a report by Opinion Research Services.
But was it really? What’s a fire service for if it’s not for giving us all the best possible chance to avoid being burned to death or choked by toxic smoke?
The dominant theme of the findings, says ORS, was that “local authorities are not the most suitable partners for emergency services because there is little synergy between their respective operations, and local government has problems of its own to deal with.”
You’d certainly have thought that last bit was true, wouldn’t you?
Some respondents worried that councils are “too political”, others that fire chiefs would find themselves competing for funding against social services or education. All of them legitimate points.
The “vast majority” of MPs in the area also said they want frontline services protected first and foremost, according to the report.
The government, meanwhile, is so convinced by the business case for the two counties teaming up that it has offered £5.54million to help make it happen.
Some of that, inevitably, is for IT harmonisation. But a big chunk is for a new SafeWise centre delivering safety education in the Salisbury area, to be combined with a ‘strategic hub’ – a meeting place for a joint fire authority and its staff.
As our MP John Glen told me: “For the people of Salisbury and south Wiltshire that can’t be anything but good news, especially with a new fire authority HQ in our patch.”
All around us are voices united in agreement - Swindon Borough Council, Dorset County Council’s cabinet, Bournemouth Borough Council …. and now Dorset Fire Authority, unanimously.
So what are we waiting for? The verdict of our own fire authority, now chaired by Winterslow’s councillor Chris Devine. It meets in Devizes on Tuesday ………