Questions for the Police and Crime Commissioner

I WAS unable to attend last night’s public meeting at the Guildhall about the proposed closure of Salisbury police station because I was on my way back from my son’s graduation.

Dedicated though I am to the fearless pursuit of truth and the public interest (!) the boy’s big day was not to be missed.

But had I been around, these are some of the questions I’d have asked Police and Crime Commissioner Angus Macpherson, or ‘Nine Jobs’ as  he’s been nicknamed by Journal website commentators (surely that should be 999 Jobs?)

Mr Macpherson, I gather you are intending to base emergency response vehicles at the Five Rivers ‘community campus’ once the leisure centre has been extended to accommodate this new role.

I am reliably informed that there can be upwards of a dozen such vehicles parked at the police station at one time.

And then there are the officers’ own cars, needed to get to and from their shifts from all over South Wiltshire. I can’t see officers using the city centre shuttle bus instead.

What I can foresee is a large number of spaces being lost by gym users and swimmers. Unless, of course, you’re going to Tarmac over all the surrounding grassed areas?

Wherever you accommodate them, there’ll be a lot of extra vehicles entering and exiting a family leisure facility where free-range children behave unpredictably (especially, in my experience, after one of those swimming-pool birthday parties when they’re stuffed full of E numbers).

And blimey, what about school sports days on the running track? I’d love to be a fly on the steering wheel when a proud mama in an outsize 4x4, desperately trying to reverse into a parking space so she can watch her little darling win the 100 metres, encounters one of Wiltshire’s finest setting forth, siren blaring, blue lights flashing. It’s a breach of the peace just waiting to happen.

Is it true, by the way, or just a baseless rumour that the Salisbury intelligence unit had thousands of pounds spent on special security doors, only to be moved within months to Melksham?

I’ve heard that a gradual exodus north has been under way for a while now. If so, no wonder you say the station is under-occupied.

Other matters are puzzling people who understand more about police procedures than I do, and I quote: Where will the child protection unit and domestic violence units go? Where will officers carry out video interviews of victims of sexual assault? Where will the sex offenders unit and vulnerable adults unit be based? What about CID?
Then there's the million-dollar question (let's hope that's not what it costs) - where will the new custody unit be?
Finally, who first suggested that a city as important as Salisbury, with its vital military connections, doesn't need a proper police station? This plan was kicking around long before your election, Mr Macpherson. So whose bright idea was it really?

A little treasure that's in need of some TLC

WHY can’t you write about the state of the Poultry Cross, I was asked at a recent book club get-together.

I was quite surprised by how strongly the whole group felt. This quaint little survivor from the 15^th century shouldn’t be allowed to deteriorate further, they said.

So, having mugged up on its history – last week’s Journal Scrapbook article by Peter Daniels was most helpful - I went and had a closer look at it, and decided they’d got a point.

At the beginning of the 19^th century – minus its original decorative topping of flying buttresses, which were restored later – the Cross was the focal point of a painting by Turner.

Now it’s the focal point for pedestrians strolling down Butcher Row, enjoying the burgeoning café culture, yet it’s covered in pigeon droppings and some kind of moss.

The stonework looks as if it could do with a clean. In places it appears to be crumbling, and the paving around it, as elsewhere in the city centre, is pock-marked with chewing gum. All in all, it is a bit of a mess.

It needn’t be like this, said my book-clubbers. And how lovely it has been lately, they added, to see the farmers’ market gathered around it on a Wednesday, using it as its creators intended.

The Cross belongs to Wiltshire Council, not to the city. Grade 1 listed monuments can cost a fortune to keep up. There are many competing demands on the public purse in these hard times.

And they say distance lends enchantment, so it probably doesn’t look quite so neglected from 33 miles away in Trowbridge.

I remember a leading light in the old district council telling me with unholy glee four years ago that Wiltshire didn’t know the headaches it was letting itself in for when it appropriated Salisbury’s ancient treasures, such as the Cross or the prison in Fisherton Street. A bottomless money-pit, was his opinion.

Wiltshire’s leaders were itching to get their hands on our assets, he added sourly. We couldn’t stop them, so let them find out the hard way.

Well, the days when the people of Salisbury had the power to run their own affairs are now long gone and we are, as they say, where we are.

However, structures such as the Cross are the priceless relics of days even longer gone, a past which gives our city its unique character and makes it such a tourist attraction. Someone must take care of them.

I can’t imagine that the Market Place refurbishment will be costing Wiltshire quite as much as was originally budgeted, given the way the project’s been scaled down since those first grandiose plans. I seem to remember a figure of £3million being bandied about. Isn’t any of that left in the Vision’s coffers?

Saving Salisbury's wildlife

I TRIED to ignore the pigeon drooping in the baking heat on my neighbour Mike’s patio.

Hunched and pathetic, it sat there for hours on end, barely stirring on the first really hot day of this so-called summer.

We’ve had landscape gardeners in, extending our own patio, and by midway through the  afternoon they, like me, were tiptoeing over to the fence to keep an eye on the poor little thing.

Coincidentally, I’d been watching a pair of pigeons nesting in Mike’s honeysuckle for a few weeks (whilst trying not to appear as if I was training my binoculars through his bedroom windows).

The female had seemed to be sitting on eggs, and my first, mistaken assumption was that this was a youngster that had tumbled out.

We tried tempting it with birdseed and breadcrumbs and it made a half-hearted attempt to peck. We put down a dish of water but it wasn’t drinking.

In the end I could stand it no longer and rang Creatures In Crisis, previously known as Wiltshire Wildlife Rescue.

Would I mind trying to catch the pigeon, asked their full-time volunteer Kevin, while he finished cooking the family dinner. Then he would take care of it.

So there I was, distracting the bird by inching my way across its line of vision while Ian from over the road, a keen angler, crept up behind it with his landing net.

And bingo! We got it first time, popped it in a shoebox, and took it across town to Kevin, who answered the door with a young jackdaw tucked under one arm, its beak wide open as it anticipated its next mouthful of food.

What a wonderful organisation this is, I thought. Thank goodness it’s there when we need it.

I’ve called it a couple of times before – once for an injured bat on my front path (it later died), and once to remove a panic-stricken pied wagtail from the Bishop Wordsworth’s School kitchen, where I was helping to serve refreshments at a parents’ evening.

If only the mums and dads sipping tea and nibbling biscuits as they waited to talk to the teachers had realised what a chase was going on behind the serving hatch!

Sadly the pigeon turned out to have a head injury and it only lived for a couple of days. But I know I left it in the best possible hands.

The team at Creatures in Crisis deserve our admiration and thanks. Their job is sometimes pretty grim. And if anyone feels moved to offer them help, either practical or financial, I know they’d appreciate it. Just email creaturesincrisis@live.com.

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.