Airfield plan should be shot down in flames

YET again on a planning issue, we have to ask despairingly: “Why do we bother to care?”

Old Sarum airfield, beset by would-be developers, was once memorably described by Winterslow’s councillor Chris Devine as “like a wagon train being encircled by Red Indians”.

He was right, and they’re brandishing their tomahawks again.

Back in 2010 when sites for new housing in South Wiltshire were being designated under the Core Strategy, a surprise, last-minute proposal for development at the southern end of the airfield was put forward by its owners, without public consultation.

Wiltshire Council officers had identified enough sites already, and they said so to the government inspector in charge of the process.

But he had other ideas, going so far as to suggest that the runway could be realigned to ease the way for builders.

The airfield is a conservation area. Three of its hangars are listed buildings. English Heritage calls it “the best preserved flying field of the First World War” – in other words, not a collection of unrelated buildings but a complete entity, and a national treasure.

Dismayed local councillors tried to get the scheme dropped at a City Hall meeting, but were told they couldn’t tinker with the Strategy without it becoming null and void.

They had to accept the whole package or risk a development free-for-all. Those were the rules.

Still, so strong was the opposition, led by councillor Ian McLennan, that Wiltshire boss Jane Scott stepped in.

To sighs of relief all round, she suggested getting the runway listed to protect it, saying there was “more than one way to skin a cat”.

No sooner was the meeting over than her idea was shot down by planners, who told her land can’t be listed. But by then the rest of us had gone away with the impression that something was being done.

Now residents have been invited to a ‘public consultation’ by the airfield’s operators, who claim they need the profits from new homes on its perimeter to manage the conservation area and put up a visitor centre, which Wiltshire policy currently requires.

For how long do you imagine the buyers of these homes will put up with the noise of flying, literally on their doorstep?

And if flying is restricted as a result, how long before our historic airfield is closed down as uneconomic?

Wiltshire Council and the spider in the bath

THAT’S it, I said to my absent husband on the phone.  Proof that it’s autumn. There’s a giant spider in the bath.

When we first bought our house the previous occupants had thoughtfully covered it with a kind of Russian vine.

To call it an invasive plant would be an understatement.  A rampaging monster, it was constantly having to be cut back from all the front windows to avoid a blackout.

As soon as we chopped it back it seemed to put on a growth spurt. And it brought with it a wealth of insect life. It was the spider that brought it to mind. At this time of year in particular we used to be haunted by them.

They would scurry out from underneath one armchair and dive under the next, to hide. My husband, keenly interested in wildlife even at the most inopportune moments, said he thought they were wolf spiders. Then, upon reflection, he decided they were giant house spiders. I said I didn’t care what they were, with legs that huge they’d have to be caught and put outside.  It was them or me, and I couldn’t sit with my feet up off the floor all night.

“They’ll only come straight back in again,” he would say, reasonably. But I was beyond being reasoned with.

Grasshoppers used to climb up where the vine snaked through the sash windows in the boys’ bedrooms and perch on the ceilings, bemused at suddenly finding themselves in a blank, white, alien environment with no idea how to get out again, so they had to be removed, too.

What with the added peril of the annual wasps’ nests in the attic – I came to dread that dozy time of year when I’d find them crawling across my young sons’ bedclothes – it was all a bit much.

The day my husband finally decided to tackle the vine some 20 years ago was one I will never forget. I know it’s a cliché, but it really was like Jack and the Beanstalk. Its fallen remains filled the front garden twice over.

Now we still get enormous spiders, but mostly they only pop up through the plughole, and since they can’t climb the sides of the bath, if I’m on my own and I’m not feeling up to trying to catch them in a jug, I can always just have a shower instead.

Speaking of fairy tales, as I was in passing, there will certainly be a happy ending to 2013 for the top brass at Wiltshire Council who are to enjoy pay rises of up to £19,000. That’s more than many people in Salisbury earn in a year, as a quick glance at Journal Jobs will show.

Apparently the council fears it won’t be able to attract and keep executives of the right calibre because its current rates are “adrift of the market”.

I’d have thought there’d be plenty of competent candidates prepared to settle for six-figure sums and comfy public sector pensions in the current economic climate. But maybe it’s a different world up there.

Or maybe Wiltshire’s problems have as much to do with morale as with money.  Certainly among the lower orders, who can only look on enviously at their bosses while they are stuck with a below-inflation ‘rise’ of just 1 per cent.

Does leader Jane Scott know that they have their own version of the ‘Where everybody matters’ motto?

It’s ‘Where everybody mutters’.

The Alice in Wonderland world of law and order

A FRIEND has given me a garden ornament – it’s an owl with solar-powered light-up eyes.

I was relaxing in the garden one lovely warm evening last week, chatting to my husband, when I had a sudden feeling of being watched.

I turned, and found two pairs of eyes gazing unblinking at me from a flower bed.

One pair, of course, belonged to the owl, which had switched itself on as the sun sank. The other belonged to my dog, who was crouched, motionless, alongside the bird, peeping over the petals, his eyebrows raised as he willed me to notice him and throw him a ball.

They made a surreal picture, and we laughed. It’s like a scene from Alice in Wonderland, I said.

So what have my dog and Wiltshire Police’s plans for Salisbury got in common? They’re both barking, for a start.

I’d been regaling my husband that evening with tales I’ve been told about events at the increasingly crowded Melksham police station as more and more staff and functions have been transferred there from Salisbury - including the trial preparation unit, which has made it difficult to maintain day-to-day contact with the officers involved in some cases.

Apparently there have been power cuts, most people have to eat and drink at their desks because the canteen can’t seat them all, and the sewage system recently overflowed, flooding an upper floor and causing a ceiling to collapse – “not a pretty sight”, I am told.

Plus there isn’t enough parking space to cope with the influx. As a result, people are parking on the surrounding roads. So Wiltshire Council proposes to paint double yellow lines to stop them. Now that last element does sound all too believable.

Of course, as I said to my husband, my informants could be making it all up. But it’s so bizarre, so Alice in Wonderland, that I don’t think they are.

Meanwhile I’ve heard that the former Imrys Quarry on Wilton Road is the favoured site for new police facilities. Not a bad spot, I suppose, as long as any new buildings are completed before the force is turfed out of its current home.

Unfortunately, I’ve also heard that this site would be shared with Wiltshire Council, which raises questions about how the privacy of users such as victims of domestic violence or witnesses to crimes could be protected.

 A week or two back there was even a rumour that a vacant factory at High Post might be adapted for police use by having its roof taken off and a prefabricated custody unit lowered in. Was that just a joke, or a sign of desperation?

If it was true, what would happen when people were let out of the cells? Would they have to walk all the way back into town along the pavement-free A345? I suppose they could always hop on to a park and ride bus at the Beehive. That would be one way to boost passenger numbers.

Lurching from one crisis to another in education

I FEEL so sorry for the teenagers who found themselves left high and dry by the withdrawal of A-level courses at Salisbury College, or Wiltshire College Salisbury - a ridiculously unwieldy title that I’ve never got used to using.

Why was the decision so last-minute, announced just a couple of weeks before the start of term?

I can see that it doesn’t make financial sense to run AS-level courses in a range of 16 subjects for a new intake of only 30 or so students.

The disappointment for these still-very-young people is equally understandable. It must have been horribly worrying for them to have to scramble about to find a place at another institution.

Presumably, some of them will have been away on holiday when the announcement was made, and will have had to take whatever they could get on their return.

But those who had already completed their AS-levels and were about to embark on their A-levels were in an even worse plight, seeking to transfer to institutions following the same syllabus set by the same exam board and having to hope that their new classmates would have covered exactly the same ground.

Surely the college authorities must have known how many students had just taken their AS-levels and would be expecting to continue for another year? It cannot have come as a surprise to them? Were there factors other than class sizes affecting their decision?

With the city’s proposed University Technical College facing a year’s delay due to a lack of proper planning to relocate the police, and a new Salisbury Sixth Form College due to open in a year’s time although nobody knows where yet – it might be to the east of the city or it might be in the city centre, according to its website - it all feels like a bit of a muddle, to put it mildly.

Once the Sixth Form College is up and running it will offer everything that Wiltshire College did and more in terms of A-level provision. With luck and a couple of years of good exam results, students will no longer feel forced to travel out of the county to get the education they deserve.

It’s going to focus on science, technology, engineering and maths – just like the UTC, funnily enough – while offering other subjects, too.

So do we need both? And which would our scientifically-minded young people prefer to attend? 

Why aren't our councillors standing up for Salisbury?

IT’S all too easy to blame Wiltshire Council leader Jane Scott and her cabinet from across the Plain for the plight of Salisbury’s retailers.

It’s true that she was in charge of the iniquitous rise in parking charges which drove motorists away and has ended up costing her own council money.

It’s also true that she’s refused to rule out raising them further, which is hardly what I’d call a conciliatory attitude in the face of so much hostility from the paying public.

Having observed her in action at many a council meeting, I’d hardly expect her to back down in the midst of the current bout of bad publicity.

Maybe once it’s died down a bit she’ll go away and have a quiet rethink.  We have to hope so, though I’m not holding my breath.

But in the meantime what about the Conservative backbenchers who represent Salisbury and South Wiltshire divisions on her council?

I haven’t heard a peep out of any of them since I reported the council’s own figures showing what a counter-productive policy this has been.

Why aren’t they standing up for us and declaring publicly that it’s time she changed her mind? Any of them care to comment?

Meanwhile, another week, and more shop closures.

I’ve got no problem with charity shops. I love them, and check them out frequently for bargains.

They seem to be thriving, as there are always plenty of people flicking through the clothes rails and poring over the bookshelves.

We’ve even got a British Heart Foundation furniture shop now, as befits our Heart City status, and jolly popular it is, too.

But it’s getting to the point where charities, along with cafes and hairdressers – how many haircuts can people possibly need, I wonder? -  must soon outnumber our embattled independent retailers.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read that Cllr Scott was blaming the recession, the internet and out-of-town shopping centres.

I’d like to echo Tony Blair’s 1997 election anthem (not that I supported him) and say that things can only get better.

But with this lot at the helm, I fear they could get a whole lot worse.

A lesson learned over plan to close police station

HOORAH! Common sense has prevailed and the rush to turf our police out of their station to make way for a University Technical College turns out not to have been so essential after all.

With all the authorities apparently dead set on 2014 as the launch date for the new school, it was Chief Constable Patrick Geenty who wisely called for extra time in the end, admitting he was “not satisfied” that police would be able to maintain their current level of service.

Last month in my newspaper column I voiced the concerns of serving officers about the same thing, only to be accused of “falling into bad habits” as a journalist in a letter from UTC project chief Gordon Aitken.

I’m not infallible (don’t tell my husband) but on this occasion I was right.

One thing I hadn’t realised, until Mr Aitken pointed it out, was that the UTC will only take in “around three students per year group” from each of Salisbury’s secondary schools.

The rest, he explained, will commute from a 20-mile radius, with 46 feeder schools in all.

As I’ve said previously, I see nothing wrong with a UTC in principle. But it doesn’t sound as many local children will benefit from it.

And whilst a “sub regional centre of excellence” may be a desirable extra for the chosen few, for their employers, and for local politicians seeking a bit of glory to bask in, it’s the general public of Salisbury who will pay the price unless Mr Geenty can say in a year’s time that he’s convinced the loss of the police station will have no adverse effect.

People may well feel inclined to ask whether it’s a fair exchange. That’s a question which could be avoided if an alternative site could be found for the UCT.

I do hope this breathing space will be used, at the very least, to reconsider plans to base response cars at Amesbury.

We’ve been told up until now that this won’t affect how long it takes officers to reach an emergency in Salisbury.

But unless the force intends to recruit the new Time Lord, Peter Capaldi, and beam bobbies about the place in his old police telephone box, logic suggests this can't be true.

In another recent letter to the Salisbury Journal, Police and Crime Commissioner Angus Macpherson stated that the "direction of travel" on this whole project was agreed between Wiltshire Council and the old Police Authority back in 2011.

I'm sure he is correct. I just don't remember anyone bothering to mention it to the public at the time, or in the run-up to May's elections.

The decisions that really matter are all too often presented to taxpayers as faits accomplis, and this climbdown shows what a bad strategy that can be.

Creeping suburbanisation of Salisbury's parks

I USED to walk the dog in Queen Elizabeth Gardens maybe once a fortnight. He loves to jump into the river at the little beach area and fetch a stick, and passers-by are always amused by his headlong enthusiasm.

Having given up on the habit while the noisy and messy refurbishment work was going on, for some reason I hadn’t strolled across Town Path from Harnham for months.

So on Sunday when I finally got round to it, what I found came as quite a surprise.

I know the old planting needed replacing, and that new planting schemes take a while to mature, and that’s fine. We’ll just have to be patient. It’s a work in progress.

But in the meantime the hard landscaping is just that – hard on the eye.

In a less-than-mellow shade of yellow, it looks as if someone has simply upended a few dozen packets of Rice Krispies on the pathways. This gritty stuff is being trodden all over the place, filling the gaps between the boards on the bridges, and spilling over onto the grass, and whatever lies underneath it is already starting to show through.

I remember when the parks department wanted to build a diagonal path across Harnham recreation ground. That was going to be golden breakfast cereal, too. Residents protested that it would stand out like an airport runway, and the project was shelved, thank goodness.

In my view both these much-loved parks should be treated, as far as possible, as visual extensions of the water meadows, since they lie at either end of them. That means green, leafy and natural.

The city council’s wildflower planting in the Harnham field was a welcome and appropriate addition.  But the Environment Agency’s flood defence scheme with its pumping station control kiosk has already spoiled the view towards the picturesque Old Mill. And now a bright red charity clothing bank is sprouting an unsightly crop of carrier bags at the entrance from Netherhampton Road.

It may be for a good cause, but haven’t we got enough recycling facilities at charity shops in town, at Churchfields, and at skips in our supermarket car parks?

Part of Salisbury’s charm lies in the way these two parks have remained semi-rural oases, linked by the Town Path, within the heart of a built-up area. They are places where we could almost imagine ourselves to be in the countryside. I’d be sorry to lose that.