Two years' hard labour in Melksham for police

TWO years in Melksham? What have our poor police officers done to deserve that?
Crikey, people have served less for manslaughter.
With a general election looming next year, I suspect politicians are desperate for a shiny trophy they can place before the voters and say: “Look! Despite all the hardships, this is what we’ve achieved for you.”
They are set on turning our police station into a University Technology College with all possible speed, whether that’s what residents want or not. And I’m honestly not convinced it’s higher in the wish-list of Salisbury folk than a locally-based police service.
While a proper science university might bring a much-needed injection of youthful vigour into the city and enliven its social and cultural scene as well as benefiting shops and businesses, a glorified secondary school where the vast majority of pupils commute from all over the county and go home again at the end of the afternoon won’t.
I’m not saying employers wouldn’t benefit from a larger pool of school-leavers with technical and scientific skills. This would be a desirable extra facility if everything else was tickety-boo. But it isn’t.
And its hurried introduction will mean a security firm ferrying people in custody across the Plain, sentencing their families and lawyers to lengthy journeys, until new cells are built here.
Meanwhile 999 crews will be haring down the road from their temporary base in Amesbury faster than you can say: “Your emergency is important to us. Please hold while we connect you to the next available member of our customer service team.”
With no impact on response times, of course.
City councillors can forget any money-saving ideas about flogging the Guildhall and moving into Bourne Hill with Wiltshire, because neighbourhood bobbies will have nicked all the spare rooms.
But there doesn’t seem to be a choice over timing. The people pushing this project forward at all costs won’t back down.
The daft thing is that there’s no need for the Tories to worry about their prospects.
Meaning no disrespect to John Glen - who’s a good, hardworking MP - the Tory vote in our neck of the woods is so ingrained that I could pin a blue rosette on my border collie and he’d get elected.
I’d try it, just for the fun of it, if the law allowed. The dog’s called Glen, too. Think of the perplexity in the polling booths with two Glens on the ballot paper.

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.

Why are Sainsbury's so set on flood-prone Southampton Road?

I FANCIED I could hear that ominous dun-dun-dun-dun theme tune from Jaws as I stared into the floodwater alongside Southampton Road on Sunday.
For something scary is stirring in its murky, slimy depths.
And no, it’s not a gigantic new species of man-eating newt.
It’s Sainsbury’s, back in response to absolutely no public demand at all with the next phase of its plans for a superstore-on-stilts and petrol station alongside the Tesco roundabout.
The company is asking Wiltshire Council what information it needs to supply about the environmental impact of this enormous building project on an unspoiled natural space that acts as flood plain and wildlife refuge and gives motorists entering our city a lovely green view across to the cathedral.
Well, I think that last sentence just about says it, really. What more do they need to know?
If the comments on the Journal website and public responses to Sainsbury’s previous (withdrawn) planning application are anything to go by, this is not just an unwanted scheme, but a massively unpopular one.
Wiltshire’s spatial planners’ report last time round made the point unequivocally. This site is “not appropriate for development of any kind,” it said. “This land should remain undeveloped.”
Presumably when reading this, Sainsbury’s bosses collectively put their fingers in their ears and chanted: “La, la, can’t hear you.”
People have asked them why they don’t look for a site north or west of the city, where I’m sure the occupants of all the new houses under construction would love to ‘shop local’, but they won’t answer. Why not? Have their rivals snapped up all the options?
Anyway, I hope that our local councillors have availed themselves of the perfect opportunity provided by our dreadful weather to inspect the sodden site and to assess its suitability or otherwise for themselves.
However, I think it unlikely that the ultimate decision on an issue of this importance will be left up to Wiltshire’s southern area planning committee.
In all probability it will go to higher authority – the strategic planning committee, which, to be fair, does have one Salisbury representative among its permanent members.
In the meantime it’s reassuring to hear that the council is going to introduce a byelaw – quite rightly – threatening anglers with prosecution if they damage river banks or impede the flow of water.
The reason? To “reduce flooding and protect watercourses”.
I suppose every tiddler helps.

Should the Vision have a rethink on the Maltings?

AS football fans like to sing when their team is winning: “It’s all gone quiet over there.”
Where exactly is there, on this occasion? Why, the Salisbury Vision.
We haven’t heard anything for ages about their exciting plans for new stores in the Maltings/Central Car Park.
Relaxing with your Salisbury Journal and a cup of tea after fighting your way through the bargain-hunting hordes at the sales, you might ask yourself why this should be.
Our lovely Christmas market, boosted by free-at-the-point-of-use parking, seems to have been a huge success, thank goodness, attracting trippers from far and wide. (One wheelchair user has asked me to point out how much more welcoming it was for disabled people this year than last, thanks to wider aisles between the stalls.)
However, city centre shops are continuing to close their doors at an alarming rate.
So why do the Vision think that the occupants of the new centre will fare any better than those in, say, the Old George Mall or the Cross Keys Chequer – or even the High Street?
What inducements are they offering prospective tenants to make it worth their while chancing their arm?
Isn’t the widely predicted demise of the traditional shopping centre a good excuse to stop and think again about the use of this large, level site within easy walking distance of all the necessary facilities?
We have a dire shortage of affordable homes. We have an ageing population. We want older people to move out of properties that are too big for them to make way for the younger generation. In fact, if they’re social housing tenants on benefits, we’re cruelly forcing them to do so.
With Wiltshire Council under orders to find more land for housing, what about turning part of the Central Car Park into purpose-built accommodation for the elderly, who might then support the retailers we’ve still got? There’s more than one way to revitalise a city centre.
But will the profit motive prevent the council and other landowners from seeing it?
After all, the prospect of lucrative commercial development must have been Salisbury’s key attraction for the cash-hungry invaders from Trowbridge, to whom, of course, I wish a Happy New Year.

The dog ate my husband's nuts

NO sniggering in the back row, there. It’s true.

The dog has turned out to be a Secret Nut Nibbler.

I’d ticked my husband off for leaving the shells of his Christmas brazils and walnuts in the waste paper bin next to the sofa, because I kept finding sharp pieces of shell on the carpet.

How did I keep finding them? By treading on them in my bare feet, having failed to spot them lying there on the dark patterned background.  Not nice, especially first thing in the morning.

I thought the dog must be fishing them out of the basket to play with. Reader, I was wrong.

He was fishing them straight out of the bowl on the coffee table, cracking them open with his teeth, holding them between his paws, and settling down for a good old chew. But only, of course, when we weren’t in the room, because though he looked up at me calmly with innocent brown eyes when I caught him, he knew he shouldn’t have been doing it.

Having removed temptation from canine nose level, and with every spare surface in the sitting room festooned with swags of greenery, I dumped the bowl in the kitchen, where I shall have to leave it safely every night now.

He’s further disgraced himself by making off with a dog-shaped doorstop, which I retrieved from the hallway minus one floppy ear.

Unfortunately, this doorstop had been given to me by a girlfriend last Christmas, and I’d always suspected that Glen might regard it as fair game so I’d kept it out of harm’s way all year on a chest of drawers in the bedroom, like a sort of heavyweight cuddly toy.

Having invited some girlies (including the doorstop donor) round for a festive soiree and banished my husband to another room to watch the football, we needed to prop the dining room door open so we could listen out for the curry delivery van.

In the five minutes of confusion that followed its arrival as I paid the driver and sorted out three large carrier bags of food, you can guess what happened.

I turned round and there was the doorstop halfway down the hall, with the ear lying sadly and soggily next to it.

However, Glen still has some way to go to match the destructive power of our previous collie, who once demolished an entire silver salver full of smoked salmon nibbles, intended for Christmas dinner starters, after being accidentally shut in the lobby where my mother-in-law had left them to keep cool.

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.

What do we expect in return when we give to charity?

NEWS that major vascular surgery is to move from Salisbury to Bournemouth has prompted understandable speculation about which other services might in future be transferred to some ‘regional hub’ miles away.
That’s a subject for another day. But here’s a related thought.
When the plot to shut down Hillcote, our respite home for handicapped children, was being hatched, did anyone take account of the input of local people into this facility?
Some £30,000 was collected for a minibus and a specially-equipped quiet room.
What happens to this stuff if the closure goes ahead? Are they planning to flog it off on ebay? Cart it all up to Devizes? Or just scrap it?
Whatever the answer, what message does it send to the fundraisers who worked so hard?
Now we are in the final throes of a huge appeal for a CT scanner. All over the area people of goodwill have been busting a gut to raise £650,000. That's brilliant.
Would they have devoted quite so much time and energy to buying a scanner based in Southampton or Basingstoke? I’m not knocking, just asking.
We pay for these things gladly, because we think they will be there to help us, our friends and our loved ones as well as the wider local community in our hour of need. And because we think our hospital is great.But these are times of upheaval for public services, and there can’t be guarantees that any piece of kit, or indeed any department, will remain here.I'm not saying we shouldn’t give to good causes. Of course we should, and to forestall criticism, I’ll tell you that I am a member of a charity committee.
But experience suggests that we should be wary of subsidising what our taxes ought to be buying.
We can’t expect the state to provide everything for us any longer, and we will all have to become more self-reliant.
But in the interests of social cohesion, the public must have a meaningful part to play in deciding what happens to publicly-owned assets.
People with power over our lives need to understand that ‘give and take’ is what makes any relationship work.
And it doesn’t just mean that we give, while they take away when they feel like it.