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 ………

The fight for our custom as Salisbury keeps on growing

INTERESTING that such a major retail player as Dunelm Mill is moving in to Salisbury.
As a near neighbour of Matalan and Homebase, it’ll give them a run for their money in the competition for customers who fancy jazzing up their homes with the latest accessories.
Arriving, as it does, hot on the heels of the TK Maxx offshoot HomeSense, it’ll have shoppers at the bargain end of the market spoilt for choice.
Waitrose and Tesco have been busily revamping their stores to ensure that they each maintain their appeal and their market share.
With the thousands of new homes springing up around the city, all of them needing to be kitted out, Dunelm bosses have rightly spotted a golden opportunity.
And a rival for our established stores can only be a good thing when it comes to keeping prices low.
With luck, it will also mean that fewer of us feel the need to drive to Southampton and tramp miles through the horrendous maze of bizarrely named furnishings that is Ikea when all we really need is half a dozen wine glasses and a couple of candle holders.
By the time we’ve paid for our petrol and possibly a plateful of those puzzlingly popular meatballs, we’re not exactly quids in, are we?
Retail is already Salisbury’s biggest source of employment, accounting for almost one in five jobs. And the newcomer will create 65 more.
The downside is that it will lure yet more custom away from the city centre, where there’s already lots on offer for those of us eager to freshen up our décor.
Size does matter in this context, I admit. Many of our quaint old buildings are simply too small to display enough stuff to offer us the choices we demand these days.
I don’t particularly enjoy shopping in soulless retail parks full of mammoth warehouses.
But Southampton Road is what it is. It isn’t going to go away, and it looks less hideous when its buildings are bustling with life than when they’re vacant, staring at us with blank eyes as we drive past.
And for many, many people, the free parking there is understandably a major consideration.
Let’s hope Wiltshire’s Tory leaders – who, by and large, are not short of a few bob – bear that in mind in the coming weeks when they’re mulling over the level at which they’ll set the city’s new parking charges.
But don’t hold your breath. What they give with one hand, they’ll take away with the other because they insist that the final result must be ‘cost neutral’.
In other words, they seem to have already ruled out the possibility that if they reduce the costs for everyone, more people will come.

Aren't we lucky, Wiltshire's such a brilliant council?

IF Wiltshire really is the fifth best council in the country, there’s only one question to ask, isn’t there?
What on earth are the others like?
The council has been glorying in the solemn judgement of the Daily Telegraph that homeowners here enjoy “the benefit of good local service”.
Hoots of derision appear to be the taxpaying public’s response.
“A tidal wave of negativity” was how one reader accurately summed up the comments on the Salisbury Journal’s Facebook page about the Telegraph’s verdict.
Another asked whether the survey had been carried out by the Chuckle Brothers.
Actually, the Telegraph article amounted to nothing more than a couple of sentences of risible editorial providing a figleaf for high-end estate agents advertising some extremely pricey properties.
“It is a fabulous area,” gushed Rupert Sturgis of Knight Frank Chichester, according to the paper.
Chichester? Note to Telegraph editor: That’s in West Sussex. Mr Sturgis is based in Cirencester. That’s not in Wiltshire either.
“The county council has worked closely with Malmesbury (two-bedroom terraced houses in the town sell for under £160,000) council and surrounding villages to draw up a plan for future development,” Rupert burbled on in his efforts to interest us in a Grade II-listed six-bedroom farmhouse for a mere £2.25million.
Well, he should know, since his dad is based in Wiltshire, and is the cabinet member in charge of strategic planning and development management.
I don’t have space here to repeat the reasons I’ve given in previous columns for my opinion that the unitary authority hasn’t done us much good in the south.
But I will just draw to your attention the fact that Wiltshire’s about to unleash another of its so-called ‘public consultations’ on us.
What’s it about this time? New parking charges.
I wonder whether the day will ever come when parking charges are listed in a national newspaper under the heading ‘All the good things Wiltshire’s done for its taxpayers’?



OH joy! Oh bliss! This is better than Strictly!
I can barely contain my excitement. As I write, I’m also watching the first live internet broadcast of a Wiltshire Council meeting.
I shouldn’t mock. Webcams do at least offer us a way of keeping tabs on what they’re up to in Trowbridge without having to make the epic journey across the Plain.
Now the members are settling into their seats. Now Cllr Roy White is telling them that this is “history in the making” which will “help enhance the transparency” of decision-making and that if the fire alarm goes off it won’t be a practice drill, it’ll be the real thing.
Do you know, if you are unavoidably detained by urgent business and don’t want to miss an episode of this enthralling entertainment, you can watch it on catch-up for six months afterwards?
And you can shout at them from the privacy of your own home.

Why is Salisbury's tip sending useful goods to landfill?

AM I alone in finding it tricky to reverse into a parking space at the Churchfields tip – sorry, household recycling centre?
And before anyone makes any tired jokes about women drivers – don’t, because my sense of humour has been severely strained by repeated trips to this ‘facility’ during a major clearout.
I don’t know when it was built, but it wasn’t with the modern 4x4 in mind.
My car’s not one of those nippy little numbers that turns on a sixpence. When the world and his wife are emptying their garden rubbish, there’s precious little room to swing round and back into a narrow space between other vehicles.
Here’s a tip for Wiltshire from me – build a bigger one!
While we’re on the subject, we’re all supposed to ‘reduce, re-use, recycle’. So why can’t tip users take away other folk’s unwanted belongings?
Several times lately we’ve been to a tip in Dorset. It’s small.
But it has an area where people can leave surplus stuff for others to help themselves. Recipients make a token payment which I believe goes to good causes.
If things aren’t rehomed after a day or two, they’re binned.
In Salisbury I’ve seen loads of small items that someone might appreciate just chucked into the landfill skip.
The Trussell Trust has cottoned on to this, and I’m sure its shop, cannily sited on the corner of Stephenson Road, diverts lots of furniture.
It looks like there’s an arrangement in place at the tip, too, for someone to pick up the bits and pieces stacked alongside the staff hut.
But there’s still so much waste.
In summer, we sit on metal garden chairs ‘liberated’ from the tip, with a matching table, in district council days (with permission, I should add).
Painted green, after several years of benign neglect they’ve acquired that fashionable ‘distressed’ look.
Another time I picked up a wood and chrome bar stool. After a spell as a perch in a guitar-player’s bedroom, it’s used in the Harnham Handyman’s shed.
A few months ago I waylaid a lady approaching the landfill skip bearing a wicker basket with leather straps.
“Excuse me,” I said, “don’t you want that? It would make a lovely sewing basket for a girl I know who doesn’t have much money.”
She handed it over with a smile. It turned out to be a retro picnic set. “I didn’t know what else to do with it,” she told me. “I’ll be really glad if someone can use it.” And someone does.
Last week a sweet little raffia basket, containing thread, tape measure, etc, was about to be chucked into the skip by an attendant.
I asked if I could have it (for the same someone).
“People aren’t allowed to take things away,” he replied. Those are the rules. Big notices say so. Why?

YOU have until Monday to respond to the consultation on whether Wiltshire’s fire service should merge with Dorset’s, an option both fire chiefs recommend.
Ignore the ludicrous questions about sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity.
Just help save our fire service at wiltsfire.gov.uk/strengtheningourfrs.

Free-range pigs are not a blot on the Old Sarum landscape

DRIVING past Old Sarum, or walking up on the monument itself, I always enjoy seeing the pigs rooting around on the fields alongside the A345, living as free-range a life as it’s possible for farmed animals to do in our industrialised society.
I certainly don’t tut-tut and say to myself: “What unsightly agricultural activity!”
Apparently, though, some people do - among them Feilden & Mawson, the architects who have drawn up a proposed management plan for our historic airfield.
That’s how their document classifies the pig farm: “Unsightly agriculture.”
In an earlier draft they also called it “intensive”, despite the fact that free-range is exactly the opposite of the inhumane factory farming methods which are still permitted by some, otherwise civilised, European nations.
The architects say: “The visual impact of pig arks in the fields around the airfield is a major negative factor on the setting of both the airfield and the Old Sarum Scheduled Ancient Monument.”
Luckily for the pigs, and for all of us who like our free-range bacon - the kind that doesn’t turn to water the minute it hits the frying pan - the architects acknowledge that their little huts are “outside the control of the owners of the airfield”. However, they add helpfully: “They are on council controlled land which could be managed in the medium term.”
Ominous, that word “managed”. I rather thought the land was already managed – by a farmer.
Or do they mean tidied up? How do you tidy up free-range pigs, I wonder?
I also wonder why they might be proposing this course of action.
Is it simply to improve the setting of our First World War airfield?
Or is it because someone wants to build houses (470 is the figure I’ve seen mentioned) round the edges? And because buyers might turn up their noses at the prospect of porcine neighbours happily wallowing in the mud?
According to Laverstock and Ford parish council this “conservation management” scheme would destroy 65 per cent of the airfield’s surviving perimeter, one of the things that makes it so special in conservation terms.
English Heritage agrees. Both bodies regard the plan as “not fit for purpose”. The parish council says it would be more apt to call it a “development framework”.
We all recall the childhood tale of the Three Little Piggies who build their homes of straw, wood and brick respectively. Only the brick one survived the huffing and puffing of the Big Bad Wolf.
What chance have a few rows of rustic arks, do you reckon, against the ferocious wind of change that’s howling through towns, cities and green spaces the length of Britain, blowing in the diggers, the concrete mixers, and the big money?