Beam me up, Scotty - resistance is futile

SALISBURY area board organised a very constructive debate on Salisbury’s parking charges last week.
The trouble was, only about 50 people turned up. And several of those were city or Wiltshire councillors.
Four years ago, when we faced a massive hike in our charges, a protest petition organised by the Journal amassed 7,000 signatures.
It led to an admission by Wiltshire leader Jane Scott that her administration had “let the city down”.
So what’s changed? The new proposals include a whopping £9 all-day rate and a derisory 10p change to some (not all) central short-stay tariffs when our businesses have been begging for serious reductions to revive the city’s fortunes.
So why the low turnout?
As the board chairman Ricky Rogers rightly put it, people have ceased to believe that anything they say will make any difference. The public’s mood, as in so many political matters, is one of sullen acceptance of our own impotence.
“Resistance is futile,” as those nasty old Borg were fond of saying in Star Trek. “Your culture will adapt to service us.”
Of those at the meeting, 55 per cent admitted they hadn’t even bothered to fill in Wiltshire’s parking review questionnaire. And these were the public-spirited few who had taken the trouble to turn up!
One commonly expressed view was: “If Wiltshire really wants our views, why didn’t they ask us first, rather than presenting us with a package for the whole county and expecting us to pick it apart?”
Others pointed out that the questions were phrased in such a way that they couldn’t give the answers they wished to. They called it “cynical” and “patronising”.
We didn’t even get round to talking about parking meters and the big increase in takings that the council expects when it gets rid of convenient 15-minute and 45-minute slots and raises the price of half-hour stays.
We know our city contributes more than half the parking revenue of the county, and is the only place that makes a profit.
And the feeling of the meeting was that while Wiltshire insists on any changes to its regime being ‘cost neutral’ it’s not going to forgo this nice little earner.
Making people in other towns pay more doesn’t seem to be on its agenda. But why should Salisbury folk subsidise the rest of the county?
We’re a low-wage economy and most users of the car parks are locals, not tourists, who tend to arrive in coaches.
Someone at the meeting suggested free parking countywide, funded by an increase in council tax. Would that be an idea worth exploring?
Another asked: “What about a cut-price parking season ticket for local people?” Worth a try?

Comfort and joy for Salisbury's 'late night economy'

CHEERS! Wiltshire councillors have decided we don’t need a tougher licensing regime to clobber anyone planning to open a bar, club or restaurant selling alcohol in the city centre.
Whilst there is a regrettable amount of drink-fuelled yobbery in Salisbury, I don’t believe such a crackdown would prevent it. Rather, the problem would move a few yards outside the boundary of any newly-introduced ‘cumulative impact area’.
The idea will be reviewed in a year’s time, i.e. it’s been kicked into the long grass. Let it stay there.
I do sympathise with those residents who have found unwelcome deposits or even overnight guests on their doorsteps but these are matters for the police, not excuses to load what is euphemistically called our ‘late night economy’ with regulatory burdens.
That being said, the Police Federation is telling us that “substantially” fewer arrests have taken place since the closure of the Wilton Road station because detainees have to be carted off to Melksham.
So we may have good reason to fear an increase in anti-social behaviour.
The Wiltshire force, on the other hand, says the numbers have remained stable.
We need facts and figures. We shouldn’t have to choose whether to take the word of one side against the other when it appears that an internal battle is raging over such an important issue.
After all, it’s amazing the way you can spin an argument depending on your point of view.
It’s easy, for instance, to say, as was reported this week, that most people “unless they’re directly affected” are in favour of the development of hundreds of houses around the perimeter of Old Sarum airfield.
What about those who are directly affected? Not just neighbours, pilots, plane-spotters and history buffs but those manning our struggling public services.
And more importantly, what about English Heritage’s view that this unique little survivor from World War One needs to be preserved in its entirety? That’s a lost cause now.
I may be idealistic, but I’m not naïve. I wasn’t shocked by the way this development site was shoehorned into the South Wiltshire Core Strategy at the last minute, without proper public consultation. But I was disgusted and continue to be so.

No fairytale ending for Pixie, or for Salisbury

WELL now, I haven’t been so shocked since Sunday, when head judge Len booted the lovely Pixie – the best dancer on Strictly - off the show.
He was, apparently, less than cha-cha-charmed by her illegal lifts.
Still, he could have let her off with a caution.
I, for one, won’t be watching the rest of the series because it can no longer maintain any pretence of being a serious competition.
But even that earth-shattering departure pales into insignificance compared with Monday’s announcement that the city may never get the new custody suite that was promised when we were being told not to worry our little heads about the loss of our old police station.
As Craig would say: “It’s a disaaaaster, darling.”
I find it very sad, quite frankly, that the poor old Chief Constable, Pat Geenty, was the one who had to make this announcement, rather than the Police Commissioner, Angus Macpherson.
It may have been, as Mr Macpherson states, the Chief Constable’s decision to review the location of the county’s custody units.
But it looks odd, given that Mr Geenty threatened as recently as April to resign if the city wasn’t allowed to keep one.
Now he’s having to execute a tricky reverse fleckerl, claiming he didn’t understand quite what a parlous state the force’s finances were going to be in.
He can only afford two custody units across the county instead of three, it seems, and one of those has to be in Swindon.
But sure as eggs is eggs, Mr Macpherson and his political masters must have known this.
Or did no-one at the top have a proper understanding, just eight months ago, of the savings required from all our public services over the next three years? It almost beggars belief.
Unfortunately we can’t vote off the Commissioner.
Of course this announcement is equivalent to a ‘Ten from Len’ for Wiltshire Council, which owns the land at Churchfields earmarked (alas, so briefly) for the cells and has always wanted to see it developed for lucrative housing.
Oh me, oh my, and they say journalists are cynical!
Officially, at least, there’s still a shred of hope that the review will come down in favour of Salisbury rather than some more northerly nick, saving our miscreants and their lawyers a 36-mile far-from-quickstep home.
But I fear that’s about as likely as any normal woman being able to stand up, let alone prance about, on heels the height of those sported by Tess, Claudia and Darcey.
Or Bruno managing to get through an entire show without parting company with his chair.
As they’re fond of saying on my (ex) favourite programme: It’s the moment of truth.

Behold St Nick, the saviour of Stonehenge!

SADLY, there aren’t many shepherds abiding in the fields around Stonehenge these days but if there were, they’d have been treated to two visitations from on high this week.
Nick Clegg must have thought he was bringing glad tidings of great joy with his announcement that on/off tunnel project will finally go ahead (I’ll believe it when I see it).
But the season of goodwill proved short-lived for the Deputy Prime Minister when local LibDems made it clear they wouldn’t be forming an angelic chorus of approval.
Actually, their parliamentary candidate Reeten Banerji told the media, the £1.1bn* hole in the ground wasn’t ‘just what he’d always wanted’.
Embarrassingly for his leader, he then called for a local referendum on a range of improvements to the A303 instead, thereby handing a political gift to his party’s opponents.
Running the Liberal Democrats has always looked a bit like herding cats to me, and whilst independent thinking in the politically-inclined is always to be admired, I do feel a little bit sorry on this occasion for Westminster’s would-be ‘St Nick’.
To cap it all he was upstaged within hours by the Prime Minister, who couldn’t resist ‘doing a Barack Obama’ and striding masterfully across the prehistoric landscape for a photo-opportunity whilst pronouncing impressively that the tunnel is now an “unstoppable force”.
It’s a wonder Ed Miliband wasn’t discovered lurking behind a standing stone, hoping to tiptoe into shot for a share of the glory.
He really can’t win, can he? Mr Clegg, I mean. Or do I mean Mr Miliband? Or come to that, Mr Cameron? Gosh, aren’t we voters spoilt for choice?
Our little city, on the other hand, is onto a real winner with its Christmas market.
This year more than 120 coachloads of day-trippers from as far afield as South Wales and the West Midlands are dropping by to soak up the twinkly atmosphere and gluhwein and splash out on stocking-fillers.
I don’t know how much extra cash the market attracts to the rest of Salisbury, but wouldn’t it be nice to see a few more stalls in the High Street or the Maltings to spread the benefits more widely?
Incidentally, I’d love to know whether we have posters promoting our market in Winchester, to match their cheeky ad at the Castle Road roundabout.
For me, though, what really gets that festive feeling started every year is the totally delightful St Thomas’s Church Christmas tree festival.
In the same way that we treasure the tinsel-and-glue-smudged decorations our children bring home so proudly from school, we should nurture and support this homespun charmer of an event that gives so much pleasure to the creators and admirers of the trees, and raises so much money for good causes, too.
It’s what Christmas is really all about. (Yes, clichés are acceptable at this time of year.)

*Figures courtesy of the Department of Guesswork

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 ………