Danger in the park

INEVITABLY, it seems, Salisbury's parks are filling up with rubbish as the hot weather draws the crowds. (Distancing doesn't come into it.)

But why should this mess be inevitable?

In Harnham, the closure of the Old Mill during the pandemic seems to have worsened the problem as instead of buying drinks in the pub, picnickers cart their own bottles from home down to the riverside and abandon the empties by the overflowing bins.

Result: Mounds of unsavoury detritus piling up along the water's edge and creating a health hazard to children and dogs who just want to splash around and cool down.

One dog walker I bumped into there this morning had brought a carrier bag with him to fill with empty glass bottles - some of them broken, with jagged edges which could slice open a paddling kiddie's ankle or a dog's paw, as well as injure wildlife - and he then carted them back to his own home to dispose of safely. Amazingly public-spirited, but he shouldn't have to do it. Another waded into the water to pull out a plastic garden chair.

If people can carry a bottle to the park, why can't they carry it home again and put it in their own bin? After all, it will be considerably lighter on the return journey once they've quaffed the contents.

Answer: They are too lazy, and they think 'the council' will come and clear up after them.

Trouble is, 'the council' has limited manpower at present, with staff off sick or self-isolating, like any other employer, as one elected member I nagged about it later told me.

He's promised to raise the issue at the Guildhall tomorrow, and I hope some good will come of it. 

But it's not just a problem during the pandemic, actually. It happens every time we have a sunny spell. The city council needs to have a system in place that allows its bin-emptying service to respond more speedily to changes in demand.

FOOTNOTE: After I raised this yesterday the city council litter team came out within half an hour and cleared 26 bags of rubbish from Harnham cricket field. Well done, and thanks to Cllr Simon Jackson.

Proceed with caution on parking ban

JUST when you thought it was safe to go back into town …

Along comes news that, for some, will make it a whole lot more difficult.

Whether this is the right time to press ahead with more pedestrianisation and ban on-street parking for shoppers is debatable.

In the long run, it has to be desirable to encourage walking and cycling. It’s an absolute no-brainer. If you are young enough and fit enough, that is.

More bus use, too, if there were enough regular, reliable buses with fares lower than car park charges. And that’s a big if.

But cutting back on taxi spaces? With a rapidly increasing elderly population? Surely if anything, you’d need more, not fewer?

How will it affect the market? Have the traders been consulted? Even for the not-so-elderly (me!), if you’re lugging bags of heavy fruit and veg, it can feel like a long way to the nearest car park. If you have a car.

At the same time, you’re making it harder for people to bring their own vehicles in anyway.

That’s a huge deterrent to the kind of people who might well use on-street parking briefly to pick up a heavy purchase or drop off a charity shop donation. Has anyone actually asked Oxfam, Mencap, our Hospice and the rest what they think about this?

What about the taxi drivers, incidentally? Haven’t we got enough unemployment right now?

Theirs isn’t an easy living anyway, and it’s going to get a whole lot tougher, with the city centre’s diminishing retail offering and with our entertainment venues and restaurants still closed.

I don’t really buy into the argument that this is about enabling pedestrians and cyclists to keep a safer distance from each other.

I can see why some councillors might have thought it was a good idea to use the coronavirus disruption as an opportunity to push ahead with their long-held ambition to bring in environmental improvements, not least to our air quality.

Half of me is with them on this. Make a fresh start!

The other half wonders whether this is the right time to risk measures that might well, in the short term at least, deter some shoppers and hurry along more job losses.

It sounds as though there’s some doubt about whether all of these ideas can be funded at once.

And maybe that’s a good thing. A gradual approach to these changes, with wide public consultation, might be wise.

Welcome back!

HELLO and welcome to any of my former Journal readers who've decided to follow me here.

If there's one good thing that's come out of coronavirus and the lockdown it's a long overdue renewal of our sense of community, and I hope that by resuming this blog I can also help to promote that, although I can't guarantee that local and national politics won't intrude!

For now, though, in our little cul-de-sac one of the highlights of the week is our Sunday lunchtime gathering, wine glasses or coffee mugs in hand, to chat across a two-metre divide.

Despite the appalling example set by our so-called leaders we are still trying to be socially responsible!

With so many musically talented residents, we've even had a couple of concerts, passing the hat round online and raising more than £200 for Salisbury Hospital ArtCare in the process.

Now this week's get-together has sparked a little history project dreamed up by one of my neighbours.

Since our road seems to have been developed in dribs and drabs, we're collating dates from conveyancing paperwork and the accompanying plans to draw up a timeline, and gathering as much information as we can from online sources about previous occupants to create a shared record.

It promises to be a fascinating exercise and maybe it will inspire others to follow suit .........

Sainsbury's give up, but developers don't

DON’T uncork the champagne or hang out the bunting just yet.
Yes, it is very good news that Sainsbury’s have pulled out of the scheme to build a supermarket-on-stilts on an unspoilt water meadow alongside Southampton Road.
But their change of heart wasn’t prompted by concern about our environment or the hundreds of public objections.
It was because of “significant changes in customer shopping habits”, i.e. profits have plummeted.
The would-be developers, Salisbury Gateway – don’t let the grandiose title fool you into thinking this is anything but a money-making exercise – are far from admitting defeat, however, and say they are already talking to other potential partners.
The site is not zoned for development under our core strategy. There are good reasons for that. They involve flooding, landscape value, wildlife, and traffic congestion.
Now the core strategy is being revisited.
Even before the wretched document was formally adopted in January – and it was sold to us on the basis that it would meet all our housing needs until 2026 – council planners had launched a search for more land for new estates. Coming soon, to a green field near you.
It’s no wonder developers push their luck all the time when officialdom keeps moving the goalposts.
Once a site has been ruled out for development, our diminishing band of public servants - whose salaries are paid by your taxes and mine - shouldn’t be required to spend their time in ‘pre-application talks’ with people who want to build on it.
All they should have to say is: “Look mate, read the strategy. This land is not up for development. Go somewhere else.”
But I’m told they have to follow “due process”, which dictates that they should also waste the time of all the highly-trained staff who are required to submit reports on planning applications – landscape officers, ecologists, traffic officers, the fire service, you name it ……
The would-be developers, meanwhile, who stand to make zillions, pay less than £34,000 by way of an application fee for a project of this size.
By the way, nobody much in this general election campaign seems to be talking about the environment.
It was a big issue last time round, but now it’s as if our political classes mostly concur with David Cameron’s view of “all this green crap” as just a passing fad.
Of course there are matters of more apparent urgency commanding public attention, such as the NHS, immigration and what Harold Wilson called “the pound in your pocket”.
But many people do care about wider issues, and if they don’t, they jolly soon will when the natural resources that we treat so wastefully start to run out.

This campaign calls for a Human Shrub

HE calls himself the Human Shrub, and the camouflaged campaigner wants his local council to turn over a new leaf.
In recent years his guerrilla gardening tactics have turned neglected municipal plots in Colchester, Essex, into wildlife-friendly green oases.
I reckon a visit from this eccentric eco-hero could be just what’s needed in Harnham.
Otherwise the lovely meadows on the corner of Britford Lane with their unspoilt views of our cathedral may soon be just a memory, an archive photo in the reference library, uprooted to make way for 100 ‘high quality’ homes.
The vast majority of people I’ve spoken to, and those who’ve commented on the Journal website, share my sadness at the prospect of this wanton destruction.
The land is what’s known as a ‘windfall site’ in council jargon, since it hadn’t previously been publicly earmarked for large-scale housing by the planners but just kind of fell into their hands like an overripe apple.
Well, development would certainly mean a massive windfall for the owners - the Longford Estate and St Nicholas Hospital - and for the builders, if not for the neighbours whose environment would be ruined.
Their new Facebook campaign, Save The Meadows, has sprouted 660-plus supporters, and a petition has been launched on change.org.
Many have pointed out that these fields are extremely boggy in the winter and the water has to go somewhere.
The developers argue that they are not officially part of our flood plain. But officialdom’s definition of flood plain so often seems at variance with the reality experienced by local people.
The proposed hotel and drive-thru next to Tesco spring to mind.
The meadows are not quite in the heart of Salisbury, if you choose to define our city purely in terms of historic buildings.
But they are a vital part of its green lung – the network of undeveloped sites which gives the place its character, its sense of space and scale, and its wild creatures a refuge.
While I’m on the subject, keen as the building industry is to persuade us otherwise, it needs to understand that you can’t just designate the odd acre of land here and there as a nature park and expect birds, bees and butterflies to thrive.
They need safe corridors through our urban jungle.
A couple of weeks ago I found a dead otter in Harnham. It had been run over.
We’ll be a lot less likely to see otters, dead or alive, if we lose the meadows.
Save them, don’t pave them.

Voters have the power to axe Wiltshire's crony cabinet

WELL, now we know what Wiltshire leader Jane Scott thinks of her minions in the south of the county.
They’re good enough as lobby fodder. They can be relied upon to vote the right way to force through her pet policies.
But cabinet responsibility? No way, they’re just not up to it.
Tribalism being what it is, none of our Conservative councillors has erupted in fury publicly following Mrs Scott’s less than diplomatic comment that promotion is based on “a number of factors” including “skills, experience and capacity”.
She doesn’t think they’ve got enough of those crucial qualities, or she’d have done the electorally popular thing and picked one of them when she chose to expand her inner circle in a mini-reshuffle.
But she knows they’ll stay schtum, however humiliated they feel, for the sake of the party and to keep any faint hope of future promotion alive.
Did you know, folks, it doesn’t have to be this way? Legally, I mean.
We don’t have to tolerate the absence of representation for the south of the county on the only decision- making body that counts.
Since the Localism Act of 2011 there has been no compulsion for local authorities to be run by a leader and cabinet.
Indeed, not far away in Bridport, Dorset, some people are campaigning for a referendum to do away with what they call “government by contempt” and to have a cross-party committee running the show instead.
If the Public First group can collect signatures from five per cent of the West Dorset district electorate, voters will have to be offered that choice.
There are several structural options that are possible if enough people want them, and I recommend the Local Government Association’s publication, Rethinking Governance, which you can find online, to anyone interested in finding out more.
In West Dorset, the district’s Conservative leaders failed to attend a public meeting called by the campaigners, though the local Tory MP, Oliver Letwin, did turn up and dutifully defended the status quo as “more efficient”.
It will be fascinating to see how this develops.
Some residents down there are so disillusioned that they’re starting to call for a unitary authority. Poor, deluded souls. They need saving from themselves.
Don’t do it, chaps! Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Learn from our experience and just don’t go there!

Parking limit puts paid to a lunch in the city centre

RECENTLY some people dropped in to visit my mother in her new home in Salisbury.
The three of them – one was a sprightly 87-year-old – intended to have lunch in the city centre beforehand, with a gentle stroll in the Close to stretch their legs.
They were breaking a long journey by coming here, and a park and ride bus didn’t figure on their list of options.
So, they told us, they looked up Mum’s address and headed for what seemed to be the most handily located car park. It was Salt Lane.
When they read the signs there, however, they realised that parking was limited to three hours. And given that most 87-year-old ladies’ sprinting days are well and truly behind them, they wouldn’t have time to do everything they wanted.
They decided not to have lunch in Salisbury after all.
They got back into their car, drove out into the countryside, and came across the Wheatsheaf at Woodford, where they had a lovely meal.
Then they drove back to Salt Lane and paid for three hours so that they had time for a nice catch-up with us without rushing.
Who was the loser in all this? You might think it was Wiltshire Council, because if these visitors had been offered the facility to pay for four or five hours instead of three, they would have done.
Indeed, if they’d asked me before setting out, I’d have directed them to the privately-run New Street multi-storey, where they could have stayed as long as they liked, with no risk of encountering a ticket-wielding warden.
But they didn’t know it would be necessary.
More to the point was what our visitors didn't buy - a meal for three in the city centre.
There’s nothing wrong with the Wheatsheaf - as it happens, it's one of Mum's favourites - so we agreed that next time they were passing through we'd meet them there, which would make things easier for them.
That's another meal - this time for five people - that won't be bought from a business in the city centre.
I remember from my reporting days hoteliers complaining about the damaging effect of the short-stay limit on their trade, particularly when guests were coming here for business meetings, maybe over a meal. It’s simply too short.
This is the result of what passes for a parking strategy under Wiltshire Council.
If I ran a restaurant in Salisbury I'd be joining forces with all my competitors to campaign for common sense on this issue, and asking my customers to sign a petition in support.
I’d ask all our local councillors to sign up too. Unless they think the city can afford to simply throw away custom?