YOU may think that a person who attends a council committee meeting in her own time must be off her rocker.

If so, you won’t care much about what happened at the Guildhall on Monday, so feel free to turn the page.

If you’re still with me, I’ll assume you’re interested in what the powers-that-be have in mind for this fair city.

Basically, it’s large-scale housing estates left, right and centre.

Wiltshire Council has been ‘informally consulting’ parishes and ‘targeted stakeholders’ countywide recently about where to put thousands more homes in the next few years.

Not Joe Public. Not yet, not until we can be presented with a complete package where it’s deemed too dangerous to unpick one element in case the whole thing falls apart.

That’ll be in the summer, when we’re all off on our holidays.

However, alerted by the Journal, people living in the Britford Lane area turned out in force on Monday to express their dislike of a proposed 100-home development on what one called their “Arcadian landscape”.

And our city council planning committee rose to the occasion, giving them unanimous backing and registering ‘strong objections’ on all possible grounds – flooding and water management, traffic issues and air quality, conservation, and the amenity value of the meadows.

As Cllr Michael Osment put it: “There’s nowhere sacred. With the pressure being put on there and at Old Sarum airfield, if we aren’t careful we will lose all that we hold dear in this city.”

Not all the sites suggested will end up being built on (not yet, anyway!) but if you look at the map (above) you’ll see how our green spaces are being eaten up.

What doesn’t help is the way Wiltshire parcelled out the old district into parishes so that plans to build along Netherhampton Road (yes, again!) are not strictly the province of the city council, but the neighbouring parish of Netherhampton.

The same problem applies over development at the airfield, where neighbours are equally unhappy. It’s officially part of Laverstock and Ford, and none of Salisbury’s business except in its impact on traffic.

Divide and rule – works every time!

City councillors, who have no planning powers, only the right to be consulted, were saying: “We can’t object to everything, or Wiltshire will just ignore us.”

But Wiltshire already ignores their concerns when it chooses, for example over traffic access for the new Aldi.

There are brownfield sites in this latest ‘consultation’ – the bus depot, Harnham Business Park.

But what the process really demands is more large-scale development on farmland – around the hospital, along the Downton Road (the committee didn’t like that one, either), and behind In-Excess. Quelle surprise!

* The print version of this column contains an error which I spotted too late to correct it before the Journal went to press. Potential development alongside Netherhampton Road would fall within Netherhampton parish, not Wilton.

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