YOUNG parents at Old Sarum are desperate to get their toddlers into nursery school but there is no room for them.

The nursery at the primary school has only 56 places – 28 per half-day session – and is full.

And increasing numbers of two-year-olds need to be catered for.

Natalie Moss, who chairs the charitable trust running Old Sarum Nursery, said: “I have a long waiting list for September and we will be forced to turn people away.

“But it’s so far for them to go anywhere else.”

Mrs Moss said: “I applied a couple of years ago to hire part of the community centre, which was supposed to have been built by last Christmas, but it still hasn’t even been started. It’s a disgrace.

“Our idea was to have the two-year-olds in the community centre and the older children in the nursery at the school.

“It’s a wonderful nursery with |the most brilliant team and |manager.

“But we’ve got no more space.

“First-time buyers stretch themselves to get a mortgage and mothers need to work.”

Mrs Moss added: “The whole area is benighted, and more and more people are pouring in all the time, all of the same age, with small |children, and there is nothing there for them.

“They haven’t got a shop or a pub or a church.

“They haven’t got anything except a little house as an interim community centre that’s nothing like |enough.”

Mrs Moss, a former chairman of governors at the primary school, said Wiltshire Council officials have been in talks with developers Persimmon, who are obliged to provide a community centre as a condition of planning permission.

Cllr Ian McLennan, a co-founder of the charitable company, has also been involved.

He said: “It’s one of the most disastrous aspects of the new expanding Old Sarum development that we haven’t been able to deliver a community centre at the time it was supposed to be provided, and it’s now about a year late.

“We are working behind the scenes to try to get something done.”

A Wiltshire Council spokesman said: “Subject to a few technical matters being resolved, building work will begin next month and we look forward to working with the |community on how this funding can best be used for the community |centre.”