ON Wednesday I visited the Guildhall exhibition about Wiltshire Council’s preferred housing development sites in Salisbury.

Living in Harnham, I was particularly concerned about plans for 740 homes, plus a primary school and an industrial estate half the size of Churchfields, alongside Netherhampton Road.

Some development there is inevitable, I feel, but on this scale it will cause traffic chaos, serious air pollution, and could increase the likelihood of local flooding through rainwater run-off.

Eight years ago, a scheme for 470 houses on the south side of the road proved controversial enough for it to be kept on the reserve list. So why are 740, on both sides, now acceptable?

Answer: they’ll produce enough profit to incentivise developers to pay for the new school, which will ease the strain on others nearby.

Yet they will also produce well over 1,000 car journeys every rush hour. Plus twice-daily school runs from elsewhere in the city. Plus deliveries. Plus a whole trading estate’s worth of HGVs, workers’ vans and commuters’ cars. Maybe a few of those huge car transporters, too? And we are the ones who will pay the price for that.

With no bypass in prospect, and no money to build one, how can Atkins, the consultants who assessed this scheme, say it won’t cause dreadful traffic problems?

Can you imagine the impact on people living in Netherhampton Road, which is not capable of being widened? The noise, the fumes?

Can you imagine the jams at the Park Wall lights and Harnham gyratory?

All the council has to offer on the subject is an unspecified ‘refresh’ of the Salisbury Transport Strategy, which stated in 2012 that these junctions “already operate close to or at capacity”.

It warned back then that any improvements at Park Wall could send even more traffic through Harnham.

And that turning the gyratory into a T junction might allow better ‘stacking’ of traffic, but would also encourage more motorists to use Netherhampton Road as a way round the city.

Sounds like a ‘lose, lose’ situation to me. And if, as they’ve always done previously, Churchfields businesses decline to relocate, what’s to stop the builders coming back for another bite at the cherry, another few hundred houses instead of that new trading estate? Because Atkins said the site could take 1,195.

Would those extra hundreds be properly master-planned and sustainably designed like the exemplary Hampton Park, or just tacked on when Wiltshire needs to meet the next government target?

What about the policy of developing brownfield sites first? OK, Churchfields firms want to stay together, but why can’t the council put some houses on the land it owns there, by relocating our inadequate household recycling centre and the adjacent depot?

And while we’re on the subject of Wiltshire, has anybody actually managed to read all the documentation on its website for this public consultation exercise? I gave up after two-and-a-half hours of scrolling up and down. If the council can’t create a simpler online route to the information people actually need in their local area, it’s disenfranchising many of us.

If you want to submit comments, you don’t have to do it online. You can write to the Spatial Planning department at Byethsea Road, Trowbridge BA14 8JN.

anneriddle36@gmail.com