Open letter to any corporate director of Wiltshire Council who cares for their paymasters (us Council Tax payers).

It is now over one year since we experienced the floods of 2014.

Our village, Chitterne was badly affected and unprepared.

It was a sorry affair with very little immediate assistance being made available from Wiltshire Council (where everybody matters).

Local residents had to fend for themselves, man the road to slow traffic down and persuade drivers to accept the road closed signs.

We had over 20 houses flooded and some were uninhabitable for more than six months.

However, we reacted positively – appointed a flood warden and implemented a flood plan that should have left us well prepared for the next flood.

We were visited by council and Environment Agency officials who were impressed by our efforts and made promises of the basics required to combat flooding so we surveyed the properties that had been affected and drew up a list of materials required to provide protection in the future. We had a list of basic requirements like sand bags, the sand, plastic sheeting and door boards. These simple requirements were promised for delivery well before any possible future flooding would take place.

We have received nothing.

Phone calls and emails are not returned or even acknowledged. We realised that in the current economic climate we would have to help ourselves too so we organised a working party to clear the watercourse of vegetation and other obstacles but we were unable to move the heavier rubble that had accumulated at various points.

We requested that WC carry out this task.

Again phone calls and emails remained unanswered.

We feel we have done our bit and are happy to do more but if the materials to help are not forthcoming and we are ignored they is little else to do other than keep banging on WC doors and highlighting our problem, which I suspect is not unique to Chitterne (where nobody matters) It is a sad reflection of our times when people working for our public services do not have the civility to reply to genuine messages regarding the sphere they are meant to be working in. They are uneducated and downright rude.

You can draw the analogy of Wiltshire Council to WC where everything is flushed away conveniently out of sight.

Frustratedly,

Murray Kent