BY the time you read this, a decision will have been made on the plan to develop 640 homes on Netherhampton Road.

Given that 250-plus residents plus the city council, neighbouring parish councils, and even the guys who run the cattle market took the trouble to register objections, you’d have thought they’d be given a respectful hearing somewhere in the vicinity.

All week, I and councillors from all parties urged Wiltshire to defer yesterday’s strategic planning meeting until January and to hold it in Salisbury rather than Trowbridge for the benefit of local people.

They wouldn’t budge. It can only be because they didn’t want to face the public anger about this scheme with its horrendous implications for traffic congestion and air pollution.

Belatedly – too late for the Journal to publicise, other than online – they offered a video link from the City Hall. But no-one there could address the meeting, because they don’t have the technology. Great.

The committee chairman, Cllr Fleur de Rhe-Philipe, told me “it has become established that the committee meet in Trowbridge”.

Since when did the fact that something is ‘established’ become an excuse to stop thinking sensibly?

And anyway it’s not strictly true. As Cllr Ian McLennan points out, the application for 673 homes at Longhedge was considered at the City Hall. Because it wasn’t as unpopular.

“Very unfair and unsavoury” is how he describes this week’s shenanigans.

Now Cllr Brian Dalton, who lives in Harnham, intends to submit a formal complaint to the local government ombudsman.

I’m not against providing affordable housing for local people. I didn’t oppose putting homes on the vacant Harnham Business Park.

That’s because I thought that repurposing an eyesore was more sustainable than a massive new estate on farmland. But both of these developments in combination add up to the least sustainable option of all.

The residents of Netherhampton aren’t Nimbies, either. They are happy to consider a suitably modest development in the midst of their community.

Yet Wiltshire planners, who have a core policy allegedly protecting villages like this one, seemed content to foist onto them all the traffic from a huge new estate that would become even bigger in future, since the council is going to drop its insistence on a business park as a component of the scheme.

It simply isn’t consistent, and that’s because consistency isn’t the motivating force here. It’s convenience.

Convenience for big builders, and for the council which won’t have to think more cleverly and use its own brownfield land to meet its targets.

I couldn’t put it better than Netherhampton parish council did:

“Simply allowing more houses to be built on each consecutively available piece of agricultural land and then hoping like Mr McCawber that something will turn up and that the infrastructure impact will eventually somehow be dealt with is the very antithesis of a sane approach and represents a complete failure of the planning system.”

anneriddle36@gmail.com