WHAT is happening to our county's assets? Positive results can be seen in the rebuilding of leisure centres, however there are some areas of concern.

Frequently on the agenda for Cabinet meetings, there is an item to agree the sale of freeholds owned by the council, mainly on small strips of land. Sometimes the land is important to local residents, for instance as a badly needed parking space in Marlborough, but the council only seems interested in the bottom line, all too often at the expense of giving sufficient weight to what is needed by the local community.

THE sale of a county farm was narrowly avoided when site allocations for a further 3,000 houses at Chippenham were considered. Instead of sites on brownfields in the town, sites extending into the countryside to the east of the town were included, one of them even partly in the adjoining parish of Bremhill. Part of the land was a county farm that would be sold for development. Thanks to strong and well-constructed arguments from residents of Chippenham and the surrounding villages, from CPRE and from developers with rival plots of land, the Inspector recommended other areas of land for development.

The household recycling centre at Everleigh, which serves a wide rural area was proposed to be closed at a Cabinet meeting in September 2015. It so happened that a hawk-eyed parish councillor spotted the item when it appeared on the council’s website a week before the meeting and local councillors were alerted in time for the item to be withdrawn.

An Area Board meeting held four days before Christmas was attended by 148 people who asked many questions. A very limited survey of visitors to all the council-run household recycling centres was carried out in January 2016. It was subsequently described as a consultation but it had not followed the principles required for a consultation. As a result, the council announced in February 2016 that Everleigh would not be included in the budget proposals for that year.

The site remained open. However, in October 2017, it was discovered that certain repairs are needed, due to an acknowledged lack of inspection and maintenance by the council over a long period of time. The requirement for repairs resulted in the immediate withdrawal of some of the recycling facilities. Since then, fewer recycling facilities have meant inevitably that there are fewer visits and less tonnage. Will the repairs be done and the site returned to full working order?

The recent Cabinet decision to close the children’s activity centres at Braeside and Oxenwood was taken in camera, and this time there was no agenda item open to the public beforehand and no attempt at public consultation.

Both the attempted closure of a household recycling centre and the closure of children's activity centres appear to be false economies. It is cheaper to manage waste if it is recycled and does not go to landfill at a cost of £88 per tonne and valuable resources are not lost. Children's activity centres provide wonderful challenges and open up a new world for many children. One of the messages coming from the young in some areas is the lack of places to go and things to do. Fortunately, in both cases, the public are fighting back. The good news for Braeside and Oxenwood is that Full Council has listened.

When it comes to assets, it is worrying that executive decisions can be taken, seemingly with a view to the money that can be saved in the short term without much regard for value to the public.

At Wiltshire Council the democratic deficit appears to be deepening. Is there too much power in the hands of a few? Some counties have dispensed with the Cabinet system and shown that it is possible to return to the committee system.

By Charmian Spickernell, of the Campaign to Protect Rural England