FURTHER to your article on November 12 on the Chippenham Site Allocation Plan debacle, I believe there are a number of questions that need to be answered by Wiltshire Council.

It was clear from the start of the enquiry that the inspector had read the evidence that respondents to the public consultation had submitted, and in particular that given by CAUSE 2015 (which my group is a member of), which clearly demonstrated in its two submission documents that the process and methodology used by Wiltshire Council and its site selection were unsound. It was also clear from the inspector’s first appraisal letter to the council and its response that the council had failed to satisfy any of the inspector’s stated reservations.

If the inspector could see so early on that the CAUSE 2015 submissions had substance, why were those submissions so very easily discarded by the council? It was clear at the full council meeting on July 14 that very few of the voting councillors had actually read any of either the plan itself or the consultation responses, just voting along party lines to the orders of Baroness Scott like the sheep that they are. At the previous Cabinet meeting on July 9, Councillor Sturgis actually told those present that “the plan was the inspector’s plan, and that any questions arising should be directed to the inspector at the examination” as if the council had no part in the plan!

At the previous examination (on the Core Strategy) the inspector threw out the Chippenham section as unsound, and now its replacement has received the same treatment. How much more public money must be wasted to satisfy the Wiltshire Cabinet’s ineptitude, and whose heads will roll? Will it be the poor officers who are only doing their masters’ bidding, or will Councillors Sturgis and Scott do the decent thing and resign?

In the examination in 2013, the inspector and participants were told by Wiltshire Council, in response to specific questions from both Chippenham Community Voice and ECOS representatives about the protection of the Avon and Marden river valleys and the valued landscape to the east of Chippenham to Bremhill, that there was already provision with the Core Strategy for protection from urban sprawl within CP51, the Landscape Policy, and that no further protection was deemed necessary for the area they are now calling ‘east Chippenham’.

Development proposals in Area C, which is clearly not in the Chippenham Community Area but is in fact in Calne Community Area, were actively fought against by the council and their barrister at that time, and yet they are now the preferred option. Why? What happened in November 2014 that suddenly changed the council’s mind?

Wiltshire Council has been hoist by its own petard of arrogance. But it’s the taxpayers of Wiltshire, and the residents in and around Chippenham, who will ultimately pay the price for this shambles, not the clowns who orchestrated it.

STEVE PERRY, On behalf of Chippenham , Community Voice