COUNCILLOR Sturgis’ response to the Gazette & Herald in last week’s front page article was, as I presume it was meant to be, appallingly misleading.

The previous planning inspector, Andrew Seaman, did Nnot find the Council’s Core Strategy sound – many changes had to be made to it before he accepted it, including the exclusion of the whole of the Chippenham section, which he found unsound for almost the same reasons that the latest inspector did. If Mr Sturgis reads the full core strategy report from Mr Seaman, he will see that the findings for the Chippenham section are almost identical to those found by Mr Whitehead at the Chippenham examination and published in his letter to the council dated November 16.

In both cases, the inspector found that the council’s site selection process for Chippenham was inadequate and stated that rejected areas had not been subject to the same robust evaluation as the selected areas. They both also found that that the council’s sustainability appraisal was not adequate. Mr Whitehead further found that the proposed plan was deliverable, due to the bridges and proposed Eastern Link Road requiring funding that the council could not demonstrate and the probable timescales involved.

Mr Whitehead also found other “substantial matters of concern”, including a substantive lack of evidence that the plan was based on delivering significant job growth, helping to improve the self-containment of the town, and a lack of policy requirement surrounding the proposed Eastern Link Road.

Contrary to Mr Sturgis’ smug claim that the inspector “wants to make sure that the evidence we have is put into a different format so that he can make his judgement.”, the inspector had clearly reviewed all of the submitted evidence, which is what he is deciding on, and found it lacking and that it didn’t support the council’s proposed strategy for Chippenham. Mr Sturgis claimed that: "Inspectors are individual people and their duty is to make sure that the plan is sound and this inspector wants to look at it in a different way." The truth is that this inspector is looking at the evidence in precisely the same way as the previous inspector, and arrived at very similar conclusions, having reviewed all the evidence beforehand.

Mr Sturgis, please do the honourable thing and resign. Wiltshire tax payers deserve better.

STEVE PERRY, Chippenham Community Voice