Ask the Leader of the Council

Government has set up a system where local authorities set the rate for a band D property and calculate council tax using the band D equivalent. Council tax properties are graded depending on the value of the property when the last valuation was done. It is an arbitrary measure which particularly means that if you've got older houses, the valuation may well be completely skewed by now.

The Local Government Association makes frequent representations on this matter on behalf of councils and we are involved in discussions as part of that. We agree that council tax is a flawed system but it is the system we've got to work with. Government keep talking about the fair funding process which is a sort of reform of council, tax but this is at least three years away, so there is no prospect of changes in the near future. I would encourage residents to raise this matter with their MP.

Legally we have to collect council tax in the way we collect it as this is set out in law. So all we can do is to explain to central government why the current system doesn't work.

It depends on the issue you are looking at. On planning there's been a lot of lobbying going on and there are changes coming up but on council tax there has been no movement. We are talking to government on a vast range of issues and there's movement on some, not on others. 

The work is already well underway for improvements to the A350. The vast bulk of that funding comes from central government and there's funding from new development that we can use for this kind of work too. Wherever houses are built the council receives funding from developers to provide the infrastructure that's needed to go alongside house building. This is addressing a significant transport issue and will make it much easier to move around this part of Wiltshire. The government is also carrying out the 'North South Infrastructure Route Plan' which looks at how to improve the flow of traffic from the north to the Wiltshire, M4, to South Coast. Vehicles currently only average around 30mph due to pinch points and areas of congestion which has a significant impact on journey time reliability for residents, businesses, and visitors.

The Local Plan process is currently ongoing and as part of that process there will be an evidence-based allocation of houses to meet the government's housing target for Wiltshire. I don't know how many will be allocated to each area and politicians do not have a say over it. We may be able to reduce the housing target for Wiltshire with consultation on the National Planning Policy Framework. As the council we are in a position in Chippenham where we own areas of land that are on the edge of Chippenham and are put forward for development as part of the Local Plan review. We had the whole Housing Infrastructure Fund bid for 7,500 houses, but the expense of that became unmanageable in terms of the risk it would provide to the council. We had £75m funding from government, but the cost of the road was escalating so we tried to scale the scope of the project down in discussions with Homes England. We were unsuccessful with that but we are still looking at putting forward some of our land for development. The funding for this isn't going to come through council tax. It will be from the proceeds of development of any land that is allocated in the Local Plan and delivery of housing.

This £500k isn't money being spent yet. We are looking to spend it as part of a process of putting land forward for development. The council doesn't build doctors surgeries, the NHS does.

Schools are built in a very formulaic way. Every certain number of houses a primary school will be built. Secondary schools is a more complicated calculation. So schools are built and they are built through the planning process as part of planning gain. Doctors surgeries are trickier as they need input from the NHS from the now integrated care system.

CIL money (community infrastructure levy) is pooled together to address infrastructure concerns. Chippenham is currently receiving a larger proportion of CIL money than anywhere else in the county due to the development of the A350. Secondary school provision in this part of the county is also taking a larger than average proportion of CIL funding.

Government asked us to put forward plans to reopen old train stations as part of a programme called 'Restoring Railways'. Three options were put forward in Wiltshire - Corsham, Devizes and Wilton. Wilton wasn't progressed as there were no train companies who indicated they could provide a service. Corsham and Devizes progressed at this stage because train companies suggested they would be able to run routes that could stop there. These two programmes have gone forward to government to be worked into larger bids, with Devizes now being in the feasibility stage. Network Rail are leading the feasibility study and are working with a wide range of partners to ensure viability of a new station at Devizes. Large amounts of money has not been spent and government is providing funding to work up all proposals. At the moment all of these programmes are being reviewed as part of a government spending review. Programmes will only go ahead if there is clear evidence the train companies will run services. 

Our feasibility work considered a number of service options that might serve a station at Corsham. These options were developed through engagement with Great Western Railway, who we would expect to be the train service operator.

There are hundreds of cases across the country where government money is used to enable housing development through initiatives such as Housing Infrastructure Funds (HIF bids). It is used to unlock infrastructure-led development. The council put forward a large scheme to the Housing Infrastructure Fund and that got to a point where we felt it was between very difficult and impossible to deliver in the timescales we had and came with a massive financial risk to the council which I wasn't willing to see us take on. We tried to scale this back. Government still want to see if there is some benefit that can come from the work that has been undertaken. The key issue is that we have to build houses as we get targets from government. I don't know how many will have to be built in Chippenham and whatever number we have to build will be allocated through the Local Plan process and will be done on an evidence based way. Various work has been done, and that work is still available for landowners, which includes Wiltshire Council, to use as part of that Local Plan application process. It is not an ideal system but when council is the landowner and when housing is coming we also have a duty to achieve the best value for residents and tax payers. The Pewsham Estate Farms were identified in the Rural Estate Asset Management Framework dated 2019 as having short, medium or long term development potential. They were therefore categorised as Reversionary Assets within the Rural Investment Estate for future development, rather than as part of the Operational Agricultural Estate. The latter is held to offer opportunities to existing and future tenants to farm on their own account.

The current government have not said they are scrapping it. They are tinkering with the edges. In the National Planning Policy Framework consultation at the moment they are talking about the ability to make some minor changes primarily aimed at areas where the scale of development coming in is of such a scale so 2,000 houses coming into a hamlet of 40/50 houses.

We won't know that until we know what is allocated in the Local Plan. To ensure we don't end up with the cookie cutter placing of small estates round the place any development will require a holistic master planned approach to ensure it is well designed and connected to the town centre. If planning all the required infrastructure that is needed when a new housing estate is built assists in the land being allocated then it will be money well spent.

Stone Circle was set up by the council to deal with some very specific issues around housing. We own council housing but we can only provide people with council housing where you give them as tenants lifetime tenure. Stone Circle is there to address areas of market failure, so for example the provision of housing for care workers. There are parts of the county where housing is needed for care workers, but the area is too expensive, so Stone Circle was set up to enable us to provide that housing.

We will not know if any Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF) funding is of value until we know what is allocated in the Local Plan. This was always going to be dependent on what is allocated in the Local Plan, even if the full scheme was still proceeding. The final bill the council will incur is £1.848m - we won't know if that will be recouped until we know if the Local Plan will allocate any of the sites involving land that we own. At that point we will know if we need to find other ways to recoup the money. At this time none of the money has been spent by the taxpayer of Wiltshire because it depends on whether the land is developed. If it is developed it will be a significant benefit to the collective taxpayers of Wiltshire because more money would be earned from the development. The houses will be built somewhere, the question is where, and that is not something which is decided by politicians, but they will be built because we are required to build them.

It isn't the case that we want to build houses everywhere. We are assigned a target by government for Wiltshire as a whole, 40,800 over the plan period. We can't say no, if we say no, we end up with government stepping in and taking over planning from us. Housing targets are assigned based on a government formula. They are assigned to the three housing market areas and then they are assigned to settlements. They are adjusted based on other issues faced around constraints so at the moment for example in the Salisbury housing area, it is quite difficult to assign houses to Salisbury. This is because the A36 is so congested that if you put more houses in it won't pass the transport test and they're likely in the Salisbury housing market area to be assigned elsewhere. They're assigned based on evidence, they are not assigned because we want them to be there. If we were delivering the housing we think Wiltshire probably needed in a plan period, I think it would be about 24,000 - but we get given our share of the national need to build houses as well. The five-year land supply basically means that we have our target every year, so we have to build 2,400 houses at the moment. If we don't build them developers are able to put in speculative planning applications. The reforms through the National Planning Policy Framework are designed so that if you have a Local Plan in place you get five years grace from speculative applications. What we asked government for and didn't get, but we are still pushing for it, was to shift it to if you've got a plan that allocates the houses you are safe for that Local Plan until they are built out. There are improvements on five-year land supply but it is a system that is manipulated by developers.

The new Local Plan should say that all commercial properties should have solar panels on all available roof space.

This has been raised by a lot of people. Prior to implementation of traffic lights a comprehensive assessment was undertaken by the Highways and Transport team to determine the best way of improving the junction for all road users - pedestrians and motorists. We continue to monitor use of the junction and wider road network in Chippenham. 

I agree it needs sorting out it's moved too slowly in terms of a resolution. I will work with Cllr Caroline Thomas, Cabinet Member for Transport and Cllr Ian Blair-Pilling, Cabinet Member for Operational Assets, to look at what technical actions can be taken to resolve these issues. We will look to bring it forward as an area board agenda item so local residents and local councillors are involved in discussions.

We're taking an approach in Wiltshire's three largest settlements where Place Boards will be introduced. We set one up in Salisbury following the Novichok incident and we are setting them up in Chippenham and Trowbridge. The aim of the Place Board is to create something that looks at the projects in the centre of town and what can be done to make that centre more vibrant and work more effectively. This could be physical projects such as Pedestrianisation of the market place which is being looked at currently. They are designed to bring together a number of partners including the town council, Wiltshire Council, the town team in this case, and a number of other landowners and people who are involved.

I do think ANPR and people paying for the amount of time they've actually parked would be more appropriate. The old barrier and payment system still work but they are rather technologically outmoded. We've got some constraints around how we use ANPR and government legislation which means we can't use it in the same way as any other landowner or company providing car parking can. I am inclined to think barriers are probably a good solution there. Whether that can be implemented - it's something that is being discussed and it may well be the way to solve that problem.

It was very interesting and useful to hear the views raised by residents at the meeting. We will be taking action on several of the issues raised, others relating to the local plan and housebuilding are much more complex and governed by evidence based process which we have got to follow precisely. I think the most important lesson is the need to carry out more engagement moving forward across all of Wiltshire's Area Boards.

There will need to be a solution in the medium term for leisure provision in Chippenham. As Chippenham grows we will also need more leisure provision. There is £11m allocated in the capital programme for refurbishing leisure centres, we don't have the detail of which leisure centres this will include, but all decisions will be evidence based.

We will take all enquiries about use of the centre and will facilitate dependent on availability of space and specific need.

Anything like that, potholes, white lines that have faded - things that highways need to be fixing, please use the My Wilts app to report it, that way we get the details and we can get it in the system to sort. We have put an additional £200k each year into white line painting across the county because we weren't getting enough of it done so there is significant resource going in - £200k goes a long way when you're talking about white lines. 

We are looking to increase enforcement visits in the Chippenham area over the coming months.

Greening is a very vague term when it comes to implementing policies. We are in a position where national housing policy requires us to build more houses than Wiltshire would require to meet our 'need' and that involves far more green field building than we are comfortable with. Public transport is really struggling post COVID, government have had to intervene on several occasions to keep bus services running and are still doing so with the £2 fares. Wiltshire Council supports 70% of the bus services in the county and unlike other neighbouring authorities we have not been cutting services. How we are going to cope with issues like the BANES cuts to services heading into North Wiltshire are currently unknown, and sadly the challenges are likely to get worse, not better in the short term. We will continue to do everything we can to support buses but we do not have the financial capacity to improve them, that requires revenue funding which isn't available. As a large rural county we are very reliant on cars and it is going to be critical to decarbonise vehicular transport rather than promote modal shift which (because of the bus issue highlighted above) is not going to be a major factor in Wiltshire in the medium term at least. I have no problem with us building roads which enable us to get freight to bypass our settlements, particularly Westbury but also Salisbury and Melksham. Taking lorries out of those areas will improve local traffic flow and in turn enable us to create better pedestrian/bike zones in their centres.

This is probably the critical issue facing the new Integrated Care System (the NHS, councils and other health and social care providers working together). There is a huge piece of work now underway which covers staffing, training, the provision of housing and a host of other issues. I am chairing the new Integrated Care Partnership to make sure we are well represented in the process.

(Answered by Cllr Caroline Thomas, Cabinet Member for Transport)

Following the major landslip on the B4069 at Lyneham Banks, we have been working to establish the cause and the best way to repair the road. This has taken some time because we had to wait until the landslip had settled to make it safe for teams to inspect the site.

We have been monitoring the ground movements in the area to find a suitable window to access the site safely and undertake intrusive surveys, and we were able to begin these investigations in late autumn 2022. These site investigations were completed just prior to Christmas 2022, and the ground investigation report is currently being prepared.

We have installed a number of long-term monitoring points to help us keep an eye on ground movements and the water table. This information will help our overall understanding of the Lyneham Banks area, and also enable us to understand why the land moved, which in turn will help us to design the new road.

In December, we undertook a further round of traffic surveys to help understand the impact of the B4069 closure and the recently introduced traffic management changes in the area. The results showed that traffic volumes on some local roads have increased due to the Clack Hill restrictions, while the average speed on most of the surveyed roads decreased. We are continuing to monitor the traffic management in the area.

We are now carrying out the design work to reinstate the road and we hope to have a programme of works shortly. We apologise for any ongoing convenience this causes local people. However, repairing this road is a huge engineering undertaking, and so it is important that we establish the full picture - and keep our staff and the public safe - as we seek to build the new road.

I would not want to introduce blanket 20mph speed limits. Our approach is that where there is evidence that a majority of residents are in favour of a 20mph limit in an area, we will look to introduce it unless there are (very specific) technical reasons to prevent that. I personally would like to see us look at automatic temporary 20mph limits (during hours of operations) outside schools and that is something I have asked to be investigated.

As with my answer above, we are a primarily rural area and whilst there are some roads with schools on where that sort of program would potentially work, for many it would cause other traffic problems. I think we need to look at a case by case basis for improving walking and cycling to school and very much tailor our approaches to each location, with new developments we need to design them into developments as they are built although it is fair to say that has proved challenging. It is one of the reasons I am so keen on the idea of infrastructure led development.

Government has set housing policy designed to try and solve the countries' housing problems. The housing market of the UK is definitely broken and there are areas of the country that have massive problems. In London and Manchester you've got massive overcrowding, you've got far too many houses of multiple occupation, so there are significant pressures. The average size of households is falling ever so slightly each year as more people live alone, you've also got immigration - so you've got a lot of pressure on housing. What government do is decide what that total pressure is, they reckon we need to build, as a country, 300,000 houses a year - they then divide that up. And bluntly, they divide it up in a way that doesn't mean that London builds its fair share but means areas that have built houses in the past and where house prices are seen as too high, get to build more under some honestly absurd theory, because it has never worked in the past - that if you build more houses then house prices will fall. It's not worked in Wiltshire or anywhere else in the UK. So we have our housing need, which is very hard to work out, but based on the local plan period we're about to be considering (which is done over a 20-year period from 2018-2038) I reckon our housing need is 18,000 maybe if you look at growth inside Wiltshire, the need for affordable housing. Ideally 40% of housing would be affordable housing, in reality it's maybe 30%, it depends on where you're building in the county. Government say Wiltshire needs to take its share of 40,800. We were looking at a higher number than that and we've consulted to try to get evidence as to whether we can bring it down further. The Local Plan has to be evidence based I can't simply dictate. When it comes to sites it's all evidence-based which means we as councillors do not decide which site gets built on. We make sure that policy is strategically considered, but the assigning of sites has to be evidence-based because it's developers competing against each other. So we get that total, it should be 40,800 it might be a bit lower depending on government consultation at the moment, it might bring it down by another few hundred, it depends if we have much over-delivery with the five-year land supply issues that you've had certainly around Devizes, and more than your fair share recently. So that's the number we've got to build, you then divide that by the number of years, you've got to work out what the total per year is. A lot of them are already built because it starts in 2016/2018 - there is some flex in the way a local plan works. You take what's already got planning permission, what's going to get planning permission, and then the rest has to be allocated out. So that's the methodology, it's a bit nuts because it basically says the more houses you have the more you should get and that doesn't make sense. It's national methodology I can't really argue with it. When it comes to where to build, it winds us all up, for example where Warminster is having houses built at the moment - it's utterly depressing. Every day when I'm driving into Trowbridge I'm driving past it, and it's just seeing a field being churned up and I don't think any of us like it. But the alternative is brownfield. We don't have much brownfield in Wiltshire - we've got a bit in Salisbury, Trowbridge has got a fair bit, Chippenham not so much - there isn't that much brownfield. And even if you took Salisbury and redeveloped all of the brownfield, which would mean moving the industrial estate to greenfield because there would be nowhere else to put it, even then you could probably get 1400-1500 houses out of all the brownfield in Salisbury. So when you're looking at our need to be delivering somewhere in region of 1000-1200 a year, brownfield is not Wiltshire's solution. Somewhere like London or Manchester or Birmingham - Birmingham has got a huge amount of brownfield, they've got a lot more capacity for that but it's really expensive to develop. So developers like greenfield because it's cheap therefore they will constantly argue it's far too expensive to develop on brownfield and they need massive subsidy and it means that even when we've got sites it Trowbridge like the Bowyers site, it's just so hard to get them to come forward. It requires so much intervention and we cannot compel developers - if they argue it's just not viable we end up in that position where we go to a planning inspector, we say this should be developed, they say it's not viable it can't come forward, and if the planning inspector says no then we're stuffed. We're back to finding greenfield sites. So it's the truth, it's the answer, it's not the answer you want to hear and not the answer I want to hear but it's the situation we're faced with.

We're now onto something called the five-year land supply measure - five-year land supply is a way developers play the system. Five-year land supply is this number, 2100 houses or whatever it turns out to be, at the moment it's 2400 and will come down with the next local plan I hope, I can't be certain but I hope. It means if we don't deliver that each year, then we end up having essentially a free-for-all. It is incredibly easy for developers to play that game. So if a site comes forward, say south of Trowbridge for 2,400 houses and as a developer you manage to drag your feet, suddenly the entire county doesn't have a five-year land supply so it becomes a free-for-all for land potentially anywhere. So when you end up with that situation you'll get some over delivery in Devizes. We're having various meetings around the Local Plan at the moment and I'm waiting for an update on what that actually means. But if there's over-delivery in an area, you would expect to reduce the amount required next time in that housing market area, providing we can obtain five-year land supply. The key in all of this is in consultation with Government at the moment. We're due in three days' time to get the response from Government which is to say A) if you've got an up-to-date Local Plan, five-year land supply no longer matters, but only when your plan is up-to-date. And B) the one we're really keen on, we've seen responses go off to MPs today, that if you reach something called Reg 18 which was the last consultation we did during COVID, then you will only need a four-year land supply which means you have two years to get your Local Plan in place. So providing they stick to that, providing they don't get nobbled by developers to change it, and providing they do what they've said, we should get protection to take us up to getting a Local Plan in place, refreshed, and we will then have that protection providing we keep the Local Plan up-to-date. It won't stop us building houses, it will just give us more control over where we build them.

Because it is the way planning policy has worked. Developers have the absolute whip-hand in planning policy right now and I don't think it's right, most of the MPs don't think it's right, but you come back to that point where I started, the country (and I wouldn't argue with it) the country needs 300,000 houses a year. There was one year under Cameron where we got close to 300,000, but that's the best year we've had since John Major became Prime Minister, a lot of people have tried. I'll come back to the broken housing market, we need affordable housing in the county. I've got a waiting list of around 4000 people right now and we need affordable housing for them. Those are people who qualify for support, so affordable rent, social rent, potentially shared ownership. Government is stuck between a rock and a hard place, we've got a degree of immigration coming in that's needed to keep the economy going, that means there's an increase in housing demand, there's reducing household sizes which also increase household demand. Government have got to match that but at the same time they've got to provide food production, renewal energy, biodiversity net-gain - somewhere in there you've got an impossible circle to square. I don't object to Wiltshire building our fair share but what I do struggle with is where rural areas get told because you're rural, because you've got high house prices and because you've got lots of green spaces, you should build more than your fair share and that's where I think it's broken and that's where the developers make the most money.

We're back to the way planning policy works essentially, so there are a number of things in this that I have real difficulty with. The first one if we're talking about villages is there's a rule that any development site of less than 10 houses, there is no affordable housing, there would be an off-site contribution instead. I do understand where that comes from, I'm also a member of the Forest and National Park Authority. Because it's a national park we have a very clear policy that everything should have affordable housing and it should be 40% of the development. Even that becomes incredibly difficult to justify on viability even when it can be enforced. Almost invariably you end up with an off-site contribution and having to put three or four of off-site contributions together to provide housing somewhere else and acquire land. So even in the most benign planning environments, as it stands it's very hard to do that. From a rural perspective, I think it's critical that we come with a policy where pretty much every village should be taking 20 or 30 houses, enough to ensure that it is large enough that there will be 30 to 40% affordable housing. It's proving really hard to write that policy, we're still working on it. When the draft comes out I hope we will have got something framed. And that will annoy some people, but one of the reasons to do it is village schools. If you live in a small village with a school, that school is at risk there's no hiding it, particularly if there's another small village school in the next village over. The birth rate is falling we've got fewer young people living in villages, if we don't get housing that people can actually afford, whether it be afford to buy which is not a bad model, shared ownership which can work, but particularly social rent housing and affordable rent which is 80% and just doesn't cut it in villages, it's too high anyway the 50% social rent, when it gets like that we find it incredibly hard to provide the adult social care that people will need because they are living in the nearest town. In my own area (Salisbury), you're looking at people coming up from Southampton - a ten-mile round trip. If you're a care worker providing domiciliary care and then you've got to add on 10 miles on roads that are pretty congested, it's really hard. So we've got to do that to keep villages alive. At the moment for affordable housing we can use exception sites but they've not delivered well. It's where you say in a village we're going to put some housing but it will just be affordable or social or shared ownership, nothing else. But there you find the landowner has to give you the land, and even then villages struggle with it. So that policy not delivered as it should have done. I would like to see us amend it a bit to enable a bit of market housing, maybe 20% to be provided as an incentive to landowners. It's got to have community consent at that point as well - if you're putting 20 or 30 houses into a village, you want residents to tell you where to put them, not a developer. You've got to get residents to tell you otherwise you'll end up with the wrong houses on the wrong side. On the bigger point of affordable, you're back to this viability argument, developers are so good at saying we've paid too much for land, and we've found whatever soil conditions or archaeology and houses prices are terribly low, which they aren't. We fight them as hard as we can, we really do but it's stacked in favour of developers. I'll give you one other bit that really gets my goat which is where we end up with allocations for housing with employment, and developers say there's never anyone interested in it. But if you call up and say, "I'm looking to put up a factory I need 20,000sqft and they'll say, "no there's no land available", despite the fact that you know the land is there. And then they come back and say, "no one is interested - we've got to build housing instead". In the Local Plan we've got to stop that because if we're going to prevent people having to drive to work and enable to people to live and work in their communities, then we've got to have more employment land inside communities.

We've got 1350, give or take, empty MOD houses across Wiltshire. The most egregious case in my view is in Devizes (off Sarum Drive), where I've been out filming several times with every bit of national media I can get, they have been empty for, we think seven years, possibly longer. We have finally been offered 28 houses we could use short-term to house Afghan asylum seekers / refugees. We've been trying to get details from the Army for nine of those, it's going very slowly and we don't know why. We've got to make sure they are in a fit state for repair. These ones in Devizes where badly damaged in Storm Eunice and I haven't been up there for a couple of months but last time I was up there, the bits of rooftop where still in exactly the same place and the rain could still pour through the holes in the roof. If that continues for another year, they are going to be uninhabitable and they are going to need tens of thousands of pounds to bring them back to a standard of occupation. So we've made tiny headway. Of those 1,300 houses and to be fair to the Army, some of them are being repaired, some of the houses in Tidworth they have been fixing up. They have a set of plans that changed about a year ago, there are more units coming to Wiltshire. From what we can gather from the latest information we have, over 40% of the Army will be based in the county, at the moment its 20 something per cent. So they will need some of those houses, but these are outside the wire, these are houses for families, only about 20% of people in the Army at any one time need that kind of accommodation. The rest will be in suitable accommodation behind the wire. So it's deeply frustrating, I've had all the MPs involved in it, Andrew Morrison is our Minister for Defence, we've got him involved - we're making creeping progress.

I'm aware of the location, it's been raised with me by the local councillor quite forcefully and I'm aware that there's been concern. I've got a new cabinet member for Highways in place, I've asked her to look at what is being proposed there as a sense check. I've asked for an explanation of what we are proposing there and why, I haven't had it through yet, I'll make sure I get that and that it is looked at in detail. There are some other points you raised there. The issue about fatalities and serious accidents, the police work on the basis of a rolling five-year period and if there are three fatalities and/or serious accidents, that's the data they record. That doesn't make sense to me, because you've got all the sorts of traffic issues, I have one in my own division where someone was killed last year, there hasn't been serious accidents, there's been one fatality, but then there have also been a lot of prangs because you hear about them. And often they're prangs that police wouldn't be called for because people slow down and it's sort of a minor shunt, but that doesn't change the fact it's an accident and it's been caused by the same factors, it's just not as serious. So we've got Highways now looking at all accidents rather than simply serious accidents and fatalities. That's a change we've brought in very recently, about two weeks ago, that we will look at that data differently. It will be interesting to see what that data shows because I think it will paint a far more realistic picture of what residents see compared to only those serious issues. The point on speed limits, it's a tricky one, you've got speed limit issues across the county, you've got some, where people want things that are simply unreasonable where they would like the speed limit lowered outside their house but they are 200m from a village on a straight bit of road. There is no way because of the points you've made, that it will be safe because all you would have is frustrated drivers trying to overtake each other and increased accident risk. What you're talking about with this issue, I think the police are possibly right, I can see their logic but I'm not a highways engineer. I can see their logic, but I can also see the fact that you've got a circumstance where the answer isn't satisfactory, I understand why. I can't give you a clear answer now but I can make sure there is a serious look at this.

Definitely an issue that causes contention on all sides. We'll start with why they were removed, I was certainly told that the police had said they wanted them taken out - I don't know if that's true or not, I was not a cabinet member at the time, I was a backbencher. What I'm worried about is what we are doing now. The new Police and Crime Commissioner has done some things that are good. Firstly, he's now got three teams that can go out with Community Speedwatch and issue tickets. On one of the roads in my division, 180 people got done for speeding. They are also looking at SID cameras that can be moved around and issue tickets. If we can get those in place, then suddenly every SID in the county is something you've got to listen to because you've no idea whether it's a speed camera or not. The problem with fixed cameras is you know where it is. But this is a PCC issue and we will feed back your comments to them.

We've been doing up leisure centres. The campus programme - it's been an interesting programme, there has been investment that has gone into places other than Devizes. I have stopped the campus programme, Melksham will be the last. They have been overly ambitious and not focused enough on a business plan for delivery for my liking. So the next leisure centre we will do is Trowbridge, the reason Trowbridge is being built is that the swimming pool is on its last legs. It's got about four years of life left. That's because it's got a metal structure - the impact of the chloride water from the pool on the metal structure is rotting away the steel, we did a short-term fix but we're going to need to replace it. So Trowbridge is going to need a new leisure centre. We've also now allocated £11 million in the capital programme for improvements to leisure centres. It will now be working through the system in terms of which leisure centres need work. Some of that will be structural, some will be things like gym equipment. So there is investment going into leisure centres. We've asked all leisure centres to tell us what they need and we will use that to prioritise funding.

Contractor attendance time is five days for our own contractor and 20 days for Scottish and Southern Electric (SSE). This does not necessarily mean a fix will be achieved, as parts may be required and that is why we quote a typical repair time of 8 weeks. All street lights on New Park Street are now operational. In the case where a number of streetlights stop working this is most likely to be down to an electrical supply fault and is therefore referred to SSE for initial investigation. This was the case in New Park Street. Once SSE reported back that no fault could be found the individual columns were then inspected and repaired. It was found that the faults were caused by an external festive lighting team switching off our assets.

My Wilts app - I hate that notification 'your issue has been resolved' I've been really clear we've got to get that changed to instead say 'your issue has been passed to whoever to look at and for an email to come back to say what it actually means - because it can mean we've fixed, or it can mean we are never going to fix it because it doesn't meet the intervention standards, it can mean it's complicated we'll try and fix it in the future, or it can mean we will fix it in eight weeks because it's a street lamp, it really doesn't help I agree.

This all stems back to European procurement rules which mean that we've got to go to framework contractors otherwise for any contracts over a certain value we have to go through a procurement process that takes months - six months, maybe a year. So we go for these framework contracts, they are reviewed and they normally run for five years, maybe with an extension if things are good for up to three years - each contract will vary. They are reviewed when they come up.

We've just been discussing this at Cabinet today in broad terms with the latest tranche of funding we've had from Government. The schemes need to be more flexible I think that's very much a finding we've had from last year. The details of how the schemes will work are currently being worked out. If you look at the Cabinet report it is very clear, it needs to be more flexible in the way money is given out. I think it also needs to be more flexible in the way different types of support are given out. That isn't a judgement for councillors to make, it's a judgement for professional officers to make. I would suggest if you've got input into this it would be a very good time to put it into the system now because sometime in May we will have come up with that new framework about how that support is best accessed and best provided. We've got a much better handle, at least from a cost-of-living perspective, on the kind of people that we need to be helping. It's different to an extent to the people we've had to help historically. So you could well have someone with a mortgage whose interest rates have gone through the roof and is suddenly finding that they are in the kind of difficulty that they never anticipated. The Boater community - we've found they have had some specific issues in the cost-of-living crisis that didn't exist in the same way before. Please get in touch with your feedback and I'll make sure it gets into the system.

I would love to turn them off in large numbers - but people get quite concerned if we suggest doing that between midnight and 5am or 6am, particularly in urban areas. I do understand why. I would be quite happy with most of the street lighting off in my village after midnight, and if I'm walking home then I can use my torch on my phone. Dimming them, yes they are can be dimmed, all the new LED ones can be completely controlled. Watch this space. Because we've gone to LED lights we're saving a lot of money on where we were. I think we've got to be careful about a blanket approach to dimming. I'm expecting it to be done, but I equally want to make sure as it's done, if we get pushback, we know where that pushback is, particularly if we're dealing with an urban area with anti-social behaviour. Having said that, sometimes turning the lights off is the best way to move anti-social behaviour on. It's working through the system at the moment.

They are being rolled out at the moment, they are being installed and a number of them have now been replaced. The Chippenham ones are all in, I gather some in Salisbury as well. I don't know when Devizes will be done but it won't be far off. The hold-up has been COVID and the whole supply chain problem that came with it. They should have been with us nine months to a year ago but when China went into lockdown the entire supply chain then melted, so it's taken too long.

Firstly we need the Local Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plan (LCWIP) - we've got one for Salisbury. Salisbury is more advanced because we had a lot of voluntary groups that did the initial work - and my goodness it was hard work before the concept of LCWIPs had been developed. The system is immeasurably better now, we've got much clearer guidance from Government. That means the process costs about £20,000 per LCWIP and we've got them coming for Devizes, Chippenham, Trowbridge, we've already got one for Salisbury and we'll roll them out further. So as soon as we've got the LCWIP we'll know if we've got schemes to put forward.

The white line issues - what we don't need is war between motorists and cyclists and we've got too much of that. In Devizes the roads are too narrow in places and in town centres in Wiltshire, roads are too narrow. What we need is designated cycle lanes that are built out and curbed so we can put proper cycle lanes on them, so people can cycle in safety. Also what we need to do is to link up our towns with cycle lanes.

If you look at Salisbury Market Place taking our parking was my answer and, I've still got political scars from the process of talking to people and persuading them, and the people that didn't like it, really didn't like it. We should have done that with Devizes when we handed it over to the town council, I wish we had done that then, but the decision was to take a phased approach and leave it to the town council's. They they are looking at taking more and more parking out. It would be really good if they would, but that's a question for Devizes Town Council.

What is the adult social care precept? In 2015 English councils were given the power to increase council tax to pay for social care services for adults. These are services which help people with age, physical or learning disabilities or mental health needs carry out their daily routines. The government announced that a further 2% can be raised during 2023/24. The precept must be spent on Adult Social Care.

How does that affect your bill?

• Councils must show how this precept affects you in your council tax bill. They must show what part of the overall bill is for the precept, and what part of the increase is for the precept.
• Wiltshire Council has chosen to add the 2% precept to the Council Tax for 2023/24. What this does not mean is that the part of the Council Tax bill going towards adult social care has increased by 2% compared to last year. It is not the precept that has gone up by 2% for social care, but the overall bill.
• Instead, the council tax part of your bill that was to fund Wiltshire Council services from last year is looked at. The Council has worked out what 2% of that is and then adds that much on to your bill for this year. That amount will then be used specifically to pay for adult social care.

Wiltshire isn't unique in this. I was at a trade show in London over the weekend and the roads were really bad. I had to get up to Swindon this morning from my house which took me through rural roads in Hampshire which were pretty bad. I may have been lucky on Wiltshire roads because I didn't encounter any particularly bad ones. But those are just those roads I know for example Malmesbury is terrible at the moment. I think we all get a different perception of it. We've had a really bad winter in terms of the effect on roads. It's been particularly bad, it's been particularly bad everywhere. Last summer was really hot, that causes cracks in road surfaces. And then we've had a winter where you've had a lot of freeze - thaw cycles, a lot of wet weather, and then consistently cold nights but not consistently cold for any period of time which means that water gets in the cracks and it starts breaking the road up. So you can get roads like Malmesbury High Street which was last inspected in November and there was a little bit of delamination but no real work needed. By about a month ago it had basically dissolved as a road service. There is a lot of filling using the parish stewards to go and put cold filling. That is a fudge, they almost inevitably won't take, they're not designed to take. It's designed to try and keep on top of potholes as they're emerging. It doesn't work with delamination, it sort of works with potholes. We are now finally at point where we're back out doing resurfacing work. We get our funding for resurfacing work from central government. They give us money every year, this year they gave us around £22 million with around an extra £3 million for potholes. This is about 16% more than we got last year and the cost of repairing roads has gone up by about 17% so we've actually got slightly comparatively less to deal with what has been a much worse year. We are at the moment reprioritising roads we were going to do to deal with ones like Malmesbury High Street which is in desperate need and is being done in two weeks' time because of the state that road has got to. So it is going to take some time to catch up with that and there should still be some cold filling going on for potholes as a fudge. And it is a short-term fudge. There is a plan in place, it's being rapidly overhauled because of the impacts of winter. The area boards would have had a list of all the roads due for resurfacing, but other roads might have become worse. The truth of the matter is that at the end of the day we've got around £26 million. From a Wiltshire Council perspective I don't have money sitting around that I could put into fixing roads. We work very hard to release reserves but we're talking £1-2 million, if we put that into potholes it goes nowhere.

I am not sure the current state of repair works but what I can do is make sure that I get someone to look into what's going on there, what the state of repair works that are needed are. The bit that worries me from what you just said is anti-social behaviour. This is one that the area board are going to need to look. The area board is local Wiltshire councillors but you also get the police and other bodies engaging through the area board. The Strategic Engagement and Partnership Manager (in the room) is the officer to take this forward with.

Sustainable development - the definition of unsustainable and sustainable is an absolute killer in planning across the entire country. Particularly when it comes to houses. I love to be able to see us build more houses in some of the small villages that are crying out for them and we can't because it's unsustainable according to national planning policy framework. And yet it seems to be entirely sustainable to build developments on the edge of any greenfield on the side of developments because government give us a housing target and we've got to deliver it. I find it incredibly frustrating. But that's more about housing rather than the incinerator. In terms of the incinerator, I find the idea that incineration is the way to deal with our waste moving forward questionable at best. Particularly, in light of the uncertainty that comes from the Environment Act and the changes that are coming there. We are going to be required by law to collect food waste from every household in Wiltshire on a weekly basis at some point, I think that is completely mad. We are a large rural county I will have to send diesel lorries round to collect food waste. That will make a massive change to the way waste disposal works in the UK. There's so much change coming I personally find it quite difficult to sit there and say what the right method of disposal or the right solutions are, instinctively I think the idea of incineration seems a bit backward thinking rather than forward thinking. Planning is based on some very narrow grounds. Fundamentally highways, environment, amenity (but that's a really hard word to define), ecology, flooding and then it gets more subjective on the edges. But it's a process in which only certain things can be considered. And so when officers went through this, I read the full report and I've read all the reports on the current applications, and I understand why officers recommended it for approval because they couldn't find a planning argument to say no. Committee first approved it, then after a period of time looked at the evidence again and refused it, it then went to the inspectorate. The inspector has overturned the refusal and approved it. We've received advice on what we can be done now and the only option you've got is a judicial review, but a judicial review has got to be based on process. But the advice we've been given to me is that the process of the appeal to the Planning Inspector was followed correctly. So with a judicial review, even if it succeeded all that would happen is the approval decision will be made again and there's nothing that can be identified there that says the process was wrong in the advice that I've had. So that's why we're at a point now where your left with central government, and again I've asked the question is there anything else that we can find to try, I am being told from a council perspective, no there isn't but if you've got something, let me know and I will make sure those questions are asked of the lawyers and people who work in the council. Do send me those questions but if I get back a professional response that says no, it's really difficult to argue with that I'm not a lawyer. We take legal advice on this including from an external QC.

The air quality issue we've got at the moment in Westbury is a traffic issue. I am 99.9% certain that (but we will check) that air quality monitoring is still going on. Quite frankly the amount of lorries you've got that are coming through Westbury is appalling. I'm really frustrated that we've still got an issue with Cleveland Bridge with at least 20% more lorries and could be significantly more than that. I've just been recording with BBC Wiltshire again, I'm not getting any headway with BANES they are the ones who make the decision and we're trying to get the Department for Transport to change that. But that isn't the air quality monitoring that you want, what you want is something measures particulate matter from incinerators. I don't know right now what baseline data we've got or what level of particulates you're trying to measure - I will get advice on that.

I have no idea is the answer to that, I'm not sure how accurate that number is.

When it comes to contracts we've got to follow legal processes for tendering the contracts. All waste contracts go out for tender in 2026. It's a tightly defined legal process. I have no idea who will win that, it could be Hills or it could be someone else. It will be based on the bids that come in and a whole series of factors. These decisions are not made by politicians, they are made on a very clearly defined judgement basis. The criteria for procurement are around value for money, social value, viability and whether we think it is deliverable or not - there is a whole raft of criteria and it's done in a very evidence-based process.

Will it be publicly transparent? - no because it's involving different contracts and different tenders - I won't know who contracts are being awarded to either, it will be presented to us as contractor 'a', 'b', 'c', because otherwise we would be giving out commercially sensitive information.

Planning enforcement is something that doesn't work well. It works far too slowly, that is not the enforcement you are talking about. The enforcement that you're talking about is carried out by DEFRA, it's central government enforcement. During build it would be Planning enforcement and mostly about traffic access. There are still several issues about what's going to happen to waste which means I have no idea whether it will be viable or not. But if it does get built then yes we would have to absolutely make sure that there are proper checks going on, particularly in terms of what's being put forward.

There won't be a dedicated phone line, but there can be a dedicated email address.

We have an air quality action plan for Wiltshire. Other towns have developed them in the past. I don't know if the action plan for Westbury is active or not. This is something I would expect the Area Board to be driving.

That's one that I'm going to need to get Waste to tell me exactly what we can and can't put into contracts. It's not an option I've heard explored in detail because at the moment we still don't know with the Environment Act what it is we are going to be doing with waste and collection went it comes to the new contract - it's definitely something to be asked during that process I agree.

I'm very happy that we ask the question. My understanding is government are looking to change the law but they are not at the point of reaching the decision as to they are going to change the law, let alone actually changing it yet. I don't know where that is working its way through the system but I'm very happy that we ask the question. The moment that comes forward, anyone would have to comply with that as well.

What Government are requiring all councils to do is to collect separate food waste on a weekly basis. I still think that with a county the size of Wiltshire and where there is no green version of a waste lorry yet. Electric waste lorries are fine until you put waste in them, when they get heavy the batteries drain - their range is appallingly low. The best you've got is biodiesel. In those circumstances I don't think it's responsible for us to be doing weekly collection of food waste across the entire county until we absolutely we have to because in rural areas it's far easier to compost large chunks of that. So it will come because government is compelling us to but I sincerely hope there is a hydrogen lorry at least by then that we can use when we have to buy them because I do not want 19 or so trundling around all over Wiltshire every week churning out diesel fumes collecting food waste that we're already collecting in the black bag.

We don't own the land, we're not looking at building the incinerator, it's a private company that are doing it, they put in a planning application. Planning is required to assess every planning application on its merits, make a decision, and if the people who made the application don't like it they can appeal to the Planning Inspector.

I don't know enough about it to give a categoric guarantee but what I will take it away and make sure that we can work out what can be done there.

Government give us money every year that we hand straight onto schools. Government decide how much money schools get. Yes schools have seen an uplift in funding but they've also seen significant uplifts in costs and they are expected to absorb things like teachers' pay increases out of the funding they've got. So best case they are sort of holding steady at the moment, smaller schools probably not, larger schools probably holding steady.

Our three main areas of spend are adult social, care, children's social care (which doesn't include schools), waste. The bulk of highways funding comes in different forms from central government.

Government have got a draft of that study. They are finalising a report which I believe is due imminently. We are expecting to see it wanting to identify the A338, up to the A36, up to the A350 as the preferred route. To do that you've got to do something with Salisbury which is an even bigger issue traffic wise, you've got to do something with Westbury - goodness knows what the route is going to be, it's going to be 10-12 years to do a deal and it's going to be vast amounts of money. I don't know if it will happen. But it is the only way we fix these traffic issues.

When we review the Waste Local Plan, consideration will be given to what provision needs to be made for managing waste within Wiltshire and where the most appropriate locations are.

National Highways is currently undertaking a strategic north-south connectivity review, which includes the Wiltshire area and the A350 as a key route. The outcomes of that study may have implications for the status and future of the A350. Once we have this information, we can consider the next steps for Westbury, which could include bidding for funds for a bypass. We know that National Highways are finalising its north-south connectivity study, but we don't yet know when they will publish the report.

Dilton Marsh is served by bus services 47 and X47 which together provide a service approximately every hour into Westbury during the daytime, every day except Sundays. Buses run Monday to Friday from 7.45am to 6pm and on Saturdays from 8.15am to 5.15pm. Some journeys also run from Dilton Marsh to and from Frome. There is also a train service between Dilton Marsh and Westbury several times a day. We cannot afford to pay for bus services to run more than hourly, and for many villages their bus services run less frequently than that, so Dilton Marsh gets quite a good level of service for its size. We will also be undertaking a review of all Council funded bus services during the next 12 months to see how usage has changed since COVID.

Our Strategic Planning Committee decided in June 2022 to advise the Secretary of State that it would have refused this planning permission on the grounds that it does not represent sustainable development. However, planning permission for an energy from waste facility in Westbury was granted by an independent Planning Inspector following an appeal by the applicant, Northacre Renewable Energy. This is despite our objections. The council could not give undue weight to the operational impact of the facility as part of the planning process. Any operational impact has been considered by the Environment Agency under its own environmental permitting system. The independent Planning Inspector considered all relevant legislation when making their decision.

Planning permission for an energy from waste facility in Westbury has been granted by an independent Planning Inspector following an appeal by the applicant, Northacre Renewable Energy, despite our objections. Our Strategic Planning Committee decided in June 2022 to advise the Secretary of State that it would have refused this planning permission on the grounds that it does not represent sustainable development. However, the application has now gone through the full appeal process and will proceed. We are disappointed that the Planning Inspector has decided to award some costs against the council. We felt that it was important for the people of Westbury and the surrounding areas that we defended this issue, and that's why we presented a statement of case to the Inspector, based on the decision of the Strategic Planning Committee, and also provided evidence at the hearing. We do not intend to apply for a Judicial Review of the Secretary of State's decision. However, this decision doesn't affect any member of the local community from pursuing their own legal action if they wish to do so. On Infrastructure, when planning for new housing, we engage with service providers and give consideration as to whether new infrastructure needs to be provided alongside the new homes. This can include new land or financial contributions towards new buildings for health facilities and school provision. However, there may be wider issues, such as the shortage of GPs nationally that may have an impact on access to GP services.

Just to emphasise the council doesn't run the police, they are run through the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) and the new Chief Constable. I had a long conversation with the PCC and the new Chief Constable last Friday with local MPs on the call as well. We raised issues around the current state of affairs in Salisbury. This isn't actually new for Salisbury. We had this just after Novichok where we had issues with street drinking which escalated into drug taking. Initially it was a group of people who were rough sleepers but very quickly it was a lot of other people who were coming along to join them who weren't rough sleepers and it proved challenging. I wouldn't agree that the crime rates in Salisbury are terrible, even compared to Swindon but it's noticeable and there were three groups of people drinking in small groups. With rough sleeping I want to be really clear, I would never want to criminalise rough sleeping. Our aim is to get support to them when they need it. We raised it as a council a few weeks ago and the chief constable is putting in some more patrols. They are putting a little more resource in and there has been more activity - there was a couple of arrests last week around the street drinking. We have in the past had a street drinking PSPO in place but that lapsed during Covid. There was no way to do the evidence base during Covid even if we wanted to. Regardless of that the police still have the power to go up to people who they feel are going to cause anti-social behaviour. They have the power to take the alcohol away if they feel they are going to cause potential anti-social behaviour which we know with some groups tends to follow as the day goes on. Getting the police to act on that is going to be difficult. The new Chief Constable is taking a very different approach. It might be sensible from an area board or city council perspective to invite the police along. The police are trying to repurpose some of that community policing but it isn't good enough and it hasn't been good enough for about eight years if I'm honest - maybe longer. It has become too focused on tackling county lines and not enough on the community policing angle which you need. You've also got an additional problem right now around the younger people and this one really does worry me. They are causing problems in Elizabeth Gardens and then they are coming in and causing problems in the centre. They are throwing things at people and being violent in a way that street drinkers normally aren't until things get to a boiling point. The police response initially worried us as a council because we weren't told there was an issue with young people and we are responsible for looking after vulnerable young people, and these are vulnerable young people. We've had the same issues in Downton and Redlynch with catapults and we've now got the catapults spreading to Milford which is a different group to the group that are causing trouble here. You're not going to solve that by arresting them. You're going to solve that with multi-agency work, by bringing in the council, the voluntary sector, and the police to try and do something about it. That's what it took in Downton and it has worked with a PSPO.

I would very much deny that Wiltshire Council haven't invested in Salisbury because Salisbury Market Place is a good example of what we have done. So there has been investment in Salisbury and I know how it can feel like there isn't because every town in Wiltshire expresses the same view, often people in Trowbridge and Chippenham for example will say that we only invest in Salisbury, and in Salisbury people tell me that we only invest in other towns. The answer is that money is being invested in different areas in different ways. We've got the Future High Street Fund coming and that will be improving the pedestrian flow from the station and basically making it look more welcoming from the station. We may as well touch on something else at this point which may come up but I'll cover it now which is plans around City Hall and this falls in the 'breaking news' category. We are committed to reopening City Hall as a live entertainment venue. On Thursday I was given details of a report that we've had. All of Cabinet went round to look at the various sites we have and when we were looking we could see that bits of City Hall really are in quite a poor state, particularly where Spire FM used to be based for example. We had a detailed condition survey done at that point. We thought it was going to cost about £300k, I've been told last week that it is going to be at least £1.2 million and that we can't get live music in there until the roof is pretty much rebuilt, because loud music could bring the roof down. Which is an absolute pain because that is going to take 18 months, but looking at the fact we're going to spend at least £1.2 million on City Hall, we've also got the library with at least £700k required to fix the roof - that figure is two years old so we know that is going to cost over £1 million now. Looking at that, I'm thinking do I want us see us find £3 million to spend on keeping two old buildings just about holding together and another £3 million to repair it in the future, or do we find a way to pull together a bigger project, go back to the cultural quarter idea and stop waiting for government money. What I've asked officers to do is come up with a plan that gets City Hall back into operation but also enables us to build whatever building it is we want on the front, there have been ideas, never so much as plans, about glass frontage to enable a modern library to move into there with the Young Gallery somewhere accessible and where people can actually visit it. When we reopen City Hall, we've already been saying that we want to look at this from the perspective of getting someone in who knows how to run an entertainment venue. As a council we lost money on City Hall consistently when it was open, we lost about £250k a year. We are looking at bringing someone in who can professionally run it with us. The aim now will be to bring someone in to help design that new space. And I can't guarantee it will work, the design may be beyond us, beyond the kind of money we can raise, but the aim there would be to have that professional coming in to run it.

We have done the Salisbury Central Area Framework which is only two and a half years old that did ask and define what people wanted.

Let's cover off where we are with the Maltings. It has been a project since before Wiltshire Council was created. I remember when I was a district councillor we were talking about the Maltings back then. It's had three owners now, the owners have come up with various schemes, none of which have been able to be developed. One of the reasons is the flooding issue, that is what the river park is, it's going to be a really nice park and set of weirs, and if you're tall enough or get the right angle you can start to see the weirs coming up and they're looking really good but it is basically a flood defence. That was to enable some of the development, before River Park was approved we had Novichock which caused further delays, then you've had covid which has turned the town centre development absolutely on its head. Wiltshire Council owns the freehold, but there is a long lease for that site so we are in the hands of owners to do anything with it. They sold it around two years ago to a Swedish owned company through APAM but it is a Swedish fund that owns it. They are talking about ideas, but there is nothing coming forward right now which is why I need to start looking at which projects can be delivered because otherwise it just sits there and we do nothing with it. The old British Heart Foundation site, the council doesn't own it in any way and doesn't hold the freehold. Someone came in and put a planning application in, first time it was refused, second time it was a 40ft rule issue primarily, and approved second time around. So they demolished as they were entitled to do as they had a new planning application to build but we can't compel them to build it. The company that owned it is the company that sold the entire thing around two years ago. I think that was sold to a separate company who builds hotels and is the long-term occupant which were expecting to go in there. I am told there is a revised planning application workings its way through to get that built. But I can't make them do it. We have compulsory purchase powers but it's incredibly expensive to use them and you've got to have a rationale for it. I've asked, and the legal advice is that we don't have a rationale for that as we've got an owner who has plans and are putting plans through the planning system to do what they were intending to do. So that's why its sitting there and I agree it's a terrible shame - we don't want Fisherton Street or anywhere along there looking like that.

Let's start with planning generally and I will answer your last question first. Can I promise you right now there will be no new development there? No I honestly can't. There is the local plan process, on 3 July we will be putting out the latest draft. These are decided by evidence based on highways, flooding, environment, need, other major transport issues and all sorts of things that come together. I can't tell you what it says, even if I knew I wouldn't be allowed to and I don't know all the details. I certainly have details around policy but you're not asking about policy, you're asking about housing numbers. My personal assessment is that until we see something done about the A36, road capacity in Salisbury in the mornings now is pretty much a good argument to say we can't add any more. I live in Whiteparish and have to go through Salisbury to get to Trowbridge so I get up pretty early now to get through. Friday afternoon from about 11:30am it's a real mess. It's sporadic but it's a mess. So I think there's a good argument, and I have certainly made sure that argument has been put into the mix when allocating sites, but officers will allocate the sites based on evidence and if I go in and manipulate it, all that would happen is an inspector will turn around and say sorry don't buy it. The problem here is that we are building housing based on targets the government give us. This is really topical in the news today about the effects of migration, we need migration, but migration means we end up with more houses. But also the fact that we are living in smaller households, we used to have an average of 2.7 per household and I think it's now down to 2.4. The population has gone up so that means more houses as well. We are required to build a share of national housing. I would love to tell government I'll build Wiltshire's share of housing, go build London's in London and Reading's in Reading and Buckinghamshire's in Buckinghamshire. I can't do that, I've got to build what they tell us to build otherwise they simply step in and take over. Wiltshire's housing need I reckon is about 26,000 houses between three years ago and 2038. Over half of those have already been allocated or are being built. Many of the rest will be found through the normal infill that you get - where someone has a big garden and they build a house in it or they knock a house down and put two houses where it was. But government is saying we have to build 40,800. When the planning bill finally comes out it might enable to enable us to shave another 300 or 400 or so off that total because of oversupply. If it was simply 26,000 I think there would be a lot less tension, we'd be building our need and the affordable houses we need for people inside Wiltshire, but we've got to build the 40,000. I can't say no which means we're getting these sites coming forward - the Harnham one was basically a replacement for Churchfields which at the moment is undeliverable so the houses that were allocated for Churchfields had to be allocated elsewhere. I would agree there are bits of Salisbury where you could build more houses without causing road chaos, but there are very few. Amesbury needs a break - the fabric of Amesbury has changed so significantly that it needs time to find itself. Traffic is a real issue, you will have seen the work going on with the lights at the Harnham gyratory. I know these roads well I represent Downton, my business is in Redlynch - these are roads I've used for 18 years. Improved lights there, that are actually based on sensor flow so that they can work out if you've got a long queue going up Netherhampton Road, you've got to let more out on Netherhampton Road, if there isn't much coming up on the A338 for example. That will improve flow there, it won't fix the problem but it will make it better. You've got the A36 - for years national Highways have done nothing - I recall getting national Highways in to talk to the area board and getting absolutely nowhere. We finally have got them moving, they've put in a bid, they've been putting a scheme together to improve traffic flow on Southampton road, particularly between College Roundabout and the Tesco Roundabout. We're expecting to see that in two months, it's been imminent, they've come up with a scheme they are just sort of fine-tuning it - that's going to be about a £20m investment and they aim to start doing it next year, they don't have to go through the same planning process because they are national infrastructure and these are improvements to existing infrastructure not building new infrastructure, that should alleviate things again quite significantly. The fundamental problem isn't Harnham gyratory it's College Roundabout. So there are for the first time in my living near Salisbury, concrete plans in place. National Highways are even looking to secure funding for a bypass, but that would be ten years away.

I don't know what a route might be, we need to be factoring that in now that national Highways are looking at it.

Honestly no, housing associations are monitored by the housing ombudsman which is central government and not Wiltshire.

There has been an awful lot going on here and this year it is really coming together. We've got something called the Place board - that is where corporate entities with 'skin in the game' e.g. Salisbury City Council, Wiltshire Council, Salisbury Cathedral, the Business Improvement District, as well as representatives of groups like independent traders - have been working since Novichok to look at what to with, the lesser and greater success. What has actually happened now, this year we will see Bradbeers (department store) open in October, we'll see Primark open in October. It is definitive that Bradbeers will open in October on the Debenhams site. That is going to be a big game changer in the marketplace. Deichmann have now announced they are coming into Salisbury in two months' time and there are a number of others I can't talk about because they haven't gone public yet. There are significant boosts coming in terms of shops, Primark in particular is a huge draw. Primark boosts footfall in the areas around Primark significantly. So that shows that actually the private investment from retailers is coming but isn't enough moving forward. You cannot have a town or city centre that is based simply on shopping. It's got to be about experiences, events - other reasons to come in. The stuff that is going at the Guildhall and Market Square is great, we've got to build on that. We as Wiltshire Council have something called the towns fund, we're investing £1 million a year supporting all of our towns, there are technically 22, some of them are villages, Salisbury is a city, but fundamentally they are in market towns one way or another. That's why we call it the towns fund. You've also got some that are towns but they want to be a village. The most important part to my mind is around encouraging the town council, city council In Salisbury, the BID and other organisations to start organising their own events as they see fit to draw people in. What used to happen is we all came in to do our weekly shopping, and we would go and do something else at the same time. Now with my street in Whiteparish I reckon a third of the houses get their groceries delivered by van. So we've got to people into the town. We're relaunching the Heritage Trail app in June - giving people a reason to walk around. The River Park will mean you will finally be able to walk into Salisbury from all sides. We're refreshing the Salisbury cultural strategy through the Place board (not as Wiltshire Council) and that work is going on at the moment. If we can get City Hall back open and bring live music in again in a larger way, that's bringing 400/500 people in which will be a boost to restaurants. It's got to be a combination of restaurants, culture, events and shopping. So we have plans and they are starting to come together. The big unknown is the Maltings and what happens with that. If we can get this broader cultural quarter idea off the ground, funded, and I hope we can. And if we can move the library into it, which will be contentious to some people, that means you can open up the walk through there which at the moment is a little bit threatening, honestly. If we can get more restaurants, something akin to brewery square in Dorchester on the Maltings side that would be even better. What I can't do is control the Maltings as we don't hold the lease.

I'm not going to speak for the PCC but I will talk about the progress that is being made on speeding. The police's view on fixed speed cameras is that they would rather invest in more random mobile patrols that mean people are always unsure about whether they are going to get caught or not. They are also looking at a version of speed indicators devices that doesn't flash up the speed but gather data which enables them to send tickets based on information gathered from mobile SIDs. They've now got three teams out doing enforcement across the county. It is having an impact and prosecutions are going up which will help but it won't deal with speeding at night.

The avenue is being resurfaced next month. We do put engineering solutions in some places I'm not sure what the situation is with The Avenue but we will get back to you on that.

The simple answer is we can do it but I am told we've got to do it through the local plan - I know a couple of other areas have made some headway with planning changes that have accelerated that and got it in ahead of the local plan process, I am told that with the structure we've got, it has to be done through the local plan update. If you have a look at the design guide that is out for consultation at the moment it is clearly referenced in there. I've asked for it to be two bricks per house, I don't see why if you're putting a brick in why not put one at each end of the house. The design guide when we approve it will become probably enough supplementary planning guidance to enable us to start, if not compelling it, heavily leaning on it.

This is an issue which has been getting worse especially in the last year. Last time I went along there were 17 bins out - I think there was about 9 when I looked a year or so ago. We've been discussing with restaurants where they are going to store their bins and how many they will be allowed to store, we've identified some places. A couple of the places I hoped we could use aren't under Wiltshire Council control so we're going to have to use highways lands in slightly different places. The restaurants are not going to like this because they are going to have fewer bins, but they will have them collected more frequently. You cannot have Butcher Row full of bins when people are meant to be eating out there. I asked officers to work this up in December, it's taken some time to come up with the plans, but they are being enacted now. Parvis (Corporate Director - Place) was telling me about a solution in Barcelona where they have specific types of bin store that doesn't look particularly unsightly and that make sure the bins aren't easy for anyone else to access, so you can have the bins nearby to restaurants but off-street. The problem we've got with Butcher Row is there is nowhere internal for them to store their bins. They stored them in the Market Place before we did the Market Place - we put a bin store there, but the City Council now don't want it to be used, for some relatively good reasons as other things were being dumped there. I would rather see the Market Place bin stores used, but that is not within my control. So we are going to be addressing this in the next few weeks with those businesses. I'm going to get a huge kickback from them about the difficulty but we've already stopped them storing furniture out where the seating area is because it's the highway. What I want them to do is have tables and chairs there so people who have come into Salisbury for a bit of shopping can also have coffee or eat and spend more time in Salisbury which will boost the vibrancy of the city. This won't just apply to businesses on Butcher Row, anywhere inside a defined shopping area will have defined areas with less bins but more regular collections. I want this in place before the summer.

Interestingly the starting point is our unemployment levels are too low for our businesses. Which is not something you can say about most of the UK, businesses are finding it really hard because not enough people are looking for jobs, but those aren't the high value jobs we need to be generating. There have been a lot of grand dreams in the past and if you get massive government investment they can be achievable but we can't wait for government investment. So Porton Science Park we've done ourselves and phase two is about to open which will be 450 high value jobs. Phase three is also coming. Many of the people working there live in Salisbury, particularly Bishopdown, which is one of the reasons we've got to get a cycle path connecting Bishopdown to Porton. Salisbury Hospital are now engaged in getting the details of university courses through Coventry - not quite the same sort of high value jobs but higher value than the retail and leisure jobs. There are further plans with Salisbury Hospital around the project there to regenerate parts of the hospital site. If you look at economic development in Wiltshire generally, and it most impacts the wider Salisbury area, we've got to make more of the MOD. We've got a huge amount of research going on, we have got the largest part of the army by a long way in Wiltshire. Estimates say it's going to be 40-50% of the army based here in Wiltshire from what we're hearing from the MOD. We've got to do more to enable companies to work with the Army in the way that we're doing with Porton. That is our great strength. There are some good examples inside Salisbury of businesses that have opened up such as the serviced offices on Castle Road that are attracting businesses in so it can be done. It can't be done by the council alone, we've done Porton Science Park because we own land up there and we've recognised that is the most significant USP we've got because there are around 3,000 people there with doctorates earning good money. Expanding that is an easy win. With the rest of it I think actually it comes back to creating the pleasant places to live, the place that attracts me to be here rather than living in Basingstoke or London etc. If we can give people that reason to be coming back into the towns I think industry will build on that. Because if people want to be here, companies will say they want to be based here. What does it mean for the centre of Salisbury? Much harder, because high value jobs don't tend to be concentrated in the middle of towns any more and if they are, they're creating industry jobs so they are fragmented with a lot of working from home. We've got an economic strategy coming out that is a distinct shift away from 'we will build a university in Wiltshire' - I can't build a university in Wiltshire, and if I did, it wouldn't work - I need a university to work with us in Wiltshire.

The best justification I can give you is what happened at the Downton Parish Council meeting after we removed parking charges for Novichock. I had the most surreal experience where at least 15 people came up to me to ask for parking charges to be reintroduced because the car parks were full and were being used by people not shopping. Parking charges cannot be the same in Westbury as Salisbury because there is very little to draw people into Westbury whereas a lot of people come in to Salisbury. Salisbury car parks have been really quite full since covid ended. Significantly fuller than we would have expected. So we have varied parking charges across the county, I think the logic of that is good. Different places have different needs, different amounts of parking and we want to make sure the parking is there to attract people in to shop, to spend time in places - we want people who are working to use park and ride. We've got to have that differentiation otherwise there is no point in using park and ride. Which is what happened with Novichok when they became free suddenly there was no one using park and rides and everyone just came and parked in the centre. Not everyone will agree with that but I think the logic is actually pretty good. Parking charges for blue badge holders - the logic is a harder one to justify, but there are some good reasons. Blue badges are given out on the basis of mobility, not on the basis of income. So you have a lot of people who have a blue badge and are extremely well off. About 60-80% of blue badges, the data isn't clear but probably closer to 80%, are issued because people have got old, and their mobility has reduced but it isn't to do with their income level. So it means we are subsidising relatively affluent older people. If I could give free parking to anyone it would be people on universal credit because they are the ones who are really struggling. If you're living on benefits that's a very tough life at the moment. We can't define people who are on universal credit as it changes on a weekly and monthly basis, it changes all the time. So we made the decision to charge for blue badges, I attended the Salisbury Disability Group and I got there early I was working in my car, and I was watching people get out of their cars and it was taking them a very long time to get out so I thought that was an interesting point, I went in and had that point made to me so we've given an hours grace period if you've got a blue badge on top of whatever amount of parking you've paid for to cater for the fact that people who have mobility issues take longer to move around and it is more difficult for them to do it. We are relocating the pay machines as they are replaced and upgraded to make sure they are more evenly spread so it's easier for people to get to them and they are an appropriate height for people who are in wheelchairs. It wasn't an easy decision, the easy decision would have been not to do it but it's the evidence and I try and do everything that we do from a Wiltshire perspective based around evidence. We are using an awful lot of data which we never used before to try to find out what works and what doesn't work and how we can channel money into the prevention I was talking about earlier. But the evidence was actually that it didn't make logical sense if we're trying to tackle inequality to be subsidising blue badges for relatively affluent old people.

We've had the worst winter for potholes, at the very least since 2014. We had a very hot summer and then we had a winter where we had a lot of freeze-thaw, freeze-thraw. That caused cracks in the summer and then water gets in and then so we have for example, Malmesbury high street - in November of last year, we had a bit of delamination not too bad, by February it had dissolved completely and has had to be resurfaced. So it makes some unexpected pothole issues and we've got a lot of them. At this time of year we normally have about 1,000 pothole reports a month and at the moment we're getting over 4,000 a month. Over the winter you cannot put in the proper repairs that we're doing now because they've got to be dry when it goes in otherwise they just end up coming out. So there's been a lot of cold fill patching over the winter. We've had the parish stewards out literally filling potholes most of the time, across the whole county with cold fill. These are not permanent repairs. Some of them will stick, there's one at the top of my road that was filled using cold fill a few years ago and it's still fine, but others won't. So like Milford Mill Road the patch that went in there hasn't stuck, it was never going to as the amount of traffic is too much and that will need a better repair. Over the winter because things were getting so bad we've been doing a lot of cold fill patching. We've now switched to hot fill. Government have given us an extra £3 million, so we've got from government £23/24 million this year. That extra £3 million is about 15% more than we got last year and the cost of repairing roads has gone up by about 16% so we stand still and we've had the worst winter for a long time. It's going to be really difficult catching back up, we are looking at other ways of trying to release some funding and that's not easy.

If you were going to design a household recycling centre you wouldn't build Churchfields - you wouldn't put it there and you wouldn't design it in the way it's designed. It needs moving, it's needed moving for as long as I've been a councillor (around 16 years) and we haven't made any headway. I am pushing for something called the depot strategy, which is the key to this, we've been asking for that at Wiltshire since the creation of Wiltshire Council. It's currently being pulled together but it's not easy working out where you put depots for highways and waste centres. It is being properly worked on. When the strategy comes out we'll know what the answer will be for a better recycling centre location for Salisbury. I think for those of us that live south and east we're probably going to be less happy because the more obvious locations are probably slightly north but we need to see what comes out. We've also had discussions with Hampshire but they've gone cold about letting us use Hampshire recycling centres and vice versa, we've got to try and get that working with Hampshire and Dorset again but I don't know where that discussion has got to.

The intention if we can't find a third party to run City Hall would be to run it ourselves, this has however been made more complication by the situation with the roof and the need to consider a larger building project as outlined in the answer to other questions here.

There is a conservation area appraisal in place which includes management recommendations. The problem from a Wiltshire Council perspective however is that it's down to the landowners to implement the management recommendations.

The local plan update for regulation 19 consultation will be published on 3 July and as a result I can't address local plan policies at the moment. The problem with action so far is that Historic England are the lead agency for the preservation of listed buildings and we cannot act without them taking the lead. This was ready to be done when the first Covid lock down was called but was then delayed when lockdowns started. Planning applications have to be considered on their merits and being in a conservation area and having a neighbourhood plan are both important factors in considering an application. Anyone is however able to put in a planning application on any land and it has to be considered according to government guidance.

This graph shows the reduction in emissions using 2020/21 as a baseline and there is work being done to identify more projects to reduce our carbon footprint further than the pipeline pathway. It is important to note that there had already been significant cuts in our emissions prior to 2020, and that there has been a massive 75% reduction in our footprint between 2018/19 and 2021/22 (the latest year when we have data - we will publish our 2022/23 footprint in the summer). Obviously the closer we get to being carbon neutral in our operations, the more difficult and expensive it becomes to identify projects - we have now done all the easy stuff.