It’s a New Year, but still no imagination from Wiltshire Council.

A new survey shows first time home ownership halving over the last 2‎0 years. 

This news is no surprise to many young people or their parents, or indeed the elderly wanting to down size and stay in the communities they know and love. 

We have an “affordable homes” crisis for both to buy and rent.‎

We need an all-party consensus to tackle this problem. 

We also need to stop our market towns and their under-pressure infrastructure from being overwhelmed.

There is a way to achieve both desirable goals. 

I backed Nick Clegg’s call for the building of new, properly planned, sustainable garden towns and villages, with significant affordable housing. 

Now the sites of 14 of these garden villages has been announced. 
This is the good news. 

The bad news is that northern Wiltshire‎ has no sites, nor indeed does any part of our county.

Places like the large, former Ministry of Defence (MoD) site at Hullavington airfield,‎ that sits just off the M4 and beside a main railway line to London, would have been an ideal for a new “garden village”, and no doubt there are other candidate sites in our county.‎ 

Wiltshire Council should have been working with the MoD to make this happen. 

Instead Wiltshire Council has failed. 

Once again leaving both young and old frustrated. 

The council’s failure also leaves market towns like Malmesbury and Royal Wootton Bassett under ever increasing speculative development pressure with longer queues for doctors surgeries and ever longer queues on the roads.‎ 

It is time for change. 

We need a Wiltshire Council that “gets its act together” on planning as with much else. 

The local elections in May this year offer a chance for change.

DR BRIAN MATHEW
Liberal Democrat Prospective MP for North Wiltshire