A further fifty houses have been approved in the parish at Moredon Bridge destroying a couple of acres of previously protected calcareous grassland.
The inspector considered that the need for housing outweighs the need to safeguard this protected site.
This is a bizarre logic: the inspector acknowledged that these houses would be for Swindon (yet Swindon Borough Council says in its Local Plan that it does not need housing in this location).
Having said that, Wiltshire Council did badly mishandle this whole thing.
Before the appeal inquiry it had begun negotiating with the property developer to find an “offset” (a different location for some grassland to offset the loss at Moredon Bridge). In the end it could not agree but by agreeing to discuss an “offset” it naively had consented to the concept that the Moreden Bridge grassland was not crucial. The Inspector picked up that and said that the Council’s argument that the calcareous grassland was part of ‘stepping-stone’ corridor of similar habitats in the area was clearly untenable. He quickly pointed out that it could not be vital one day and not the next.
Both the Council and the developer had applied a developing tool in biodiversity offsetting (which the Government’s own Environmental Audit Committee at the end of last year derided as a box-ticking exercise). The inspector did not question the efficacy of this tool. So, the offset agreed is to be based on land called Poulton Field in Bradford on Avon. Hands up anyone who knows where that is. Exactly.
So the people of Purton lose out yet again.
Possibly one of the most bizarre elements to this debacle is that another Council officer gave conflicting evidence to which the Inspector gave “substantial weight” even though it was acknowledged that this person had NO KNOWLEDGE of the proposed offset site “… in a professional capacity”. In my view that is completely unprofessional of the Inspector and the Wiltshire Council officer and brings the whole process into disrepute.
In fact, this whole business smells of expediency, and is completely unsustainable. Sadly Purton Parish Council was not present during the appeal to represent the people of Purton.
