The Inquiry has completed.
Our unitary councillor Jacqui Lay and myself were present to give evidence and offered ourselves for cross-examination by the appellant’s barrister.
No councillor from the parish council turned up so it was difficult to clarify their position. Earlier on they had submitted a letter of no objection which seemed to go against the general findings of the Purton Parish Plan. But then when the application was heard by Wiltshire Council’s Strategic Planning Committee, the councillor representing the parish council spoke in objection to the application. So that was quite confusing.
Unusually for planning appeals, this one hinged on the very technical and controversial concept of biodiversity offsetting. In this case it is about the destruction of a Site of Nature Conservation Importance (Bradley’s Meadow) and it re-creation somewhere else. The evidence between the Wiltshire Council and the appellant (Wainhomes) being contradictory about whether or not an equivalent calcareous grassland could be re-established elsewhere. Given the Government’s own Environment Audit Committee had criticised the Government’s experts for their biodiversity offsetting initiatives as “merely box-ticking exercises“, it seems unlikely that Wainhomes would have any particular expertise in this difficult area of science.
Anyway, as usual it was quite difficult to “read” the planning inspector and so we must wait for the decision to be announced, probably in two or three month’s time…
