Swindon Borough Council has opened a six week public consultation on its draft Local Plan 2043, the document that will decide where new homes, businesses and infrastructure can be built across the borough for the next two decades. The plan is being shaped around a Government requirement for Swindon to deliver 1,203 new homes every year, a figure set nationally rather than locally.
Residents are being invited to give their views on where that housing should go, which roads might need widening and which green spaces might quietly stop being green spaces. The council says the feedback will help finalise the plan before it is submitted for examination, a process in which the 1,203 figure itself is not, strictly speaking, on the table.
It is understood the consultation represents residents' final say on the matter, in the sense that a final say usually means getting to choose something, rather than being told the total in advance and asked where to file it.
A council spokesperson confirmed that all views submitted during the six weeks would be fully considered, provided they related to where the 1,203 homes a year should go rather than whether there ought to be 1,203 of them, which is understood to be a separate and much shorter form.
Brenda Pask, 72, of Old Town, who has lived there since before it was old, said she had read the consultation document cover to cover at the kitchen table with a pot of tea and the good biscuits. 'Twelve hundred and three,' she said. 'Not twelve hundred, not twelve hundred and four. Somebody sat in an office in London and decided on the three. I'd like to meet him. I'd ask him what he's got against a nice round number, same as I'd ask whoever decided four for a tin of custard creams was plenty.'
She added that in her day a council consultation meant a man from the planning office standing at the end of your street with a clipboard, not a document the length of the Argos catalogue that nobody intended to read all of. 'Ron always said a decision you can't argue with isn't a decision, it's a weather forecast,' she said. 'You just get your coat.'
Gary Tench, Area Manager at Tench Paper Solutions in Westlea, said the arrangement had given him a new way of describing head office's approach to his printer allocation. 'They tell you the number of units coming to the Westlea site is fixed from above, no negotiation, but you, Gary, get full consultation rights on where in the building they go,' he said. 'I spent three weeks getting feedback from the team on printer placement. Turns out nobody wanted it near Julie. We moved it near Julie anyway. That's local democracy for you.'
He said he had written a short acoustic number about the experience, working title 'Final Say', which he hoped to debut once his band The Lanyards secured a slot anywhere that would have them.
Asked whether the consultation changed the overall total of homes planned for the borough, the council confirmed it did not. The number 1,203 declined to comment, on the grounds that nobody had actually asked it anything.