I'm following up on a group post on Facebook's Historic Melksham page. As the group is a private group, I am adding this public explanation addressing public concern at the current demolition of the old Labour Club which prior to that served as the Cottage Hospital.

I quote from a reply I'm about to make to that group ...

Please may I add comment here as a Town Councillor, and newly chair of the Economic Planning and Development Committee and also now on the Heritage Assets steering group with the neighbourhood plan. I have also purchased a listed building in Melksham as a wreck and restored it. But in writing I must stress these are personal thoughts and I am not speaking for the committee, nor for The Plan.

We have some 152 listed buildings in Melksham Town ((here)) a further 73 in Melksham Without ((here)) and those listings provide significant protection to buildings and other structures. Listing can also provide a very real disincentive to the purchase of such building - increasing maintenance costs with limits on how things can be done to structures which are going to be expensive to look after anyway, and restricting changes / modernisation which reduces their practical utility for many purposes. For these reasons, it's my personal view that there needs to be a balanced number of listed buildings in the area, and unless we want to set up our town as a historic place such as Lacock we should not be adding lots more buildings to the lists.

The new neighbourhood plan calls for an additional list of buildings and infrastructure features of local historic interest which, however, are not listed; the intent as I understand it is that such features may not be up to the level required for full listing, or perhaps have been overlooked in the past. A consultation run by the neighbourhood plan team last month was notable in how few of these extras it turned up, and that's in contrast to hundreds of inputs on the parallel green spaces consultation, which suggests to me that either the listing are about right, or there's little interest in the historic "third division" after so much is grade 1 (few) or grade 2 (almost all of the 225) listings.

Buildings that are public assets (owned by Wiltshire Council, Melksham Town Council, the NHS, MOD, etc) also have a degree of protection from pure commercial development in that they are owned by you, the community, and through your councillors or others you have an input into their future, which may be much more governed by quality of life considerations rather than by the commercial bottom line. Buildings such as the Assembly Hall fall into this category. Other buildings owned by charitable trusts may also fall into this area.

The former Labour Club / Second Cottage Hospital was not listed nor was it owned by the community, so it did not fall into any of the baskets listed above.

For such buildings and sites, planning applications must be submitted to Wiltshire Council before substantive changes are made - anything from replacement of old buildings by new ones down to a new porch. Such applications have been made - several of them including what the owners wanted to do, then modifications to their plans, to Wiltshire Council. Nearby neighbours and informed and can express their views, and there's also a public register so you (dear reader) can go through the planning applications if you wish, and make your input. They are also notified to the Town (or Parish) council and we meet every 3 weeks to discuss the and make our own inputs - and the public are welcome to inform us too as to what they think, though we encourage direct inputs to Wiltshire Council too as we have only the power of recommendation and persuasion on the decision maker, who by default is an officer of Wiltshire Council.

Wiltshire Council officers are governed by a set of rules in making planning decisions. They must be sure of all the technical stuff like drainage. They must be sure the development does not encroach beyond bounds on the neighbours. They must be sure that the traffic flows and parking will all works. They must be guided by the local plan and the neighbourhood plan. They must be happy that the building and its effect will be up to scratch and safe. And a whole lot more. However much "sentiment" there is there, though, if all the rules and regs are met they have a role to accept the owner's plans whether they're from a developer, a commercial business / building owner, a private individual or landlord or even from a third party because there's nothing to stop you putting in a planning application on something you don't own (I have done that!!)

Is the officer's analysis "final"? Not quite. A unitary (Wiltshire) councillor can "call in" an application for it to go to the planning committee at the county for a public hearing of the case. Councillor Mike Sankey did that recently for the extension of Sandridge School, because of public concerns at the parking / drop off problems that many expect; sadly (IMHO) that has still passed planning. In the case of the old Labour Club in Forest Ward, the person to call in the application would be Councillor Jack Oatley, though I suspect that the substantive plans were passed prior to his election. Some minor changes did go through recently but (again IMHO) no call in would have resulted in a major change.

If a planning officer or committee rejects an application, reasons are given. The applicant can then see what the objections are and try again with plans modified to meet them. A recent example being access to parking spaces not directly off the public highway where the applicant currently has a modified proposal that's removed those spaces going through the system. The applicant could give up his plans. Or he could take in to appeal; developers with major projects and expertise to hand will tend to do this, but for the private home owner it would be expensive and impractical unless it was really important to them and they were pretty sure of winning.

Back to the Labour Club. Not listed. No reason in law to refuse permission and for your current (town) council far too late in the day to use the power of persuation to try for a different outcome with the cooperation of the owners. However much historic infrastructure is a great thing to retain, there does need to be a balance between preserving for posterity and retaining things which hamper our town moving forward. The system is set up to look after that balance and has been worked though in this case; far too late for the current elected team to make any difference - water under the previous bridge, if you like, and probably a difficult borderline case anyway.

What this DOES suggest is that listings - both listed buildings and heritage assets - need to be carefully reviewed as they provide clear guidelines to development to help appropriate plans come through in the first place and some teeth (though blunt ones) to the community's handling of controversial ones.