There are times when you have to wonder if Wiltshire Council views its own multi-million-pound property portfolio the way a teenager views their bedroom floor: out of sight, out of mind, and safely ignored until the smell forces a reaction.
We are constantly told that Wiltshire is in the grip of a devastating housing crisis. In Calne, residents watch with mounting despair as our green spaces are aggressively devoured by private developers, while thousands of local families languish on housing registers waiting for a place to call home. Yet, in a twist of bureaucratic genius, it turns out the council has a secret stash of its own residential properties sitting completely empty, quietly rotting away into community eyesores.
The lid was lifted at County Hall when Calne North’s Reform UK Councillor, Mike Sankey, blew the whistle on these vacant, council-owned ghost houses. You might naively assume that discovering you own empty houses during a housing shortage would trigger a sudden burst of common sense. You might expect an order to fix the roofs, hand over the keys, and move some families in.
But this is Wiltshire Council, where efficiency goes to die.
Instead of taking immediate action, a motion to simply create a transparent, public register of these decaying assets was swiftly killed off. Why solve a problem today when you can send it to a “scrutiny process” to be gently suffocated by a committee for the next six months? Heaven forbid the council introduces a basic Excel spreadsheet that might actually hold someone accountable.
To be fair, setting up a spreadsheet requires administration, and administration costs money. Perhaps they could have easily afforded to buy the software—and maybe even hire someone to type the addresses into it—if they hadn’t just aggressively rejected a proposed £224,000 cut to their own councillor allowances. It seems there is always an empty coffer when it comes to tracking public assets, but the money magically appears when it’s time to protect their own pocket money.
Leaving existing buildings to crumble while crying poverty—all while voting to keep your own financial perks fully intact—is an absolute masterclass in local government incompetence. But let’s be honest: it fits a beautiful, familiar pattern of how Trowbridge handles our money.
This isn’t even the first time the council’s property strategy has left us staring at expensive emptiness. It heavily echoes the financial acrobatics I previously exposed in Wiltshire Council’s £64M Housing Company Debt for Just Nine Houses?. In that particular triumph of public spending, the council’s wholly-owned “arm’s-length” property company, Stone Circle, managed to leverage tens of millions in debt while delivering virtually nothing on the ground.
The strategy is beautifully consistent: whether they are burning millions on bespoke development companies that fail to build, ignoring the empty properties they already own, or voting to keep their own allowances topped up, the end result is identical. The taxpayer props up the debt, the buildings sit empty, and the council sets up a working group to investigate why the sky is blue.
If Wiltshire’s cabinet can muster the raw energy to launch a county-wide war on cardboard circus posters, debate the climate impacts of screen wash, and defend their own pay packets, surely they can manage the monumental task of counting the houses they already own. But until they decide to stop hiding behind the bureaucratic shield of “scrutiny panels,” those dark, empty windows will continue to stand as monuments to Wiltshire Council’s total lack of ambition.