Wiltshire County Council issued its first planning application for an Eastern Westbury Bypass on 15 April '05, during the run-up to the local and general elections at that time.  Road schemes are not normally consulted on during election periods.   WCC allowed only three weeks, until 6 May 2005, also coinciding with a holiday, for people to study the scheme and respond.   WCC notified it obscurely: a small ad lost in the back pages of one local newspaper and small notices on trees or posts out on the route (which is in open countryside).

The only significant publicity about what was going on came from voluntary environmental campaign groups.

WCC had 6 letters of support - and some 600 individual letters of objection to the eastern bypass scheme.

About three-quarters of these letters are from Westbury and the surrounding West Wiltshire villages.

There were also some 200 identical undated petition forms of support for 'a bypass'.   Names & addresses for these were collected, by accosting passers-by, or by door-stepping people at their homes, not allowing them to think it out for themelves.   There have subsequently been complaints about residents having been misled by the cold callers.  Few of these petition forms are date-stamped as having been received by WCC. This petition was fundamentally an exercise to drum-up apparent numbers for the eastern bypass scheme, as if to rival the genuine large quantity of local people who independently posted real letters against it.

A re-advertisement of the same planning application by the County Council in July (another holiday period), because the Eastern Bypass scheme was after all not in the District Plan, drew over 160 further genuine letters of objection, all date-stamped in the period, three-quarters of which are from the Westbury area.

The County Council's third advertisement, ending in December 2005, was specifically for comment on the additional environmental information which was released at that time.   There are seven relevant letters, five of objection to the scheme, from such as the Environment Agency and the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust.

It can be seen that, even allowing for bypass support which was collected from the indifferent or misled, over three-quarters of the genuine response was consistently against this so wrong eastern bypass.

Wiltshire County Council is trying to wear us down by repeatedly re-issuing the same scheme.