I’M not lovin’ the prospect of taxpayers picking up the tab for the McDonald’s planning appeal.

The bill for Wiltshire Council’s failure to fend off the ‘drive-thru’ and Premier Inn combo on Southampton Road will run into tens of thousands of pounds.

So on past form you might be expecting me to lambast the councillors on the southern area planning committee for poor decision-making.

But I’m not going to. They had the courage of their convictions.

They didn’t like the idea of that development any more than I do.

Not only will it destroy what some people dismiss as ‘a bit of scrubland’ – although I regard it as a welcome if often waterlogged strip of greenery for wildlife at the entrance to our city – but it is bound to attract more traffic to Southampton Road. Otherwise, why would they build it?

Where Salisbury needs another hotel (and a youth hostel) is in its centre.

What matters to people like me, however, doesn’t seem to matter where the planning regime is concerned.

The inspector ruled that it was ‘unreasonable’ to refuse permission for this purely commercial development.

He also ruled that there was no need for the developers to chip in £50,000, as they’d agreed to do, to help care for another wildlife site, at Lime Kiln Way, Harnham.

This debacle highlights a fundamental flaw in our planning system.

I can understand interference from on high in disputes over schemes that might be of strategic importance – hospitals, motorways, nuclear power stations, runways at Heathrow, that kind of thing.

I can accept that there are times when government has to govern in what it sees as the national interest, whether we like it or not.

However, we’re talking about a burger joint and a budget hotel here.

Nothing wrong with the occasional Maccy D. I’ve eaten my share. Stayed in Premier Inns, too.

But what business is it of government-appointed inspectors to be dictating whether we should have to put up with commercial developments that cannot win the approval of our own locally elected representatives?

I now have this vision of a rush-hour park and ride bus from Big Tesco, packed (for once) with tourists clutching disposable coffee cups and chomping on breakfast McMuffins, taking in the scenic sights of B&Q, Kwik Fit and Majestic as they inch towards our historic city centre. I don’t envy them!

And how long, I wonder, before someone, emboldened by this decision, resurrects that store-on-stilts scheme for the flood meadow opposite?

One ought not to be giving thanks for financial bad news, but at least the sorry state of the supermarket industry seems to have scuppered that one, for now.

With the threat of punitive costs hanging over their heads, will our planning committee be brave enough to resist other developments that they don’t consider suitable for Salisbury?

Will Trowbridge allow them to take the risk?

I doubt it.

anneriddle36@gmail.com