Block Management in Wilton

Wilton has the highest flat share of any town covered in this part of Wiltshire, and the ward fits the town almost exactly, sixteen of its seventeen output areas falling inside the built-up area. The published ward figure is 502 flats among 2,210 households, 22.7 per cent. Narrowing to the town gives 2,028 households and 494 flats, 24.4 per cent, made up of 394 in purpose-built blocks, 31 in a converted or shared house, 40 in another converted building and 29 over commercial premises. That 40 is the distinctive figure: at 2.0 per cent of households it is the highest share of flats in former schools, churches and warehouses of any town covered here, against 1.4 per cent at Westbury and 0.2 per cent at Amesbury. In a town with a carpet factory, an abbey site and a large estate that is a real conversion stock, and it brings the management questions conversions always do.

Decided under the Wiltshire Core Strategy, adopted 20 January 2015, whose Core Policy 33 makes Wilton a local service centre and provides for approximately 255 new homes across the community area to 2026. The largest single allocation affecting the town sits in a different policy, though, and under a name people do not expect: the former army headquarters site is allocated under the Salisbury community area policy as UKLF, Wilton, for 450 dwellings of which 40 per cent are to be affordable, plus three hectares of employment land intended to provide at least 1,200 jobs to replace those lost when the military site closed. The term Erskine Barracks appears nowhere in the adopted plan. The development template for that site identifies the setting of Wilton Park and the conservation area, the risk of coalescence with Salisbury and proximity to the River Nadder among its constraints. The emerging Wiltshire Local Plan reached examination in November 2024 but was withdrawn on 22 May 2026 under section 22 of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, with its replacement not expected before 30 April 2029, and the council states that the 2015 Core Strategy's policies are not automatically out of date and will continue to guide development. There is no neighbourhood plan and no Article 4 direction. On the National Landscape the same care is needed as at Mere: about 13.5 per cent of the parish lies inside Cranborne Chase, but only half a per cent of the built-up area does, in a sliver at the extreme western tip more than a kilometre from the market hall, and none of the conservation area at all. The constraint that does apply everywhere here is nutrient neutrality: the whole town sits inside the River Avon Special Area of Conservation catchment, where the applicable nutrient is phosphorus, and the requirement is written into the adopted housing site allocations plan, which records that new development within the catchment must be phosphate neutral. The river itself runs through the town, covering about one per cent of the built-up area, the highest of the towns covered in this part of the county.

This is development plan policy, so it binds the council when it decides an application and it binds a leaseholder's alteration just as it binds a developer's scheme. It sits alongside, not instead of, the consent the lease requires.

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