WILTSHIRE Council’s plan for the next 15 years of development in Wiltshire’s towns and villages has been criticised in an open letter signed by 25 organisations.

Representatives from the groups, including civic trusts and parish councils, handed their objections to Coun Toby Sturgis, cabinet member for the environment, at County Hall on Monday afternoon as the consultation on the “core strategy” came to a close.

The plan sets out where the council wants future housing, commercial and industrial developments to meet the needs of a growing Wiltshire until 2026.

The letter, headed up by George McDonic, a past president of the Royal Town Planning Institute, criticises the scale and location of development proposed in the draft document. Building 37,000 homes across Wiltshire, with 20,000 houses concentrated in North and West Wiltshire over the next 15 years, would it says, lead to massive estates on green field sites, more characterless car-based suburbia, more traffic congestion and pollution, declining town centres, damage to the environment and loss of agricultural land.

Mr McDonic, a former planning inspector and chairman of the Wiltshire branch of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE), said: “In economic and planning terms it simply does not stack up.”

Patrick Kinnersly, secretary of the White Horse Alliance, said: “We have done this because we sensed mounting resistance in all parts of the county to a plan that would dump a sprawl of urban extensions and industrial estates into the open countryside.”

Officers are now poring over feedback from the consultation exercise and will prepare a report with their findings by the end of the year, when the Core Strategy will be released to a second round of consultation.

Fleur de Rhe-Philipe, cabinet member for strategic planning, said: “We welcome this letter and the thousands of comments received. We have reduced the proposed number of new homes in Wiltshire from the government target of 44,400 to 37,000 over the 20-year period 2006 to 2026.

“The proposed number of new homes is based on the amount of people who will need housing by 2026. We are working with communities to strike a balance.”