Letter: Gay Meadow covenant row at heart of secrecy concerns

I am not alone in thinking that the council owned the land, and I wasn't aware that it had been sold to the football club so long ago. However, the fact that we lost out on a financial bonus is in the distant past now, and anyway, secrecy is my worry, not finance.

Far from being the wrong example, as Mr Dunham suggests, the question of the covenant and its withdrawal remains at the very heart of my concerns about openness.

When the land was used for public entertainment, e.g. football, it was, in my eyes, well within the spirit of the covenant, in that the Gay Meadow was available for the good of the public.

The car park and other land inside the Meadow's confines were equally open to public access. Therefore, until the time when the football club decided to move, there had been no need for enforcement – the land was still being used within the requirements of the covenant.

It's what happened next that I am uncomfortable with. There is no doubt that the covenant was still legally considered to be alive or there wouldn't have been any need to rescind it. At that juncture the council could have purchased the land from the football club and built the theatre on it – once again primarily for the use of the people of Shrewsbury – and they would have stayed within the requirements of the covenant.

But no, the cabinet met in secret and they wrote off the protection that this piece of land had enjoyed, to the detriment of the people of the town, but to the gain of the football club, who were then in a position to apply for planning permission to build housing on it.

That one act (among others) was enough to betray our trust in politicians for ever, or at least until they start to come clean about their now frequently secret goings on. Councillors are local people, elected by other local people, and they are in charge of our local affairs. I'm not sure when open public service became closed party service but it did, at some point.

Paul Wagner

Shrewsbury