I feel I must reply to Fred Horsington’s letter (Echo, June 2) in which he accuses the Stop Council Offices Now (SCON) campaign of having ‘cost us, the council tax payers of West Dorset, over £600,000’.

Fred was chairman of the development control committee at that most memorable September 28 2010 meeting (held in the county council chamber to accommodate all those members of the public who had asked to speak on this particularly important planning application).

He would have been left in no doubt whatsoever at the strength of feeling aroused by the new WDDC office element within the whole Charles Street Development proposal.

He must also have been aware that in April 2010 in Dorchester Town Poll more than 2,000 people voted against the proposed new offices and only 156 people voted for them.

That this degree of passion should lead to the creation of a campaign group to fight against the imposition of this unwanted addition to the historic centre of the county town was hardly surprising.

Fred should be grateful that this kind of democratic freedom not only exists but is a cornerstone among the checks and balances required within any truly democratic society.

SCON was formed initially to raise the funds necessary to get a barrister’s view on the likelihood of success, were the planning decision to be challenged by judicial review.

The advice we received was that while we undoubtedly had a case for challenging the planning decision on the grounds of predetermination by members of the development control committee, the evidence to make this case in front of a judge in the High Court fell short of our pre-arranged target of 75-80 per cent certainty of success.

As proceeding to a judicial review would have required the raising of some tens of thousands of pounds from the public, this course of action was abandoned and SCON concentrated its efforts and very limited resources on revealing to the public as many of the facts as we could ascertain.

We wished people to know how this extraordinary decision was reached; the veracity of the reports on which decisions were made; the realities of the current system of decision making within WDDC and the nature of the relationship between WDDC and Simons, the developers. Information on the deal between WDDC and Simons was very difficult to obtain as huge swathes of it were classed as ‘confidential’.

Our campaign highlighted many issues, which we felt were worthy of greater dissemination, not least among which were the true scale and therefore the massive impact of the new office block to be built parallel to one of Dorchester’s unique features, namely the avenue that is South Walks.

We also exposed, for those interested and concerned about the manner in which our district council operates and reaches its decisions, the alarming lack of open debate and proper democratic scrutiny.

I am assured by those with considerable experience of multi-million pound developments that it would not only have been unbelievably foolhardy to start a development before the three month period within which an application for judicial review might be lodged, but that in many, if not most cases, it would not be allowed by any financial institution supporting the developer.

Thus it is disingenuous in the extreme for Fred to assert that the SCON campaign ‘has cost us, the council tax payers of West Dorset, over £600,000’. I look forward to his retracting this remark.

The SCON campaign has received £3,545 in donations from the general public and has spent £3,000.78 on legal fees, £709.45 on printing, photocopying and stationery, £208.40 on postage, and £507 on events (PA system, balloons etc).

No money has been paid to any election candidate, nor to any of the organisers. Indeed, if you add up the expenditure, you will see that some of us are somewhat out of pocket.

Alistair Chisholm, Friary Hill, Dorchester