Only Tories pledge to cancel strategy (From Worcester News)

Only Tories pledge to cancel strategy

8:00am Wednesday 1st July 2009

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SIR – When all the (sometimes amusing) mud-slinging in your correspondence columns is finally done, what remains as fact in the housing proposals for south Worcestershire?

It is the Labour government that is trying to force them on our local authorities via its West Midlands regional planning agencies. It is Labour’s projections of future population growth that underpin south Worcestershire’s supposed housing requirement date from six years ago at the height of the now rather distant economic upturn.

It was Labour’s Baroness Andrews who unilaterally raised the housing figures even higher without guarantee of necessary infrastructure investment.

Both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats oppose these dictats.

The LibDems in their current Pocket Guide to Policy state on housing only that they “will release public sector land to... build thousands of affordable homes for their local communities” – a statement that raises more questions than it answers.

But it is only the Conservatives who have made a definite pledge to cancel the regional housing strategies here and nationwide, abolish the regional quangos and to return such planning to the local authorities where it belongs.

COUNCILLOR CR CHEESEMAN,
Malvern.

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