The author of the Hullbridge Memories website makes a withering attack on the Conservative District Council campaign in Hullbridge.
If you vote Conservative in the LOCAL, I repeat LOCAL not General Elections, you are basically saying you are doing a good job carry on. Is that what you really think ?
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If you vote Conservative in the Rochford District Council Elections I plead with you to reconsider and vote for someone who is able to identify our problems and Issues! Please urge your family and friends to consider carefully about their vote.
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Choose your vote carefully!!! Look at what the other candidates are saying. And please vote !!
Full article is here.
There is not much you can add to this residents pleas. Surely everyone deserves a Councillor who will speak up for the residents of their ward. There are many good Councillors who actually represent their residents, however too few are Conservatives!
Labour set the regional housing targets and Rochford District Council, run by a Conservative Party political administration, decided where the houses would go where very little change being seen once the first draft of the Core Strategy was officially issued by the Council. I remember hearing that if you don’t like the porposal then say so and we will come back with alternatives having listened to you.
(Remember that the first iteration that the people of Rayleigh objected to so fiercely was a political announcement in the local press by the Conservatives alone.)
I won’t go into in detail the other mistakes made when 330 were originally proposed for Hawkwell which ran against sustainability which was something that they found out about only when they had done a Sustainability Appraisal. I am quoting here about the evidence given under cross examination at the DWH Appeal.
The Conservative Candidates candidates in this election are saying (a quote from one) “an incoming Conservative Government would remove those “top down” housing targets imposed on us by unelected quangos, to be replaced by local people decidind their housing needs”.
The inference is that this will all go away. But Mark Francois is reported to have honestly said in Hullbridge that the proposal for a 500 dwelling housing development will NOT change.
So we have district candidates inferring one thing and reportedly the defending MP saying another thing in a place (another) that is saying that they do not want or need this scale of development.
If you read the Conservative Green Paper on Planning that you will see that nothing will change.
John, I agree, nothing will change because there is no will for change in either National Government or our local administration.
What I will say is that one of the reasons the residents of Rayleigh got so annoyed with the housing figures is that after taking a huge amount of new developments over the past 20 years, the Conservative administration was giving Rayleigh another 1800 new dwellings. It was only, and I repeat only, after the residents campaigned in everyway possible that the Conservatives came up with a revised figure for Rayleigh.
What was comical was that a prominent Tory Councillor who wrote in his leaflet, in the elections of two years ago, that it was the Tory Councillors who voted against the RDC Officers report for the housing allocations in Rayleigh!