Labour's quango culture threatens Cambridge

Cambridgeshire is consulting again on how it should respond to the East of England Regional Assembly's latest proposed plan for enforcing massive housing growth on our area. Please do take part in the consultation if you get the chance - it ends on 31 October 2009.

This is really the wrong way to do things. We have an unaccountable body in EERA telling our local authorities what to do and then we have another one in Cambridgeshire Horizons trying to do the government's dirty work for us around Cambridge.

It is time for these quangos to go. Conservatives have pledged to abolish top-down housing targets. Of course we do need more houses, but we want to decide locally on what we need, and we need it to happen organically, with infrastructure so that we are not developing ghettos for the future. And if we want to see more houses of the kind we are lacking here (e.g. more than 2 bedrooms) then we need to get rid of the government's targets for density and hefty development taxes (AKA 'affordable' homes subsidised by buyers of 'unaffordable' homes).

Oh, and it would also help if the government stopped demanding maximum parking levels, tightened even further by local Liberal Democrats, resulting in every new development having inadequate parking right from the start.

Conservatives warned 11 years ago that Labour's housing plans (thank Prescott) would result in unsuitable sites being chosen for development, such as Marshall's Cambridge Airport, but were accused of scaremongering by Labour. With the Lib Dems cheerleading for the development, there's only one way to save Marshall - vote Conservative!