There is only one person responsible for the mess we are now
in – Eric (I hate the North) Pickles.
Not Grant Shapps, who said before the election “If elected
we will scrap LDF”. Not even the Under Minister who had secret meetings with
KKAN (the not in anyone’s back yard pressure group), who told them you build as
few houses as you want. And defiantly not Simon Reevell, who said “there will
be no Local Development Framework” after all he is a lawyer so his concept of
reality is different to ordinary people.
No, the fault is well and truly nestled in the ample body of
Eric Pickles.
Eric said, soon after the election that he would scrap the
targets for house building set in the RSS. Kirklees Council (all groups in
agreement) took the decision to delay the submission of their plan until after
the abolition of the targets, to allow for a smaller number of houses.
Unfortunately Eric took over 2 years to fulfil his pledge to abolish the
targets. In the meantime, with later consequences, he introduced a “Duty to
Consult”. This was very late in the process.
So when Eric eventually got round to abolishing the targets,
Kirklees submitted their plan. This was against the officers’ advice that there
was a high risk that the Inspector would say there were not enough houses, and
even with that warning the Conservative Group wanted an even lower target.
Also in the meantime, Eric changed the rules of how councils
were funded; the only way that Councils could raise income to pay for its
services, was to build more houses. True to form houses built in the South paid
them twice as much money than houses built in the North.
Now we come to “Eric’s Inspector”. He, as our Officers predicted,
decided we did not have enough houses in our plan. Rather than saying this
clearly, obviously not wishing to expose his master’s duplicity, he tried to
hide his views with nonsensical arguments around the “Duty to Consult”. What he
is saying is that the fact that we moved away from the Targets, unlike other
West Yorkshire Authorities, is evidence that we did not consult. Remember we
did exactly the same consultation as Leeds, who has been deemed to have
consulted properly. This is ignoring
the fact that when we allegedly, did not consult, there was no duty to consult.
So now that we have no plan (the one that the Conservatives
were going to abolish),local Conservative MPs
have a private meeting with Eric, to cobble together a statement that makes it look like they want to
build less houses, to try to pin the blame on Kirklees for the mess engineered
by Eric and Eric alone.
We should be asking him to come clean and tell us how many
houses he wants us to build, rather than pose with objectors for Conservative
leaflets and, rather than have secret meetings, he should spell out publicly
what target he is setting us.
