JOHN REDWOOD ON THE ROLE OF AN MP AND COUNCILLOR
Posted by John Redwood, MP for Wokingham, at 13:48, Thu 12 October 2006:
Judging by my email box and postbag many of you are more interested in what goes on at Wokingham Council than in Parliament. I receive far more communications about local planning issues than anything else. Some of you would like me to be a kind of super Councillor, capable of making the local decisions for you. If only I could!
We elect 54 Wokingham District Councillors, and they have the power to make those choices on our behalf. They supervise the professional planners at the District offices. They receive the planners’ advice. They have the power – and the duty – to decide the planning applications, in the light of the advice they receive. They would not welcome Berkshire MPs trying to second guess them. MPs don’t have the benefit of close working with the planning officers that prepare the cases and have no planning powers of any kind in our local areas.
Parliament is there to supervise the government, and to change the law when necessary. It is my job to make sure Wokingham’s voice is heard whenever it matters on the new laws the government is proposing. I should ask the right questions, and take up the issues where Wokingham’s interests are not being served by the national government when it makes decisions and spends money that affects us.
The government is involved in planning, because it upholds or amends planning law, and sets a framework for all local Councils to work under. I am a long-standing critic of this government’s general approach. I think they are inviting too many people into the country. They are asking for too many new homes to be built as a consequence, and they expect the South-east to take too many of those new homes. I and my Parliamentary colleagues on the Opposition side have kept up a continuous campaign against the government’s town cramming policies, against their high figures for new development in Berkshire and the other Home Counties, and against their designation of people’s gardens as brownfields suitable for development. To date the government has been unwilling to give much ground, but we will continue the argument. I want to see regional planning quangos abolished, and more power given to elected Councils rather than to unelected bodies to make the bigger decisions about how much development in each District.
There are some welcome hints that maybe the government will take a different approach to migration from Bulgaria and Romania, when they join the EU. The government misled us badly over the numbers coming from the eastern European countries that most recently joined the Union. No wonder we are short of homes, short of water, short of many public facilities. No wonder unemployment is now rising, as the growth in the workforce exceeds the number of new jobs. The Official Opposition is calling for restrictions on numbers from the new member states, just as France and Germany when the EU was last expanded. Now we have some Labour MPs agreeing with us as well, let’s hope this time government listens to Parliament.
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