LETTER: MP’s ‘promises’ amount to little

Now, less than five months later, not having removed a single Planning Inspector, he wants to work with them and Nick is telling us he wants to talk with them.

This is the Planning Inspectorate, his Government’s ‘bully boys’ enforcing his Government’s National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) which states there is always a ‘presumption in favour of developers’!

This is the Planning Inspectorate which is a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation (Quango) which is costing us, the taxpayer, well over £60million a year to bully our locally elected district and county councils. This is a Quango that did not go up in flames during this Government’s ‘bonfire of the Quangos’. This Quango is the privately employed enforcement arm of this Government’s central diktats, or ‘localism’ as the Tories prefer to call it, and which our Nick Herbert ‘promises’ to get rid of.

We know Nick Herbert can run a very successful campaign, he led and chaired the same-sex marriage campaign, but we hear nothing at all about Nick’s promised campaign to rid us of his Government’s enforcers.

Nick Herbert promises to oppose the Mayfields New Town development despite a couple of his Government peers, one having drafted the NPPF, being on the board of Mayfields and who are now trying to force the Planning Inspector and Horsham District planning officers to increase the numbers of this Government’s central diktat to build an already unsustainable number of houses in our area.

It is only when the chairman of the Mayfield opposition group, ‘Locals against Mayfield Building Sprawl’ (LAMBS) decides he should stand down because he has become a UKIP council candidate, in Mid-Sussex, that Nick Herbert promises so much more help, with offers of putting the chairman of LAMBS in front of Government ministers, if he does not stand for UKIP.

Nick Herbert ‘promises’… but it is his Government that is bringing in the Infrastructure Bill, to increase the power and scope of the Planning Inspectors, and also ‘bribe’ our councils with £1,350 for each house they allow to be built in their area, and are then built.

It is Nick Herbert’s Government that cuts funding to our local councils before then offering a ‘carrot’ to increase their funding, by permitting the building of thousands of houses to destroy our towns, villages and our quality of life, as well as waving the ‘big stick’ in shape of the bully boy Planning Inspectorate.

This is Nick Herbert’s Governmental definition of ‘localism’, where local councils are afraid of the punitive financial penalties incurred when rejected development applications are then overturned and approved by Nick’s, ‘I am going to get rid of them’, Planning Inspectors. Nick Herbert MP promises…

We need an election, before we disappear under ‘promises’ as well as bricks and mortar. It is time to change the out of touch, self-serving, status quo and have our voices heard in Westminster.

PETER GRACE

Arundel and South Downs UKIP Parliamentary Candidate, Chanctonbury, Ashington