LETTER: Which political party to vote for

Instead of expanding our villages and towns beyond recognition and damaging their character, a ‘new town’ shared between Mid Sussex and Horsham District has long been suggested as a part-way of meeting housing targets for Mid Sussex and overspills from the South Coast Districts as well as Horsham and Crawley. But is this the same as a ‘new garden city?’

Michael Donnelly reporting in ‘Planning Resource’ (19th March 2012) reported David Cameron’s speech to the Institute of Civil Engineers. Cameron said the growth of towns and cities had been ‘held back by a planning system which has encouraged development of the wrong sort in the wrong places’. He then referred in glowing terms to the Abercrombie Plan (1944) which proposed ‘well-planned and well-located new towns which would in time become new engines of economic growth’.

Jonathan Brown writing in the Independent (31st December 2013) writes ‘David Cameron has broken the emerging political consensus on the need for Britain to build a new generation of garden cities as a way of solving Britain’s housing crisis, it has been claimed. According to the Financial Times the Prime Minister has quietly dropped his support for the idea fearing that by identifying a site for a new town the Conservatives could provoke a nimby backlash ahead of the next general election in 2015’.

Like me, perhaps your readers will be confused by the apparent loose use of the terms ‘new town’ and ‘garden city’. Does Cameron’s position rule out, for the time being, the Mayfield ‘new market town’ proposal?

Even more interesting for voters in the Horsham Westminster Constituency, if we believe a new town should be part of the solution, should we vote Labour, Liberal democrat or UKIP?

C. MORRIS

Tennyson Close, Horsham