OR COULD SHE BE OUSTED BY A BORIS BABE WHO HAS RECENTLY UP-DATED HER PROFILE PICTURE ON FACEBOOK?
Who wants to be Canterbury’s new Belle?
Guildford Conservative Association and all the branch’s of the Tory tree will be gearing up over the coming weekend to choose the candidate for the ‘once-safe’ Guildford and eastern villages seat.
While some wannabe Tory candidates are getting up close to Boris, MP Anne Milton is fighting in Parliament to ensure all those extant planning permissions for housing on her patch are built-out.
She asked Secretary of State for Housing Minister Esther McVay to “do something” to force developers to build much-needed homes, instead of surrounding sites with hoardings. She says while there is a requirement on developers to begin building within a set period from the granting of planning permission, there is no equivalent requirement to finish what they start, let alone a deadline to do so. This leads to building land left abandoned and unused, housing completions lagging behind housing need, and leaving people without homes.
It was business as usual for one of the finest, hardworking and most respected constituency MP’s Guildford, Ewhurst and Cranleigh have ever had. She told a Westminster Hall debate this week that:
“Local authorities simply do not possess enough tools to force the hand of [property] developers,” Ms Milton had requested the debate on Building Out Extant Planning Permissions to express her frustration that slow progress by developers meant many sites with planning permission were left undeveloped while people suffered from housing shortages”.
“We need houses that people can afford in areas such as Guildford and Cranleigh, where prices are eye-wateringly high (the average house price in Guildford is more than £550,000), and get the socially rented homes we also need.
“But it sometimes feels as if successive governments are simply unwilling to do anything that will upset the developers’ apple cart.”
Ms McVey said: “When we talk about the number of homes coming forward, we all agree there have been many decades of not building enough. Demand has outstripped supply for many years. In the past year, more than 220,000 homes have been built, more than in all but one of the past 31 years.
“We need to do more, and more is being done, but a significant amount has been done already. We are going in the right direction. The government are putting another £44 billion into home-building.
“What we are doing is bringing forward an accelerated planning Green Paper. There will be not just a single solution that ensures that developers build-out there will be an array of solutions, using both carrot and stick approaches. Those methods will be set out in our new Green Paper, which is coming