Lies, damn lies and Herefordshire Council Press Releases

3.01.13pm BST (GMT +0100) Thu 13th Aug 2009

Writing to the Hereford Journal, local Parliamentary Candidate Lucy Hurds has slammed the decision by Herefordshire Conservatives to axe the current planning system. The Conservative Council Leadership has voted to stop local councillors having a say on planning decisions. In an effort to push through unpopular decisions on developments such as the Edgar Street Grid area and windfarms on the Welsh Borders, the Council Cabinet has acted to cut off any challenges from fellow councillors.

Lucy's letter appears below:

Sir

"There are lies, damn lies and Herefordshire Council Press Releases." I am appalled at the recent whipped vote by Conservative Councillors to abolish local planning committees. Replacing them with a single, Party political planning committee, with a permanent Tory majority, ends fifty years of local Councillors right to vote on planning decisions, as well as leaving unaccountable and unelected planning officers the vast majority of planning decisions. The Council's press and spin department issued a press release saying this would now make planning more 'open, democratic and accountable', what rubbish! (Have they been taking lessons from President Mugabe?)

The real reason they want to take planning decisions further away from local people, denying local councillors the right to vote, is in order to impose their deeply unpopular plans on Herefordshire people.

The County does not need or want to have yet another supermarket on the cattle market, windmills in the most beautiful parts of our county, a large waste incinerator belching out toxic fumes, thousands of houses where they shouldn't be, to name just a few. This Council is determined to disenfranchise local resident's representatives.

Herefordshire Council seems to lurch from one disaster to another; it is already spending well over a million pounds of taxpayer's money a year on PR in order to deceive residents. One example being last year's school closure fiasco and climb down which was followed by a press release from Councillor Roger Phillips saying that he had been promised 6 million pounds more funding by the Department of Education but this was subsequently proven to be a complete fabrication. A senior civil servant present at the meeting made it quite clear that no such conversation had taken place, let alone any promise made.

It's time for Herefordshire Council to start being open and honest with its residents. Stop the Spin!

Lucy Hurds

Lib Dem Parliamentary Candidate, North Herefordshire