This article originally appeared in the paper edition of The Herts Advertiser.
As I sit down to write this column, it has been less than six months since the Liberal Democrats promised you that they would protect our local greenbelt and campaign against top-down housing targets. On the basis of those promises, they took control of Harpenden Town Council and cemented their grip on the District Council – likely guaranteeing themselves another four years in control.
In the six months since the election, the mask has slipped. Now they’re proposing to build thousands of houses on our local greenbelt – announcing those just over a month after they’d made those commitments to protect it. This comes after years of delaying and delaying making a decision on where housing should be located, opening up our local greenbelt to speculative applications for more than 2,000 houses in 2022/23 alone (according to data from the CPRE).
And now, still mere months after they gave you cast iron promises on housing targets, we again see the truth. Because at their Party Conference, the Liberal Democrats voted for a national target of building 380,000 houses every year – 80,000 more than the old targets they’ve been telling you are forcing them to pave over the greenbelt. That could translate to something like 800 more houses every year in our District.
Now their Parliamentary Candidate has claimed that that still meets their commitment to campaign against “top-down” targets, arguing that they will target them from the bottom up. But the motion passed clearly states that they will “translate the national target into achievable local targets”. That’s a top-down target however you try to spin it.
Now on the other hand, the Conservative Government has taken action to protect the greenbelt. Abolishing mandatory top-down housing targets; strengthening protections for the greenbelt in Local Plans; putting regeneration of brownfield sites in places like London and Leeds and a major urban extension of Cambridge first to deliver new housing. And Nigel Gardner and the local Conservatives are committed to protecting our greenbelt.
The Liberal Democrats take for granted that they can say one thing and do another. That they can make you promises that they have no intention of keeping. That they can decide to pave over the greenbelt and blame everyone else for it. That they can introduce a top-down target and tell you that it isn’t one.
Don’t let them get away with it.
