7:00am Wednesday 10th March 2010
By Herald Reporter
WANTAGE MP Ed Vaizey has said proposals to build 1,500 homes on the edge of the town should be halted until after the General Election.
He said housing allocations set to increase the town’s population by 35 per cent could be looked at again if a new Government came to power, and it was possible to stop some of the development.
Dealing with the issue was his number one priority, he said.
The leader of the Vale of White Horse District Council, Tony de Vere said Mr Vaizey was “behaving irresponsibly”.
The council’s Liberal Democrat cabinet will cast a key vote on where to allocate homes across the district in the coming months.
Mr Vaizey said: “I am always being told that this is a process that cannot be stopped, but we are talking about houses that will transform parts of the community and will be there for 100 years.
“The idea we cannot pause to start again seems to me bizarre.”
He added: “The Liberal Democrat council have made the mistake of proposing to dump 1,500 houses on Wantage without any consideration about either the number of houses or the best place to put them.”
Mr Vaizey said he still believed it was possible to stop the development.
He said the day after the General Election, he planned to request a meeting with the Secretary of State to ask for the proposals in Wantage to be halted and looked at again.
A recently-published Conservative Green Paper on planning suggests that under a Tory Government, councils would be able to revisit the number of homes allocated to their districts under the South East Plan.
But Liberal Democrat Mr De Vere said: “I can imagine looking again at the housing plans is a very popular thing in Wantage, but I think Mr Vaizey is behaving a little bit irresponsibly.
“It’s not clear what his party is proposing and, to be honest, I don’t know quite what they mean, and I don’t think anyone else does either. It’s important to have a plan for housing. We don’t agree with the numbers of homes given to us, but we have to have a plan because the area is expanding and new homes need to be built.”
The party’s parliamentary candidate, Alan Armitage, said 1,500 extra homes was more than Wantage could realistically support.
He said that if elected, he would lobby the Government to reduce housing targets for the Vale of White Horse, but that would not resolve a wider problem.
He said: “I can see where the Conservatives come from when they say they will abolish the structural plan, but it is going to leave us even more short of housing. At the moment, the district council is being forced into making decisions, and I wish they had more options available.”
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