Last week’s Conservative mayoral candidate’s letter on housing targets and Watford Council’s Local Plan demonstrates how out of touch the local Conservative Party have become.

It is interesting to ponder the extremely late timing of the mayoral candidate’s intervention. She has not made any representations to the public consultations on the draft plan submitted to the inspector for examination. But instead, she chooses to submit a letter to the Watford Observer. The wording of her letter appears to be an attempt to duck responsibility for the consequences of the Government algorithm, which leads to very high-density development on our few available brownfield development sites. Then they try to blame the Liberal Democrat administration in Watford for the inevitable consequences.

If she is genuinely concerned about the impact of overdevelopment on the character of Watford, the best course of action would be for her, along with us, to challenge the standard method of calculating housing need. This could potentially result in a significant reduction of housing targets for already densely populated boroughs like Watford. This would of course be balanced by an increase in development in the greener Tory-voting Shires. We can only imagine how popular such a policy change would be with the Conservative Party.

However, as much as the Conservative candidate for mayor tries to spin this, the facts are straightforward. The Conservative government has tripled Watford’s housing target. They have attacked us for not building enough and have threatened to take power away from Watford Council to punish us for this. The Prime Minister believes we need to ‘build, build, build’ and his Conservative government believes we should have built twice as many properties in Watford over the past three years to meet their target.

The Conservative mayoral candidate’s time would be better spent trying to get Conservative ministers to change their policies, rather than blaming others.

Cllr Steve Johnson

Tudor Ward,

Planning, Property and Housing Portfolio holder, Watford Borough Council