Jonathan Djanogly, the Member of Parliament for the Huntingdon Constituency, yesterday spoke in a Parliamentary debate about the collapse of community services in Britain under the Labour government. In the run-up to the local elections on Thursday, Conservative MPs highlighted the impact of centralised Government policies, resulting in a crisis in school funding, a deteriorating transport system, an increase in violent crime and constant threats to local services such as post offices and pharmacies.
Mr Djanogly remarked:
"The Government wants to build thousands of houses in Cambridgeshire in the next few years but they haven't provided the necessary infrastructure to support such a growth. Transport is stretched to bursting point, flood defences are already inadequate, and they seem intent on closing down vital local services like local pharmacies and rural post offices.
And the Government has rewarded the people of our area with a massive rise in council tax, as a result of their new formula for deciding charges, which sends our money to northern metropolitan parts of the country to fund high-taxing, low-achieving Labour and Liberal Democrat councils. And this is after the independent Audit Commission has recently produced a report indicating that Conservative councils charge lower rates but have higher satisfaction ratings than their Labour and Liberal counterparts.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats want to take power away from local people in creating a series of distant regional assemblies. They claim that there is a thirst for this extra layer of Government but, as I found out in a written question this month, only 48 of the 550,000 people in Cambridgeshire responded to the Government’s consultation on the issue. Voting Conservative on Thursday is the only way to ensure that local government remains truly local." "