What has the West Northants Development Corporation done? - asks Councillor (Northampton Liberal Democrats)

Northampton Liberal Democrats <info@northamptonlibdems.org.uk>

What has the West Northants Development Corporation done? - asks Councillor

April 16, 2006 10:45 AM

Cllr Tony Woods

After a year in existence the WNDC has done nothing, achieved nothing and should be closed down according to Cllr Tony Woods. In a letter to the Chronicle & Echo Cllr Woods said:-

The West Northamptonshire Development Corporation was imposed on Northampton just over a year ago with the compliance of local Labour and Tory politicians. Its objective? To deliver the government's disingenuously named "Sustainable Communities" Plan - in simpler, more honest, terms - to dump some 50,000 extra homes in the area.

Northampton has been raped once by a Development Corporation. Development Corporations up and down the country have, over the last half-century and more, left a legacy of failure and urban blight. But Two-Jags Prescott and the Labour government have insisted that Northampton will once again be subject to massive expansion regardless of the wishes or needs of local people.

After a year in existence it is time to ask what this undemocratic, unrepresentative and unaccountable quango has achieved? It has spent an obscene amount of public money, produced a content free prospectus and held a few vacuous consultation meetings - the one I attended being more like a rally for an obscure sect complete with stirring nationalistic music and soft focus images of the very countryside that they want to cover in concrete.

But what has the WNDC achieved? What have they done for the money?

It would seem nothing - bar the suggestion that they might build on Dallington Grange - a development that has been in the Local Plan since 1997 - and a few 'back of a fag packet' sketches for the town centre and the railway station.

Keith Barwell and his hand picked team are charged with making things happen. If, after a year, they have produced nothing then let's close the quango down and replace it with a properly representative and accountable body capable of regenerating Northampton to make it the very fine city it deserves to be - the very fine city its citizens want it to be - not another soulless clone town imposed on us by faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats.