Letter: Questioning the housing quotas

If a new development is to go ahead on the Flaxby golf course site (as reported in the last edition of the Advertiser), I should hope that it would be a model of the very best sustainable design and build, properly resourced and serviced with the necessary infrastructure, such as grocery and post office, community facilities, green spaces and excellent public transport access.

It should be mainly affordable housing incorporating, for example, renewable energy, rain/grey water harvesting etc. Suitable brownfield sites should also be used, of course.

But first - I would question the basis of the quotas for housing which government is demanding local authorities provide. I distrust this because government ideology, and that of all the ‘grey’ parties, is based on the outdated neoliberal economic model.

This pushes for infinite ‘growth’ despite world resources being finite. We live on a small blue planet which is being poisoned, built over and depleted of resources at an ever increasing rate as we develop more and more powerful technology. War over resources is now endemic. Inequality has reached grotesque levels. UK wildlife has declined by 60 per cent in the last 50 years (RSPB)….need I go on? Governments are in bed with the construction industry, as with other powerful sectors of industry such as oil and pharmaceuticals. These actually finance the grey parties – so how can we trust those parties’ policy decisions?

We must be on our guard against exploitation via government. The imminent Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), supported by all the grey parties, will give even more power to corporations.

usTo learn more about this shady deal, come to Harrogate Futures Forum’s talk ‘Death of Democracy’ on Tuesday, November 25 at the Friends’ Meeting House, Queen Parade, Harrogate at 7.30pm.

Shan Oakes

Green Party Parliamentary Candidate for Harrogate and Knaresborough

Tentergate Rd, Knaresborough