Electoral reform needed over the student vote

I HAVE sent the following letter to Chris Skidmore MP, Minister for the Constitution:

“I live in the parliamentary constituency of Colne Valley.

“At the last election we lost our sitting Conservative MP – Jason McCartney – to Labour in the form of a retired school head teacher.

“This situation has since been attributed to the votes of students of the University of Huddersfield. The voters in Warwick and Canterbury suffered a similar fate.

“I would ask for the swift introduction of electoral reform to prevent this transitory, inexperienced group from choosing the MP for a constituency in which their residency is temporary.

“The indigenous population have to live under the whims of this MP, who was not the choice of the majority of them, when the students are long gone.

“The new legislation should read: ‘A student who is entitled to vote can apply to be on the electoral register only in the constituency from which they came to their present place of learning.’

“This present situation is surely nothing but a way of manipulating the electoral process. Democracy it is certainly not.”

Should any of the 31,602 who did not vote for Thelma Walker MP agree with me I urge them to contact Mr Skidmore with the same message. READING Paul Routledge’s column (Examiner, September 20) regarding the number of homeless under a Conservative government, I seem to remember Labour’s pledge when they were last in government that they would make sure that no-one was homeless. I have looked into their record and found the following:

“Statistics on homelessness from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (who has responsibility for housing) revealed that the number of homeless families in Britain has reached 100,000.

“This record level of homelessness is more than double the total when Labour took office and the government estimates that this number will continue to rise until at least 2008.”

There will always be the homeless. On a TV programme on the subject, they interviewed one lady who preferred to sleep on the street and when they found her accommodation she went back to “sleeping rough”.