TRYING TO AVOID BLAME

THE Conservatives are rewriting history to try to avoid taking the blame for the Danes Moss Housing development.

In 2017 the Conservatives on Cheshire East Council voted through the Local Plan which included the Danes Moss site for development (Labour voted against).

Conservative government guidance requires ‘approving development proposals that accord with an up-to-date development plan without delay.’

So once the site is in the Local Plan the developers know they will get planning permission

- and indeed the Cheshire East Tories voted for planning permission for houses on Danes Moss at

a Strategic Planning Board meeting in 2017 (Labour voted against) and all planning permission papers were signed off in early 2019 before Conservatives lost control of the Cheshire East Council.

Even now the Tories are seeking to help out the private developers of the site by demanding that Cheshire East Council pay for surveys of the site!

The perverse Conservative motion to council for Cheshire East to use taxpayers money to do a hydrogeology report of the site was rightly rejected on the grounds that Barratt Homes are

doing such a survey and have agreed to pay for it.

Meanwhile, having granted planning permission and demanded taxpayers money to be used to subsidise the development, the Conservatives now claim that they don’t want the Danes Moss site to be developed.

If this is their true position now in 2023 they should surely be petitioning the current Conservative Secretary of State to withdraw the current planning permission?