DAVID Cameron says we must be freed from unelected bureaucrats in Brussels dictating to elected parliaments, but his own Government is imposing just that on counties up and down the land.

Disarmingly called ‘local enterprise partnerships’, these constitute a majority of unelected worthies and a minority of the leaders of elected authorities.

But they are required to operate by majority rule, so even all the elected councils together can have decisions forced upon them.

All the members have signed up to being a ‘single housing market’ and a ‘statement of co-operation’ binds every district council to provide for guestimated long-term future housing need if its neighbours cannot do so – or in other words to satisfy the growth ambitions of a rapacious and expansionist Oxford City Council, which claims to have already used up all its own land.

Now they have commissioned an economic consultancy (from Cambridge as it happens, despite their assertions of Oxford’s intellectual pre-eminence) to provide a truly incredible economic growth forecast, requiring 80,000 newcomers to move into the county to take new jobs.

This in turn is used to “justify” a forecast that 100,000 new houses need to be built, mainly to accommodate the new arrivals. That’s a 40 per cent increase in our total housing stock, irrevocably destroying the character of our county.

Our elected district councils seem to have wandered unthinkingly into a trap they had helped the city council and its unelected allies to set for them.

The local enterprise partnership, the single housing market, the statement of conformance, the commitment to ‘cloud cuckoo land’ development, all without any consultation with their electorate.

Never mind Europe, we need a referendum in Oxfordshire to claw back our democracy from this unelected city-led quango, before it completely destroys our beautiful county.

Michael Tyce
Campaign to Protect Rural England
Thame