General Election: Conservative candidate for North Beds blasts East West Rail

Richard Fuller is seeking to be re-elected as an MP at this week’s General Election.

He said: “I’m the only candidate to oppose EWR [East West Rail] because I know the damage that it will do.

“Currently, it’s estimated to lose £7 billion, and the Civil Service and the Treasury want that loss to be made up through housing growth.

“If you do the maths you’re going to be getting into the 10s, 20s, 30 thousand bracket of additional housing for the route from Bedford to Cambridge.

“[If re-elected] my work will begin straight after the election working with local residents, working with local parish councils, to oppose this utterly incompetently managed project, East West Rail.

“It’ll have a devastating effect on our countryside,” he said.

“We got very close to stalling it, and the Universal Studios can’t be used [if it goes ahead] as an excuse for building the last part of East West Rail because that isn’t an important part of the infrastructure needs of Universal Studios.

“That’s much more about railway stations on the Bedford-St Pancras line, Luton Airport and junction 13,” he said.

In a campaign video, Mr Fuller talks about there being “excessive housing development”, but websites that record MPs’ voting record say that he has voted to make planning easier.

“I don’t think that’s quite right,” he said.

“In terms of votes I supported an amendment to stop top down national targets.

“And if you look at the measures on changing the planning rules, there were some proposals by Mr Jenrick when he was community secretary to reform, quite radically, planning rules.

“[These went] away from individual planning applications to more zonal applications that would have made the process of planning more efficient.

“I thought that was a good idea, but you may have missed that I also put some amendments down.

“Particularly to empower neighbourhood plans which are the lowest level of planning rules, these are the ones developed by local communities, local parishes.

“I wanted them to have more democratic say, because really if we’re going to build more houses what I heard from many parishes is ‘we know what type of houses are needed in our area’.

“And I felt that they didn’t have enough power in the decision process compared to the national government and local government.

“And I’m not obviously against building more houses.

“We’re doing our bit, if you look at the Census in 2011 and Census in 2021 and look at the number of households, across England and Wales it’s up to six per cent, which is quite high by historical standards.

“But in Bedfordshire, certainly North Bedfordshire and Mid Bedfordshire, it is up 21 per cent, 23 per cent – that’s three and a half times the national average.

“So we’re doing a lot of house building naturally already, but I would support opposition to excessive housing development when it was clear that both the parish or town council and the local authority councillors were opposed,” he said.

The other candidates seeking to be the North Bedfordshire MP are:

Pippa Clayton – Reform UKPhilippa Fleming – Green

Uday Nagaraju – LabourJoanna Szaub-Newton – Lib Dem

The election will be held on July 4.