Bedford Borough Liberal Democrats have reacted with astonishment after the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government gave the go-ahead for a controversial housing development off Norse Road, overturning the decisions of both the Borough Council and the Planning Inspector.
Nigel Bakhai and the Liberal Democrats have slashed the Labour majority in Ealing Southall to just 5,070 votes. The Tories, despite the personal intervention of David Cameron, trailed home in third, picking up 22% of the vote.
Bedford Borough Liberal Democrats have repeated their calls for the unfair council tax to be scrapped and replaced by a fair system of local taxation based on the ability to pay. The calls follow comments from the North East Bedfordshire Conservative MP in which he said of his party that it will merely be "watching carefully" while the Labour Government continues to increase the financial pressure on local residents via the unfair and discredited council tax.
Radical tax plans that will take the basic rate of income tax to its lowest level since 1916 have been unveiled by the Liberal Democrats.
An independent watchdog has slammed the marathon counting process which saw the recent Mayoral and Borough elections in Bedford descend into a fiasco. In its report on electronic voting and electronic counting processes used in May's local elections in England and Scotland the Open Rights Group, a nationwide Non-Governmental Organisation which works to protect civil liberties and prevent data fraud, concludes that it 'cannot express confidence in the results of the electronic counting pilots it observed' and lists a catalogue of concerns with the Bedford Borough count in particular.
The Labour and Conservative Groups on Bedford Borough Council last night voted to look into introducing fortnightly rubbish collections, and failed to back the Lib Dems' call to reject fortnightly waste collections and instead focus on the promotion and extension of the existing 'orange bag' recycling scheme. Both the Tories and Labour supported an amendment to investigate the option of introducing fortnightly collections, and refused to join the Lib Dems in opposing the County Council's attempts to roll out fortnightly collections across the county.
