South Holland District Council leader Gary Porter's letter on the upcoming election

South Holland District Council leader Gary Porter writes about the upcoming elections and what candidates must do if they want to succeed...

As people will know from the coverage in this paper, we are now in the swing of the local elections.

There are a range of candidates standing across the district, but unfortunately our community has been shunned by the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties.
The second largest group of candidates standing are the South Holland Independent party (I’ll leave others to work out the conflict between those last two words).

They have started to campaign on the basis that they claim the Conservative Group, which runs the council, apply a party whip and that they wouldn’t.

The reality has been that, for the last twenty years, the Conservatives haven’t had a whipped vote because that is not how we operate.
The only time a whip would have been applied would have been if anyone wanted to vote against the delivery of something in our local manifesto.

Maybe the Independent group would operate differently, maybe they think its fine to make a pledge to the community and then wilfully break it or maybe they wont commit to doing anything in the first place.

Either way, it’s not a platform that I would want to elect someone on.

The scale of the challenges we face are such that a plan and a commitment to deliver, are a minimum prerequisite for anyone seeking to hold local office.

Gary Porter, South Holland District Council leader