I ENJOYED Mr Hanlon’s letter re: housebuilding.

It seems to me the real issue is one of supporting infrastructure.

You can build as many houses as you like but how do you get to them? Where do the people go to see a doctor? Where do the children go to school? Which hospital can they attend?

What do we do with the additional sewage, the cars, the pollution, the demand for water and heating? Remember we are decommissioning power stations and two have burned down.

Whilst we sit on an island of coal and gas, we buy it from Europe.

We build all these houses, on the orders of central Government and their powerful inspectors, yet the development of the infrastructure to support them falls on the county council, who are having to make another £100m of cuts and simply cannot provide the money.

It seems to me that as long as we keep doing this, the county will get fuller and fuller and there will be no places in schools, no doctors’ surgeries, no roads that will be able to cope with it all.

Surely a common sense approach would be to halt the programme until all the necessary infrastructure reports and surveys have been done and then decide how many and where.

Local people must have a say in local affairs, so consult them with meaning, don’t discount them as worthless.

The trouble is that local government is supposed to have the powers necessary to determine these issues, but is overruled by central Government.

It beggars the question why bother with councils and why even consider super-councils or even the people who make up this county?

After all, we don’t even know how to feed ourselves, do we?

Roy Swales, parliamentary candidate for UKIP New Forest East