All change at Westminster. A new government and all the implications that brings to the District Council. My biggest ask will be for genuine devolution. Give local authorities the funding and the responsibility to deliver for our communities. We know our local areas best and we know what will work for us. No more micro-management from Whitehall.

Councils are experts in their fields. They deal with the practical rather than the theoretical. Actually delivering services not trying to devise a universal scheme for the whole country that is bound to fail. Central government’s interference stifles potential innovation at a local government level. Councils are unable to devise their own ways of doing things. Rather, smothered in a regime of petty rules and regulations championed by bureaucrats.

Let’s look at housing. It’s a massive issue for us in the South Hams. Once again, we will be given top-down targets for numbers of houses to build. It’s a policy that just doesn’t work here. It continues to be a great source of frustration that despite the council doing everything previous government asked of us, the housing crisis went from bad to worse.

The council has built more houses and so-called affordable houses than the target number prescribed. Our Joint Local Plan contains plenty of allocated sites for more. The five-year land supply for housing is in place and yet local working families and key workers cannot afford to live here. Pensioners find it almost impossible to downsize locally. The system is broken.

The setting of top-down housing targets and changes to planning rules have achieved nothing to date. I hear executives from developers whinging about planning constraints. They argue, if only they could fix the supply side by building more houses, then prices would come down. What a load of tosh. They could easily build more with the permissions in place. They don’t exactly because the last thing they want to see is prices coming down! It doesn’t fit their business model or suit their shareholders.

If only local councils were given the opportunity to solve their own housing issues. What we could do with the millions given to the big developers. We certainly wouldn’t spend it on huge dividends or obscene executive pay. The policies would reflect our housing needs and not be determined by market forces.

In many of our villages you will see small groups of council houses. We didn’t have to build hundreds of open market houses to achieve this. In our towns, there are whole council estates. (Unfortunately, many of the houses have been lost to ‘Right to Buy.’) Again, no huge developments to subsidise these.

There was a problem with lack of housing, so the state including national and local government built affordable housing for working people. We did it then, why can’t we do it now. If we continue to allow money and greed to be the driving forces behind house building, then we will continue to fail.