Truro and Falmouth election candidates on housing and crime

Here we ask the candidates standing in the General Election on December 12 in Truro and Falmouth for their views. The Liberal candidate was invited to take part, but we have received no response.

Housing & Homelessness

Jennifer Forbes – Labour

I have lived in rented accommodation around Truro for 16 years. I know how hard it is.

Everyone, especially our children, has a right to decent housing.

Expensive houses are popping up all over the Cornish countryside, and local people have no power to stop them. Many stand empty, only to be used as holiday lets and second homes, with owners who don’t even pay their fair share of taxes.

We should let Cornish people decide on housing needs, not faceless bureaucrats in Bristol.

We should prioritise house-building for local families in the greatest second-home and holiday let owners will pay extra tax to help reduce homelessness. A building programme of energy-efficient, well insulated and sustainably-built council houses.

Meanwhile, the council housing waiting list of 20,000 gets longer and longer.

Ruth Gripper – Liberal Democrat

Earlier this month over 100 people slept out at the Eden Project to raise awareness and funds for St Petroc’s homeless charity. Anyone who has walked through our town centres recently will have noticed the number of people sleeping rough.

Rough sleeping has been increasing since the 2008 recession and is one of the most visible signs of increasing poverty and inequality. Liberal Democrats will end rough sleeping within five years, and scrap the archaic Vagrancy Act that criminalises homelessness.

In Cornwall we have a growing population and need to build the right sort of homes for the people who need them – whether that is starter homes for young families or accommodation for older people. The Liberal Democrats would give local authorities full control over Right to Buy, so we can decide at a local level what is best for our area.

We would also allow local authorities to increase council tax by up to five times where homes are being bought as second homes. And we would help renters by limiting rent increases and introducing licensing for landlords.

Cherilyn Mackrory – Conservative

I am passionate about making sure that local voices are respected in the planning process.

I believe there is a disconnect between the homes currently being built in Cornwall and those that are actually required. After years of casework as a Cornwall councillor, I am aware that there is a need on the Homechoice Register for certain types of properties in these areas and these are not the homes being built. There needs to be more joined-up thinking around this.

If elected, I intend to do what I can to ensure that developers and planners make the best use of brownfield sites before building on more of our agricultural land, as required by the National Planning Policy Framework. I would like to encourage developments which are more energy efficient and support local construction businesses. It is also important that the local infrastructure to maintain the growing population is included in any planning.

Cornwall has done a fantastic job in recent years reducing the number of rough sleepers. However, there is still work to do and would like to work with local activists and agencies to find new and interesting solutions which can be the envy of towns and cities throughout the UK and help those who are most vulnerable.

Tom Scott – Green

It’s inexcusable that so much new housing in Cornwall is being shoddily built to very poor standards of energy efficiency, mainly for the benefit of private developers rather than for the people on low incomes who most need to be housed. We urgently need major changes to the planning regime to stop this happening – and to stop so much of the Cornish countryside being eaten up by such so-called “development”.

Many people here, particularly people on low incomes, rent their homes, but these are often very overpriced and substandard. We want to transform the lives of renters, by increasing housing security and bringing rent levels down especially in places like Falmouth and Truro where they far outstrip incomes. We need rent controls on private tenancies that reflect average local income rates in Cornwall. We also need to see an end no-fault evictions, which mean that landlords can just chuck families out onto the street at their whim.

We also want to make it easier for people who are now renting to buy the properties they live in from their landlords. Renters in houses of multiple occupancy should have a right to buy and run their homes as housing co-ops, for example.

Crime and policing

Jennifer Forbes – Labour

The Tories have got rid of 21,000 police officers and recorded crime is rising at the fastest rate in a decade. Tory cuts are devastating communities.

Labour has pledged to recruit 10,000 police officers, to be funded by reversing Tory cuts to capital gains tax. 

Ruth Gripper – Liberal Democrat

We are fortunate that crime in Cornwall is relatively low compared to other parts of the country – but it does exist, it can be very serious, and it is often hidden.

Domestic violence, human trafficking and particularly county lines are all issues that affect us here and which are placing new challenges on police. The Liberal Democrats will invest £1 billion to recruit and train an extra 20,000 police officers and restore proper community policing.

Under the Conservatives, council spending on youth services has been cut by 40 per cent since 2015. A Liberal Democrat government will invest £500 million in youth services so that young people have positive, healthy and safe places to be – places like Zebs cafe in Truro and the Dracaena Centre in Falmouth.

It’s also important to think about what the other side of this issue – our prison system. Our prisons are overcrowded and unsafe, full of people (often women) on short sentences for non-violent crimes. Reoffending rates are high. We will change this by focusing on what works to reduce reoffending.

Cherilyn Mackrory – Conservative

We are lucky to live in a part of the UK where crime rates remain relatively low. There are, however, increased threats from knife crime as well as from cyber and online crime. In addition to this, Devon & Cornwall Police must also work with other forces around the country to counter the ever growing and complex “county lines”, term used when drug gangs from big cities expand their operations to smaller towns, often using violence to drive out local dealers and exploiting children and vulnerable people to sell drugs.

The government has announced that there is funding for 20,000 additional police officers and Devon & Cornwall will be getting 141. This is a huge boost for Cornwall, however there is still more to do.

The Devon and Cornwall force is the largest in England and receives more tourists than any other force outside London, yet has one of the lowest police officer densities in the country. Devon and Cornwall officers and staff struggle to cope with an 11 per cent rise in crime in the months between April and September, a 14 per cent rise in incidents and an 18 per cent increase in missing people. I will work closely with my Conservative MP colleagues and our dedicated police and crime commissioner, Alison Hernandez, to lobby government for seasonal funding for Devon and Cornwall police.

Tom Scott – Green

Our criminal justice system is failing, and that’s because it relies on the idea that punishment is the solution to crime. It isn’t, and our prison system is actually making things worse – locking people up in sordid, overcrowded conditions with few opportunities for learning and development guarantees that they’ll commit more crime as soon as they get out.

The figures bear this out: 60 per cent of newly released short-term prisoners reoffend in the year after their release, often committing more serious crimes.

So we want much more focus on community-based policing, alongside investment in education and employment. We aim to halve the prison population, as the Netherlands has managed to achieve. To break the vicious cycle of reoffending, we want to see much more emphasis on rehabilitation to enable offenders to change and reintegrate into society. One way to do this which really does work is restorative justice, which means confronting offenders with the effects of what they have done and getting them to take responsibility.

We also want to see an end to the “war on drugs”, which has empowered violent criminals and done nothing to reduce drug usage or the harms that it can cause.