This selfie taken by Conservative David Reed MP shows him campaigning with “Build, build, build” Phil Skinner in support of the latest failure to get veteran candidate of many wards, Patsy Hayman, elected in the Exe Valley by-election.

Why is Owl surprised?

Only last week David Reed was falsely claiming that the level of housing in East Devon was down to the Lib Dem-led East Devon District Council. Here is what he wrote on 13 March, on his facebook page:

“We all know that our current sewage network in #ExmouthandExeterEast cannot cope with our current level of housing, let alone the tens of thousands of extra houses that the Lib Dem-led East Devon District Council are proposing for our area.“

This attribution to the Lib-Dem District Council couldn’t be wider from the mark. The real culprit is the man on his left – Phil Skinner!

Philip Skinner’s record as a primary architect and driving force behind the long standing Tory policy of building in East Devon is copiously recorded on “The Watch”. His, and his EDDC Tory colleagues’ policies, resulted in the current Local Plan having a development target of 950 houses/year. This was driven by the adoption of an aggressive “jobs led policy on” scenario.  Comprehensive studies showed only around 580 houses/year would be required to satisfy purely demographic and normal migration growth trends. 

This policy, therefore, resulted in an uplift of 370 or 64% on what is strictly necessary and is the target that the current EDDC coalition has inherited and the basis on which the government thinks reasonable to set its own growth strategy. Owl has already pointed this out to David Reed in a post last September.

Phil Skinner was also one of the drivers of the now defunct “Greater Exeter Strategic Plan (GESP)” which tried to get green field sites in East Devon to take the lion’s share of Exeter’s housing needs. It seems that there were always farmers in East Devon willing to “sacrifice” their land to this end. At the time planners confirmed that the GESP targets would over-ride East Devon’s local plan.

When the Tories lost control of EDDC, one of the first things the coalition did in August 2020 was to vote, by a massive majority, to pull out of GESP. Exeter is now having finding sites elsewhere to satisfy their needs.

To be fair, David Reed hasn’t been in East Devon all that long. Like his predecessor, Simon Jupp, he’s a “Blow in”. He still needs to read himself in before sounding off like this.

Here is puppet master Phil with David Reed’s predecessor as featured on Tory mailshots in the old Devon East constituency.

Phil Skinner was the leader of the Tories in East Devon until he was kicked out by the electorate in the May 2023 local election.

Despite this he is still pulling the strings.