A CONSERVATIVE councillor is demanding to know if his own Tory administration has an agenda to encourage Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants to settle in West Cheshire.

Cllr Brian Crowe (Mollington) is concerned at Cheshire West and Chester Council’s (CWaC) pro-development agenda despite lower government projections.

Earlier figures being used to develop the new Local Plan showed 800 new households would be formed in the borough each year but this prediction has now dropped by 40% to just 495.

Cllr Crowe told the Local Development Framework Panel: “It’s a worry when one sees, at a seminar promoted by this council last week in Winsford, that this council is peddling the same old discredited statistics to justify building some 70,000 houses in Cheshire and Warrington over the next 20 years.

“My first question is, are those pursuing an increase in our population of Cheshire and Warrington of some 110,000 people up to the year 2030 relying on immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria to justify those numbers?”

He said the Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), supported by CWaC, was using figures double those considered by Government to allow for ‘reasonable growth and sustenance’.

Cllr Crowe, an opponent of the proposed 2,300-bed student village on green belt at Mollington, added: “Those flawed figures have put our green belt under constant threat ever since. Big business locally has a lot to do with that.”

Cllr Crowe asked why nearly half of all new housing in the borough was in Chester and highlighted that a major building programme in Nantwich had led ‘to empty properties and the complete stagnation of house prices’.

Cllr Crowe said Chester already had one of the highest repossession rates leading mortgage providers ‘to look for higher rates to justify their risk here’.

Jeremy Owens, strategic manager for spatial planning, said the council’s Local Plan was informed by its own evidence independent of the LEP. He said: “It doesn’t mean that in this one instance the council will automatically translate the targeting and economic potential into its Local Plan. It hasn’t done that to date.”

Cllr David Robinson commended Cllr Crowe’s tenacity for driving home his concerns over many meetings despite being ‘ostracised’ by his own group.

However, he added: “I do though disagree on occasions with the examples he uses, particularly with the one he used this evening, picking on one particular ethnic group in his comments.”

Cllr Robinson said he presumed the lower household projection figures meant it was now ‘less likely’ the green belt around Chester would be affected but spatial planning manager Mr Owens responded that he ‘couldn’t speculate’ at this stage.

However, he accepted the new figures would ‘need to be considered in setting targets for new homes in the borough through the Local Plan’.

This would lead to a delay in the timetable for delivering the new Local Plan which would be made public on May 20.