Any questions for Grant Shapps?

Grant Shapps is Shadow Housing Minister, attending the Shadow Cabinet, and MP for Welwyn Hatfield, a seat he first fought in 2001. In the 1997 General Election Grant challenged the Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes MP in his North Southwark & Bermondsey seat.

Grant was a member of the Public Administration Select Committee between May 2005 and spring 2007. In December 2005, he was appointed as a Vice Chairman of the Conservative Party, with responsibility for campaigning (including parliamentary by-elections) and in July 2007 Grant was promoted to Shadow Housing Minister.

Grant was born in Hertfordshire in 1968.  He was educated at Watford Grammar, before studying Business & Finance at Manchester in the late 1980s. In 1990, Grant founded his own printing company at the age of just 21. Originally started as a small printing shop, PrintHouse Corporation has grown into a major commercial design, print & web development company.

Grant married Belinda in 1997. The couple live in Welwyn Hatfield and play an active role in the community. They have a young boy named Hadley and baby twins, born April 2004, called Tabytha and Noa. Grant holds a pilot's licence and enjoys general aviation as a pastime.

If you have any questions for Grant please leave them in the thread below.

Comments

[Tony Makara]

What can be done to sort out 'Problem Families' living on council estates? Often it only takes one such family to move onto an estate to completely ruin it as they act as a magnet for other troublemakers in the area, encouraging youths to congregate, holding noisy partys and so on. I'd like to see tough measures taken against such families but I'm worried about forced evictions where children are involved. Is there a way to deal with such families while still ensuring that the children don't become homeless?

[matthew]

Grant - a big well done to you on Ealing. Getting the Conservative vote up by nearly 1% really was your achievement!

I want to ask about computer security. Can you tell us how a post seeming to be from you came to be posted on a Lib Dem web site bewailing defeat? How did they manage to pose as you?

[David Boothroyd]

Is your password still 1234?

[NigelC]

Is the Green Belt safe under the Conservatives?

Labour talk about maintaining the total acreage by compensatory additions when one site is redesignated for building. This defeats the purpose of the Green belt in containing urban sprawal and encouraging urban regeneration. Do the Conservatives recognise the real benefits the Green belt brings in forcing hard planning decisions for our towns and cities?

Secondly will the Conservatives abolish regional plans (whether drawn up by regional assemblies or regional development agencies) and return to county structure plans and district local plans?

[powellite]

Grant - how are you going to reconcile the visceral nimbyism in our party with the housing shortage and desire for people to own their own homes? I don't have a chance of getting a home in the south east at the moment with prices as they are, and yet any scheme to increase housing provision sees Tories throw up their arms about 'concreting over the countryside.'

Are you going to make us the party of social aspiration again, like Cameron said in his conference speech last year?

[Iain]

In the Kate Barker report Gordon Brown commissioned, it was calculated an immigration rate of 40,000 per annum would create a demand for over 450,000 dwellings within a 25 year period, that’s 18,000 homes a year. Trouble is we don’t have an immigration rate of 40k, more like 250,000 and that translates into a need of over 100,000 homes per annum, chewing up all and more of any house building increase Gordon Brown is planning.

But Cameron’s Conservatives having failed to define the issue of the housing shortage as primarily to do with Labour’s mass immigration policy have let Labour off the hook, and where as Cameron’s Conservatives have been remiss to failing to nailing the problem on Labour’s policies, Gordon Brown is not going to be quite so charitable or complacent, for I feel pretty sure he is going to define it as the failure of Conservative councils to permit the house building. So house building will be forced on communities who don’t want it, we will find Cameron’s Conservatives have been struck dumb, and instead of putting Gordon Brown in a difficult position, it will be Cameron’s Conservatives who go awol on the issue. Result no opposition.

So Mr Shapps are we going to see the Cameron’s Conservatives coming out fighting, laying the blame of the housing crisis where it rightly belongs on Gordon Brown’s Labour, their mass immigration policy, their destruction of pensions and savings, driving investment into property and to the buy to leters, or will it be more self censorship on immigration lest it upsets Cameron’s new found friends in the BBC, Guardian newspaper and metrosexual media, and result in the Conservative councils having to take the flack and abused as being ‘nimby’s?

PS there is one further point, its going to take years for Gordon Brown to increase house building, the housing pressures from immigration could be cut tomorrow.

[601]

Do you think the meaning of the green belt should be changed to include back gardens?

Should the quality of life report look at the huge impact the current levels of *ECONOMIC* migration is having on Britons? If so how much emphasis should be given to economic migration?

[Deputy Editor]

We mistakenly put this up a bit early so Grant won't be able to answer your questions for a little while. Do keep asking them though, thanks!

[malcolm]

What lessons do we need to learn from Ealing and Sedgefield?

[TaxCutter]

What changes should the party make in campaigning in key marginals?

[NigelC]

As shadow minister will you still be able to support the "No way to 10k" campiagn and other similar campaigns like www.stopharlownorth.com

[Felicity Mountjoy]

You are expert at the internet.
What role do you think blogging has in today's politics?

[treacle]

Why do we need a housing Minister?

With strong immigration controls, the immediate expulsion of all failed ayslum seekers and illegal immigrants, a tax system that discourages family sizes of more than 2/3 then a housing minister would be surplus to requiqrements and we could get on with demolishing some of the rubbish built over the last 5 years.

Your comments please.

[J]

What message have you got for the outspoken backbenchers who were critical of proceedings in Ealing?

[Chris Keating]

Do you have any evidence for your allegations about other parties bribing people to put up posters? If not, when are you going to apologise?

[Iain]

treacle, its an error to believe we need to expel illegal immigrants and failed asylum seekers, and pursuing this line of thought falls into the trap of the people who don't want these people to be made to leave, and who argue it would cost too much and take too long for us to do it.

What we need to do is to incentivise these illegals to leave, reversing the incentives they had to come here. Essentially we need to massively fine the companies and people employing these illegals, and I mean a really steep fine, and as all the income these people have earned can be classed as the proceeds of crime, confiscate all the funds of the illegals who are caught. So we should dry up the employment market which attracts these illegals, and in threatening the funds these illegals have earned, incentivise them to leave with their gains lest they lose it all.

[Oddball]

As we accept that HIPs is fatally flawed, do you have any new ideas as to how to speed up/simplify the buying and selling of houses?

Oddball