When I grew up in Fareham in the 1960s and 1970s, I always thought of Locks Heath, Warsash and Sarisbury as local villages, surrounded by countryside, and far removed from the urban bustle of Fareham itself. Obviously things have changed. The Western Wards still enjoy some of the most beautiful scenery and countryside on this side of Hampshire, but those villages have expanded to the point where they are in danger of eating away the green spaces that make the area so special.

At the same time, Locks Heath has still very much kept its individual identity. Talking to people during this election campaign, at both ends of the huge Fareham constituency, I've heard people say that they feel cut off from what happens in Fareham - and that they don't feel that the decisions that are made in Fareham always take their needs into consideration. It's the same story in Sarisbury at the west of the constituency, and Portchester in the east. Neither community feels as if it lives in Fareham, but they still have to live under the rule of Fareham's distant borough council.

As Mark Hoban has pointed out in his contribution to the website, house-building (and especially in-filling) is an enormous issue in the Locks Heath area, as it is everywhere in Fareham. One man told me that he tries to avoid driving down Hunts Pond Road these days, as he finds it too depressing to see the green spaces he remembers being swallowed up by houses. And on the edges of the Western Wards, there is real fear about what might be coming soon. People have seen what has happened in Whiteley, where planners tried to create an artificial community overnight, without thinking about the infrastructure that would be needed to support it. They know that there are 3,000 more homes planned for Whiteley, and anything from 8,000-10,000 intended for the green fields between Fareham and Wickham. Then they look out at their own fields and woodlands, and wonder: are we going to be next? Rumours spread from house to house, and every day these residents look nervously out of their windows, half-expecting to see the builders’ lorries arriving.

Obviously people need homes. But they - and we - also need green fields, woods, and everything that is attractive about our local countryside. After all, people don’t choose to live in Locks Heath or Warsash because they want to live in the middle of a city. I believe that much tighter controls need to be exercised on planning and building, so that the needs of local residents are put first, rather than planners just inserting new homes into an area so they can tick a box on their target sheet.

Where there are new homes, of course, there need to be schools – and the Western Wards are lucky enough to have some of the best schools in Hampshire. I’ve heard that first-hand from my wife, who has worked in several of them as a supply teacher. But some people have said to me that, despite the excellent results obtained by Brookfield, which are well above the Hampshire average, they are worried that the school is simply getting too big. The Green Party believes strongly that we should support and defend existing schools, but also that large secondary schools can be alienating. The current plan to rebuild all the country’s secondary schools offers us the perfect opportunity to do so on a more human scale. Before any changes are made, however, residents need to be asked what THEY want.

There’s one more issue that affects all of us: transport. Nobody can deny that the public transport system across the whole of Fareham borough simply isn't good enough. You're fine if you live close to Swanwick station, but everywhere else, the bus service is virtually non-existent after 6pm. We need to completely rethink our local transport policy, especially with the oncoming danger of oil supplies running down and the need to avert the threat of climate change. And, of course, that takes us back to housing, as new houses without public transport facilities simply send more cars onto our already over-crowded roads.

All of this needs money – and if there was going to be a Green government on May 7th, I could explain to you how we would set about doing it. Sadly, that isn’t going to happen – not yet, anyway. But that doesn’t mean that, whichever party wins control of the country, Fareham’s MP can’t fight to preserve everything that’s good about our local community, help improve what needs improving, and save us all from the horrors of reckless planning decisions.