Read excerpts from the interview below or listen to the interview in full here: First of all, why are local elections important?"Everyone in this country cares about rates of crime and anti-social behaviour and I believe one of the ways to cut those rates is to make sure we have good strong local councils providing clean streets, getting rid of the litter and graffiti and broken windows and making sure our neighbourhoods are going up rather than down. | "We need what I call a revolution in responsibility - everyone's got to play their part." | | Conservative leader David Cameron |
"Clean streets are safe streets, and if we sort out our neighbourhoods in terms of cleanliness then that helps to cut crime. If we care about cutting crime, so let's go out and vote in the local elections." Let's look at some of the issues for Berkshire - for example some people believe we're being swarmed with people from Eastern Europe and that it's having an affect on local services - what do you make of the situation there?"We advised at the time that the Government ought to have a transitional scheme rather than just opening the doors to everyone from the new entrance to the European Union countries. "The Government should have taken our advice and as a result there has been a very large inflow of people - who are working hard and making a great contribution to our country - but I think for the future we do need a better system for asking, in terms of migrants from outside the European Union, 'what benefits will you bring to us as a country' and also asking for us to measure the cost in terms of health and education." Housing - and house prices, here in Berkshire they're just going up and up, especially if you're a first time buyer..."It really is tough this, what we're seeing is young people living at home with their parents for much longer, the typical mortgage they're taking out can be three times what it was ten years ago. "There's no magic wand solution to this, but what I've been saying to Conservative councils is 'let's do all we can to promote rent-to-mortgage schemes' - where young people can start by renting a home and just buying a share of the house. As they get better off, they can increase those mortgage payments. "Also we should look at Community Land Trusts where the Community Land Trust owns the land but the young person buys the building - that cuts the cost." And 'living' in Berkshire is also really expensive..."It 'is' expensive and I understand that if you move house, the stamp duty bills are huge. "Government has to cut its cloth better and not increase spending so rapidly cos otherwise taxes go up rapidly. "We've seen council tax almost double, stamp duty - massive increases, right-to-buy discounts have been removed, so home ownership has become a lot more expensive for people." Talking about crime - in Wokingham a young man was jailed for killing two Wokingham teenagers, and there's the Mary-Ann Leneghan case - drugs seem to be a very big issue here in Berkshire. What can be done?"The truth is with crime, the Government's got a role to play but we're all in this together. "We need what I call a 'revolution in responsibility' - everyone's got to play their part. "Yes - the Government's got to put police on the street, get rid of their red tape, untie their hands. Yes - we've got to build prison places so courts can send down dangerous offenders. "But we're never going to cut crime unless parents bring up their children properly and schools teach the difference between right and wrong and business stop selling alcohol to children - we've all got a role to play and one thing I'm determined not to do is pretend that Government has all the answers." Finally, what can you do for our rural parts of Berkshire?"Well we've got to keep Britain farming. I really want Britain's countryside to be a living working countryside, not some quaint museum. "One of the things I talked about this week was 'let's make sure the Government, as a procurer of food, buys more 'British' food'. "At the moment the Government's pretty hard-pressed to tell us how much British food they buy. "When it comes to the vital things in local areas of saving our court houses, police stations, care homes, post offices - there's a whole range of steps we've got to take. The Sustainable Communities bill which we're taking through Parliament will help but it's lots of things to keep these rural communities alive." | 
