Chairman of British Conservative Party Grant Shapps has tried to silence emails that showed he \u00c5\u201cmisled MPs\u201d when he was housing minister.\n<\/p>\n
New embarassing revelations show Shapps asked his former colleagues at the Department for Communities and Local Government to prevent the release of internal correspondence relating to him, at a cost of thousands of pounds.\n<\/p>\n
The emails, finally released after a year-long battle and intervention by the Information Commissioner, contained civil servants\u00e2\u201e\u00a2 expression of concerns that Shapps deceived MPs on the number of affordable houses the government was building when he was housing minister.\n<\/p>\n
Shapps had claimed in an address to the parliament that the current coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats will built more affordable homes in five years than the previous Labour governments had done between 1997 and 2010.\n<\/p>\n
However, the correspondence showed that his colleagues had warned him about using such inaccurate figures again.\n<\/p>\n
The disclosure drew angry reactions from the Labour Party with shadow Communities Secretary Hilary Benn saying the attempt by Communities Secretary Eric Pickle to shore up Shapps\u00e2\u201e\u00a2s position has been a huge waste of taxpayer money to cover up his department\u00e2\u201e\u00a2s failure in dealing with the affordable housing problem.\n<\/p>\n
\u00c5\u201cInstead of wasting taxpayers\u00e2\u201e\u00a2 money to try and avoid his duty to come clean he should have been working to stop the drastic decline in affordable housing,\u201d Benn said.\n<\/p>\n
AMR\/HE<\/p>\n