'Lavour has abandoned S.East'

He said: 'The government has changed the funding formula for local councils, which is directly responsible for the horrific rise in our council tax this year. They have ignored our warnings about the consequence of their policy of shifting funds from the south to the midlands and the north, and it is now the people who live here who are going to have to pay for that decision. They have completely ignored the fact that it costs more to provide services in the south-east because the cost of housing is so high.

'On top of that, the government is imposing thousands of new houses on the south-east, without providing the infrastructure. Rather than building on the green fields of East Sussex, they should be encouraging more business activity in the north, where there are already spare homes.

'The reality is that this government has given up on the south-east and has decided instead to give support, at our expense, to other parts of the country. For all their words about being a government for all the country, the truth is that they do not recognise that the south-east has real problems that need to be addressed.'