Gosport Conservatives have a new party leader who is promising to hold the Liberal Democrat administration to account.

Peel Common ward councillor Stephen Philpott was elected to take up the role as leader at the Conservative Party AGM on July 15 after Lee East’s ward councillor Graham Burgess stepped down.

Cllr Philpott said: “It is a huge responsibility being party leader and I have enough experience to do it as I have been a councillor since 1986 for 34 years.”

He added: ”It is quite a challenge and I have some ideas on how to do that. We are going to develop policies and present them to the electorate in 2026.”

Being in opposition there is only one job to be done, he said, which would be “holding the Liberal Democrat-run council to account”.

He said that at May’s local elections, the Conservatives won 44 per cent of the vote with Liberal Democrats winning 37 per cent. 

He believes his party won the vote in terms of public opinion, adding: “I think we did rather well but not well enough and we are still in opposition.”

“We believe this council is poorly run, we believe this council wastes its money and we believe it can do an awful lot better at delivering services for its residents. Better value for money and without throwing money down the drain on what we consider to be vanity projects. The Criterion and the bus station which is now known as the People’s Park.” 

People’s Park is the old bus station that was given £1.35 million in government money to clean up the site of contamination with a proviso that the land be used for housing while the Conservatives were running the council. 

The current Liberal Democrat council took over and decided to keep the site as a park, the money was returned to the government as there was no longer the intention to build housing on the land. 

Cllr Philpott said: “It’s been 18 months since the announcement about the park and we haven’t seen any detailed plans about what the park might look like. However, we are aware they are considering options that range between £1.1 million and £7.5 million to develop the site with a variation on the theme of a park, not a residential development.”