The Conservatives will announce a bonfire of regulations including abolishing affordable homes and community funding rules as well as scrapping Natural England and the Environment Agency. The shadow chancellor, Andrew Griffith, will say the party intends to “streamline regulations” that protect nature and oblige developers to include affordable homes and community services such as GP surgeries, to speed up infrastructure and housebuilding. The announcements on Monday are a signal that the party intends to refocus on the economy, an area where it has made relatively little progress in the polls.
Tory strategists believe there is a major opening to make gains against Reform and Labour, given the limited focus on growth from Andy Burnham and the chancellor, John Healey, at the Labour conference last week. The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, published a new tract on Sunday called The Right Way, which she said would be the bedrock that underpinned the party’s policy development before the next election. Polls have the party still trailing third behind Labour and Reform UK.
Introducing the document – inspired by Margaret Thatcher’s The Right Approach from 1976 – Badenoch said the Conservatives still expected to win the next election and needed to “hit the ground running … We will need to be ready from day one, having already shown people what kind of government we are going to be.” “Keir Starmer didn’t have a plan. That’s why he’s gone,” she said. We have to be different, different from Labour, and different from the party we were two years ago.” In a slew of announcements at the Conservative party conference on Monday, the Tories will pledge measures that they claim would cut the price of a new home by £50,0000, including scrapping net zero regulations on housebuilding, such as the Future Homes Standard, which requires all new homes in England to be zero-carbon ready.
The party will promise to replace section 106 agreements and the community infrastructure levy that oblige developers to build a proportion of affordable housing and support school and health service demands locally. Instead, there will be a “one stop” levy on developers, Griffith will say. The party has also pledged to abolish Natural England and the Environment Agency, “moving to a more streamlined regulatory landscape to protect our environment”.
Griffith will say in his first speech as shadow chancellor that the Tories would continue to back the expansion of Heathrow airport and leave the Aarhus convention, which makes it easier for community groups to oppose developments. Conservative shadow Treasury ministers will be tasked with finding new ways of simplifying tax for individuals and businesses, Griffith will say, calling the tax code “a cat’s cradle of complexity”. In his speech, he will say: “No one else is coming to save our economy.
Only we can inject reality, tell the hard truths and make this a country we are proud to hand on to the next generation. We face a prime minister that wants to return Britain to an imagined past. A socialist fever dream of the 1970s.
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