We should be focused on increasing the number of homes, particularly family homes, while also improving their aesthetics. Too many developments look like very tall, soulless, human greenhouses that some of us would not even place our house plants in; they are that ogreish.
This was a David versus Goliath fight. People from all backgrounds came together with a shared purpose: to protect our farms and greenbelt whilst advocating for the appropriate development that our community needs.
We need a common sense approach to Biodiversity Net Gain.
Local borough councils should be allowed to retain and use more of the Business Rates collected in their area. This not only would provide more funding, but it would be an incentive to increase local business activity,
Research from the Centre for Policy Studies, for example, found that rents in London increased from around 15 per cent of household income in the 1980s to approximately 40 per cent by 2021.
Voluntary planning consultations and hearings are systematically unrepresentative. Participants are disproportionately older, wealthier, whiter, more likely to be homeowners, and far more hostile to new housing than the communities they claim to represent.
There are always temptations for oppositions to back measures which make it harder for governments to do things. Yet such tactics must be treated with great care.
If reorganisation becomes an exercise in scale for its own sake, producing larger authorities, remoter leadership and weaker local voice, communities will feel even further removed from the decisions that shape their homes and increasingly disenfranchised.
The proper place of polling is marketing, yet too often politicians defer to the public on granular policy questions.
We must protect rural communities from inappropriate, infrastructure-poor expansion. Planning is not merely about where we build—it is about who we are as a nation.
Residents see local plans overturned, neighbourhood plans ignored, decisions made under duress, and appeals upheld in ways that feel opaque, unfair, and costly.
Instead of tackling the rot at the heart of the system, the housing minister has brought it into government via his advisors.
De-risking development in ways that are locally acceptable can rapidly diversify supply and create bedrooms. This, I would judge, is good Conservative policy.
Conservatives have historically led every stage of Britain’s nuclear storyl from Magnox in the 1950s, to Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactors in the 1970s, to Pressurised Water Reactors in the 1990s.
The homes we construct today will form the landscape of Britain for generations. They will shape how children grow up, how neighbours interact and how communities perceive themselves. Building well is therefore not an aesthetic indulgence; it is an act of civic stewardship.