How the Tories could bolster London’s housing stock

What is conservatism without broadening and widening home ownership? It is a question that cannot be answered, many of the party’s MPs and supporters say, because it is so fundamental – and yet it is a link that has been broken.

“What works for the Conservative Party on housing is what also works for the country, and that is building up densification in London. The two go together,” one Tory MP tells me – and the party is now considering a range of new policies to do the obvious and boost London’s housebuilding.

“The Conservatives being the party of aspiration and hard work, being able to improve your life, is existential to our challenges with young people. That means we need to build homes.

“When we’re building sprawl in rural Buckinghamshire, or Oxfordshire or Cambridgeshire, which is politically difficult for us, that’s not what the market really is demanding. The reason that they have popped up in those places is because they’re commutable to London. So, the obvious thing to do is to increase the urban densification of London, which is actually what the demand is.”

Another MP tells me more bluntly:

“It’s not the done thing to really say aloud but obviously, as well as the thing that needs doing, urban densification and building in cities works for us politically.”

But there is a distinct need, they say, for the party to be “a lot more aggressive” about planning reform. Especially if they want to avoid building in their own rural seats.

Already there has been a push from its new intake of MPs, with 22 of them signing a letter with the NextGen Tories group, calling for policies to “build more homes,” with an emphasis on “gentle density” in cities.

Weald of Kent MP Katie Lam earlier this year pressed Housing Secretary Angela Rayner on London targets, saying:

“Demand for housing is greatest in London, which is where the economy most needs new homes. Building in London means less pressure on commuting infrastructure and house prices in places like rural Kent, but the housing targets for London have been cut.” 

As Britain Remade’s head of policy, Sam Dumitriu, tells me:

“If you have a London housing crisis, it gets exported to lovely, pleasant, rural parts of the country, like her [Lam’s] area, which is completely right – and probably it’d be much nicer to build more in London and keep these places very pleasant.”

Blake Stephenson, the new MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, wrote in ConHome last week that:

“We should be focused on increasing housing supply in areas where housing is most needed. Urban densification must be encouraged and enforced to deliver homes for the next generation.”

For all the reasons above there has been surprise from certain MPs that the party hasn’t been, so far, making more of what it would be doing in power – especially on cities – for housebuilding. “I am assuming it is part of the plan and we just haven’t got to it yet,” one MP says optimistically, “but I think appointing Onward to look at the issue is a step in the right direction”.

Another adds: “They’re quite clear on where they stand so it would be a surprise if we don’t look down that Yimby route.”

But other than a blanket push for higher targets – the Government recently set London a target of building 88,000 homes a year (cut by some 10,000) but we are very far from that; the last time the capital came close to meeting those numbers was in the 1930s – what policies can the Conservative Party actually push for to make it happen?

One MP admits: “I think Kevin [Hollinrake] gets that we can’t just build everywhere in our seats. I think he gets the next-gen stuff. But I don’t think he yet has a full plan to make it happen.”

Sir Simon Clarke, who in his role as Director of Onward is partnering with Hollinrake to “arm up” his policy review (with policy papers being submitted at the end of the month), describes the Conservatives as being “stuck in a muddle” over housing, harming “intergenerational fairness.”

“What has felt like a good campaigning tactic for conservatives in shire areas has morphed into something which is actually a stranglehold on our youth support.

“We have to acknowledge that Labour has stolen a march on this issue in relative terms. They at least have talked a better game than we have done, and they have reaped an electoral dividend for doing so.”

There are a number of ideas that Hollinrake could take on board, and some he is already considering. The Conservative YIMBY group, chaired by Sir Simon, hosts its summer party next week (Tuesday 15th), at which they will release their ‘London Plan’ featuring ten policy suggestions.

It is set to include proposals to give planning policy “real teeth” when a council repeatedly blocks schemes that meet their requirements. Applicants affected should be able to appeal directly to the Mayor or Secretary of State to receive a ‘builder’s remedy’: “Automatic permission if councils miss clear deadlines.”

That’s alongside pushing for lower fast-track thresholds, with reform to make the current 35 per cent affordable housing threshold more flexible, “allowing councils to lower thresholds in high-cost areas to encourage more small and mid-size schemes”. The document will read: “More fast-track routes, with more transparency and quicker decisions, will boost delivery without compromising quality.”

Or take what Dumitriu sees as Labour’s “wasteful and inefficient” preservation of industrial land by branding them ‘strategic industrial locations’. The main example is around Old Oak Common and a big industrial estate called Park Royal, home to the McVities biscuit factory; “I’m not sure it is the best use of London’s land,” Dumitriu says.

There are about 11 tube stations relatively nearby and developments in the surrounding areas that aren’t strategic industrial land are built very, very densely. So a well-connected area with proven demand to build and potential for redevelopment has been, as Dumitriu puts it, “completely hamstrung by the fact that we say this land can only be used for industrial use”.

One option would be swapping this strategic industrial location system in favour of a target for a level of industrial land within London, allowing better use of well-connected sites while shifting less suitable industry to other locations.

When I mention this to one MP, they respond: “On a similar vein, why are there three major prisons in zone 2 of London? That is prime land for needed housing.”

Sir Simon warns that the Conservatives risk looking like a party of obstruction in London:

“You can feel that the positivity Boris brought has gone. It feels like a city in decline. But we should go for the mayoralty in 2028 on a hopeful narrative. That’s possible if we sort ourselves out on housing.”

Dumitriu also highlights “supercharging estate renewal” as an obvious win. Many post-war council estates are “tall but low-density, with green spaces no one uses because they’re unattractive or unsafe” – these estates could be rebuilt quickly to a high density. 

He cites the Isle of Dogs, where 82% of residents supported regeneration plans.

“If you want to regenerate an estate, meet rules on height, density, social housing replacement, improvements for residents and you’ve been approved by a ballot – you should get automatic planning permission. These are wins that make basically everyone happy, but we make it absurdly difficult to do.”

While other developments going up often see a small reduction in surrounding house prices or rents, often down to competition, the places you don’t see this happening is around renewed estates because they make the area nicer, so people want to move in and it frees up housing all over London.

One MP has more radical suggestions when it comes to council houses:

“How many million of council houses are in central London, and how many of them are occupied by British citizens, or even people born in this country? We should sell a lot of it and redevelop it massively – and then, with the capital receipts because it’s a huge uplift in land value, we should build three times the amount council houses in somewhere like Blackpool, and put eight storeys of mansion boxes and sell it to the private sector in central London.”

Another MP says planning powers in inner London (outside conservation areas) should simply have “the blanket ability” to allow eight-storey mansion blocks by default.

There is one group taking matters into their own hands: the Charedi Jewish community in areas like South Tottenham who have found ways to build upwards, even in conservation areas, by agreeing to strict design codes. It could be done in Stamford Hill, potentially alongside other parts of London.

This idea of extending into more conservation areas, perhaps with a restriction for its use to only be for single families, not for HMOs, could be a way of making London more attractive, so when people’s families grow, they don’t have to move from area to area as much.

“We have kind of solved densification, but in areas that are like 60 per cent Orthodox Jewish. The rest of London, there’s a way to go,” Dumitrui jokes.

He argues London should move away from its highly individualised planning system toward zoning – defining upfront what can be built on each street, especially those designated by the mayor already as ‘opportunity areas’ where we should be building.

“Where we are clear we want to build, we should say: these are the rules for permitted development on this street – and if you meet them, just crack on with it.”

“Getting into a zoning mentality would be the absolute dream,” Sir Simon tells me – and the answers to these problems are clear, “we just haven’t really had the political courage to really pursue them”.

One promising model comes from Tower Hamlets, which recently put in for a supplementary planning document (SPD) for five areas, allowing mansard roof extensions without special permission, provided they meet certain design standards. Conservatives could adopt similar approaches across London.

For context, London built 80,000 homes in 1937. Last year, it managed less than half that.

For a four-storey block of flats back in 1937, its planning application consisted of three pages – now it is 1,250 pages long (25 pages more than War and Peace).

“It’s so bureaucratic,” Dumitriu says. “Someone’s got very rich at the end of it, but they’re not necessarily the people who are building houses – they are lawyers advising people that it is too difficult to build houses half the time.”

Many Tory MPs recognise the need to boost housebuilding and density in the capital – not just for Londoners’ sakes, but for the city’s productivity.

And as one of the earlier MPs put it simply:

“We could be really aggressive – and the thing about all this is there’s no political cost for us whatsoever.”

But whether the party is prepared to make that real “paradigm shift”, as Sir Simon says it needs to, is another question.

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