James Crouch is Head of Policy and Public Affairs at Opinium.
“Build on brownfield now” was the bold headline of a press release earlier this year from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Unfortunately, the Government’s approach to housing in recent years has been far from bold.
It might be understandable, considering the fractious nature of the debate within the party. Nevertheless, the Party should be planning now to overcome this division and get its house in order. Conservatives should have confidence that it is possible for them to beat Labour on housing – but they should also know how essential it will be to them winning future elections.
One of the few areas Sir Keir Starmer has campaigned strongly on is housing, allowing Labour to steal a clear lead on the issue. Opinium’s latest polling shows that 34 per cent of voters trust Labour and Starmer most with housing, while only 17 per cent trust the Conservatives under Rishi Sunak, giving Labour a 17-point lead.
By comparison the Government, buffeted by crises, appears to fear its own voters’ reaction to its policies. Elected barely five years ago on a platform of ‘build, build, build’, this clear agenda (and political will to implement it) has gone, leaving the party adrift.
In the vacuum, Labour has stormed ahead with a bold offering on housebuilding. They even seem prepared to slay one of the holy cows of British politics: the Green Belt.
I imagine Tory ministers look at Labour in awe when it comes out with such policies and seemingly still wins support; it must seem like a total impossibility for the current government to go into this election saying anywhere near as loudly as Labour that they want to build more homes.
Nevertheless, this has become an increasingly important issue for voters. This is especially true for swing voters and for none more so than the young, amongst whom housing now competes with the economy as one of the single most important issues facing the country.
The Party must recognise the precarity of its current position, and plot a long-term course to regaining trust on this urgent question. To try and get at this problem, Opinium has developed a question which tells us if someone is a ‘nimby’ (not in my back yard) or a ‘yimby’:
“Which of these two statements do you agree with most on housing and planning policy? Should we “increase building and development to provide more homes and tackle rising housing costs” or “prevent excessive building and developments to maintain the character of local areas”?”
It is a crude measure, but effective. Our research shows that the British public are evenly divided on this question. We are a nation split between the nimbys and the yimbys.
The pain for the Conservatives comes when we explore what these people look like. Through our polling we can paint a pen portrait of the typical person who is most strongly in each camp. If you are a well-paid male graduate in his 20s or early 30s, you are highly likely to be a yimby. If you are a retired woman in her 60s or 70s, in suburban or rural areas, who voted Leave, you are highly likely to be a nimby.
Both of those people would be – or at least should be – someone we could imagine voting Conservative; no wonder then that the Party is not interested in starting that bunfight.
However, almost every Conservative will recognise the discord this issue causes. I once sat on a panel at Conference where this was a key talking point, and it is an experience I would rather not repeat. The Q&A afterwards was, shall we say, robust.
This might sound like I am an apologist for the Conservative Party’s decision to seal the too-difficult box as tight as it possibly can. Quite the opposite: the 2028 or 2029 general election campaign should essentially be planned for now, and thus we must have a new strategy.
The party needs a vision on housing that actually is going to address the crisis, and it needs to take its voters with them – not least because the current strategy, or at minimum how it has been implemented, has run out of road.
Returning to our measure on nimbys and yimbys, we asked each group what they think the two major parties’ stance on this question is. Those people who want to prioritise more homes have no trouble selecting Labour as the party of building, but just don’t really know what the Tories want.
Nimbys, on the other hand, suspect that the Conservatives are just as likely to build and develop as Labour. To put it more simply, saying you want to build, but with less clarity than the Opposition, is merely a recipe for maximising the political pain and minimising the gain. This leaves two major options open for the Conservative Party.
First, choose to become a party of protest, like the Greens, and go hell for leather on preventing all development. It might get some political points out of attacking a heavy-handed Labour housing programme, but the benefits would evaporate if the party gets anywhere near office again.
Alternatively, with its eyes set on being a party of government during a major housing crisis, develop a clear and coherent narrative for how much we should build, where we should build it, and how we can build it.
This might sound like a political impossibility now, for the reasons I have already laid out. But to accept it and be drowned by the tide is not an option.
While I do not have the space here to outline all the questions that need to be asked and all the steps that need to be taken, the aim of the strategy required is simple: the Conservative Party needs to be a party of housebuilding, for people to believe it will actually build, and to take its voters with it.
As importantly, this cannot and must not just emulate a Labour approach to building – housing must be a cornerstone of a far bigger platform for government.
Developing this coherent offering should give the party confidence to go harder on housing while broadening its appeal, for example by focusing on the deep connexion between housing and immigration, which Labour will find much harder to do. This would help with other structural problems facing the Tory vote, namely how to sell low immigration policies to the young, and a fit-for-purpose housing policy to the old.
What is essential is that developing this strategy has to start now. It is not a press statement, nor is it a speech. It will be years of hard work to reposition the Conservatives as a party of government, prepared to face up to the challenges of office. But if we wish the voters to trust us with office again, that work simply must be done.
The post James Crouch: To be again a party of government, the Conservatives must become again the party of housebuilding appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: James Crouch
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