What 'Conservative YIMBY' should say (starting with we're not YIMBYs)

The Conservative Party is the party of the suburbs and it should simply say “we want to build a new suburbia and here’s how we’re going to do that”.

Some Conservatives have, at last, launched a ‘Conservative YIMBY’ group to campaign for pro-housing, pro-development policies within the Party. Its chairman, former minister and MP Simon Clarke, in presenting the group, reminded us that Britain has a housing crisis, that we used to build a lot more homes than we do now, and that housing prices relative to income haven’t been as bad as they are now since the 1870s. As yet the group has no proposals on how to fix the problem, I assume they’re going to have a chat about this before running any ideas up the policy flagpole. So here, ahead of this, I’m going to share my view on how to fix the problem with a little more detail than my regular call to scrap the green belt, reform planning and build more houses.

First, don’t be YIMBYs. I know you’ve called yourself ‘Conservative YIMBY’ but the well-connected and supported YIMBY movement has not succeeded, even where it has pushed through policy changes. This is because the YIMBY movement is obsessed with urban densification as a solution to housing crises when most of the evidence suggests otherwise. Plus densification has a host of other social pathologies - poor health, fertility collapse, crime - that we should consider. And the anti-car, anti-suburb, flat-life that some single, male professionals may enjoy is not most people’s aspiration.

Second, realise that the cause of the problem is primarily the lack of land supply in places with high housing demand. Britain’s assorted crises are, in large part, all determined by either high energy costs or state control of land use. Dealing with the second of these requires Conservatives to commit to ending the most damaging nationalisation of the Attlee government - removing our right to build something on land that we own. In the first half of the 20th century assorted left wing groups emerged from Britain’s cultural elite to tell us that we had to stop the natural evolution of communities determined by the preferences of a growing middle-class. Pejorative terms - ‘sprawl’, ‘ribbon development’, ‘unchecked development’, ‘suburban dullness’ - were used to make the case for sealing cities and large towns inside ‘green belts’ where nobody would be allowed to do anything that wasn’t already being done. The lion’s share of our housing problems can be laid at the door of Patrick Abercrombie’s London Plan and the other organisation he helped found, the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE).

Third, social housing is part of the problem, not part of the solution (at least in its current form). Simon Clarke talked in his opening video about how many homes we built in the 1960s. And the response from the left will, of course, be to point out that half of this development was council housing - built by the state. But the legacy of men like Poulson and T. Dan Smith was poor quality high rise estates built using corruptly procured modular systems and requiring repeated dollops of taxpayer ‘investment’ to stop them collapsing into piles of useless rubble. And, because the national government was paying for this housing it insisted on setting rents (something fans of Dennis Skinner and his brother might recall). Today this means rents being significantly lower than the market level. If, as is the case with central London boroughs, up to 40% of housing stock is social housing - rent controlled - we should not be surprised that there’s a lack of market rental and, what there is, is ridiculously expensive.

Fourth, the Conservatives believe in people owning a real stake in our nation and that means supporting home ownership not renting. This is why Conservatives introduced right-to-buy and also why we’ve pursued foolish first time buyer subsidies as a means to help people onto the ‘housing ladder’. Conservatives should set an aspiration - I guess, Keir Starmer would call it a ‘mission’ - that a person on average earnings should be able to afford, on those earnings alone, to buy a home in which they might start a family. Conservatives need to talk about home ownership in terms of sociology rather than economics - it is about rootedness, family, and community, not just cash and economic growth. The city-booster talk of agglomeration so popular with YIMBYs should be replaced with ideas of social cohesion, and that good old idea of an Englishman’s home being his castle.

Fifth, any housing strategy that works will start with breaking things. Precious things like the green belts, planning committees, and hugging either bunnies or trees. Conservatives do think we are stewards of the land as much as its owners but modern environmentalism has been entirely taken over by the wealthy and guilt-ridden owners of houses with great views of open fields. The purpose of environmental regulation is no longer primarily to protect the environment but is, instead, an unholy alliance between the degrowthers of the Net Zero Climate Cult and assorted NIMBYs and BANANAs aimed at preventing any development taking place. Similarly local councils and planners will construct massive fortifications around their system and blame everyone and everything except their precious planning controls for the housing crisis. And there are hundreds of Conservative councillors sitting on those planning committees who will line up to attack anyone who suggests their committees might be part of the problem.

Sixth, don’t be like the last government (and probably the current Labour one too) and get suckered into cute and simple ‘solutions’ to the problems of housing. Remember street votes, the idea that we can densify England’s suburbs by getting the people who live there to vote on knocking down their homes and building five story mansion blocks? The reason why Michael Gove, then housing minister, and others got so excited about this idea, and the whole idea of gentle density, isn’t because it was ever going to work but because it offered protection to their green belt riddled suburban and exurban constituencies in Surrey, Hertfordshire and Solihull. We have expensive housing because we don’t supply enough land and the resolution lies in allowing people who own land to build a house on that land, not in trying to turn West Wickham into Maida Vale.

Finally, make the case for there being more development land. All of England’s current housing sits on less than 5% of the nation and this includes gardens, garages and suburban highways. If we want to get four million or so new homes - at suburban density - we need to build on another 1% of England, that’s all. The ‘concreting over the countryside’ argument is simply a lie. And the best way to get this development to happen is to tear up those sixth form geography resources about ribbon development and garden cities, confine the likes of Ebeneezer Howard and Patrick Abercrombie to a box labelled ‘nice but wrong’, and allow people to build houses. Labour is going to fail on housing because, for all the ‘I’m a YIMBY’ proclamations they don’t understand that the housing crisis wasn’t made by developers or bankers but by politicians and regulators. If Conservative YIMBY doesn’t step beyond the city-booster, strategic planning paradigm that dominates the pro-housing debate then their contribution will be simply “us too” as everyone lines up behind a planner, city-booster approach that will fail, not only to meet housing needs but also will further damage the social fabric of England by prioritising anti-family, child-unfriendly, car-hating dense urbanism over what most folk prefer. And the thing most folk prefer, we call it the suburb.

The Conservative Party is the party of the suburbs and, if a Conservative YIMBY group is to make a difference it should simply say “we want to build a new suburbia and here’s how we’re going to do that”.