Max Booth
Editor
Earlier this year Conservative YIMBY was founded this February with three aims: Make the Conservative Party the home of the builders, drive free market innovation in development, and protect British heritage by building beautiful.
All immensely noble aims – but how will these aims be achieved?
What drives these new Thatcherite YIMBYs?
Those were the questions that I set out to answer when I sat down with Conservative YIMBY Chairman, Sir Simon Clarke, earlier this summer, deep in the bowels of Conservative YIMBY and UK Onward’s shared HQ.
Why housing matters now
The first thing Sir Simon said is that, for him, housing is the number one issue holding people, especially young people, back.
He explained the thesis that he, and his jolly band of fetching “Build Baby Build” cap-wearing Gen-Z comrades, hold as the root of the housing crisis – supply has been constrained far too much, and too little land has been opened up for development.
“We’ve built in scarcity and uncertainty to our planning system. And until you simply have more land available to developers to build on, you will continue to have very high house prices,” he added.
Fighting the good fight
As a result, Sir Simon decided that the Conservative Party needed its own YIMBY group and, in late February, Conservative YIMBY was unveiled to the world – seven months after the birth of Labour YIMBY, and the loss of Sir Simon’s parliamentary seat.
Sir Simon said he hopes to provide a space for people on the centre-right to “get stuck in” with pushing the pro-housing agenda forward.
He said he wants to provide constructive solutions for his Party to become, once more, the Party of home ownership.
But, some would argue, it will take some considerable effort for the Conservative Party to metamorphosize into a party that young people with ambition can lend their votes to again.
Sir Simon himself pointed out that the cutoff age at the last General Election at which people became more likely to vote blue– that is, dark blue – than red, was 63.
He said: “It is imperative that the British Conservative movement understands the significance of this. Our vote is dying. Literally, it is dying.
“Put another way, of the roughly 6 million people who voted for us last year, one in six will probably die by 2029. We cannot sustain ourselves as a political movement by not having a pipeline of future voters. That’s why we have to act.”
Bringing the voters along
The Conservative YIMBY Chairman makes no equivocations that the loudest local voices are often NIMBY, sometimes ferociously so.
He pointed out that often “a small minority can make a huge noise,” and that for almost every application, there is a group “vociferously opposed”. Yet, he argued, the silent majority is either supportive or “agnostic” – those are the voices that we need to capture.
He also stressed that the Conservative YIMBY argument is not that every application will be appropriate, “It doesn’t mean that setting up some gargantuan project for skyscrapers in the middle of Oxfordshire would be the right thing to do.”
What then, is the approach he wants to take? “The default presumption ought to be that more homes be built – to a good rigorous design code and with the appropriate infrastructure – that’s a social good. And I think that’s the battle we can win.”
Assessing the government’s progress
The Conservative YIMBY stance on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill is that, while it’s somewhat of a step in the right direction, it could “be made better”.
Sir Simon listed “low hanging fruit” that he wishes the Government to pluck – nutrient neutrality, the “NIMBY neighbourhood planning loophole,” in which, neighbourhood plans serve to block rather than promote development and streamline appeals timetables.
While he believes the Government are “absolutely sincere in wanting to do the right thing,” Sir Simon said issues such as habitat regulations will present challenges over the years ahead.
Contrastingly, he said he knows “for a fact Kemi wants to make this a reality for people”. He highlighted the fact that his team at Onward have been formally appointed as partners to the Conservative Party in developing pro-housing policy as evidence of this.
He remarked: “We wouldn’t have taken on that commission if we didn’t believe that we were going to be listened to and would have the chance to make a real difference.”
