Rishi Sunak’s embrace of nimbyism lets down all those who are desperate for proper housing reform

By the time either Sunak or Truss wins the leadership contest, they will have accumulated a large, uncontested and reactionary policy programme dictated by an extremely small and unrepresentative clique of Tory members, argues Sean O’Grady

Rishi Sunak delivers a speech during a campaign event in Newmarket (AFP via Getty)

Right now, the government’s programme for the remaining two years or so of this parliament is essentially being written, ad hoc, by around 160,000 members of the Conservative Party.

Despite all the talk about “delivering” on the 2019 general election manifesto, pledges are being dropped and new ones added by Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss every time they turn up in a media studio or at a hustings. The new policies appear to edge to the right of even Boris Johnson’s plans, and are arrived at without much of the kind of care the civil service usually devotes to such work. It’s off the cuff, it’s rash, and if it’ll get a few more of the activists to cast their vote in the right column, all the better.

Sunak’s embrace of nimbyism is a case in point. Posing in a waxed jacket with, presumably, the rolling countryside of his North Yorkshire constituency behind him, he looks every inch the country gent. He pledges to protect “precious” green spaces and green belts: “Green belt land is extremely precious in the UK. Over the last few years we’ve seen too many examples of local councils circumventing the views of residents by taking land out of the green belt for development, but I will put a stop to it.

“Under my plans, if a local community has clearly judged a development to be inappropriate, there are no circumstances in which planning permission should be granted.”

It is the closest to enshrining nimbyism that the nation has come. Sunak appears to be going further than the 2019 pledge to protect the green belt. It is a blatant pitch for the votes of the many comfortably off Tories who live in villages and outer suburbs, or maintain second homes and holiday cottages in rural England. It is a policy precisely framed in the interests of these older property-owners, their mortgages long paid off and renting a distant bad memory.

It does nothing for the young or the poorer people who can no longer afford to live in these places. It does little for the rural economy, and is actively inimical to attempts to solve the housing crisis. Building fewer homes where people wish to live is simply a way of underpinning scarcity and high house values.

It is all a long way from the radical streamlining of planning procedures envisaged by Dominic Cummings. In typical style, Cummings, along with Robert Jenrick and Michael Gove, the ministers in charge of housing and local government, proposed a “revolution” in the rules. The intention was to disarm the nimbys and the timid councillors and planning officers, and unleash a wave of construction not seen since before the Second World War and the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. Houses, warehouses, and infrastructure for HS2 were to be almost literally bulldozed in an effort to boost economic growth and help relieve the housing shortage.

However, soon after the loss of the Chesham and Amersham by-election in June 2021, with planning and HS2 being key issues, the Cummings-inspired white paper was quietly shelved. Instead, we have government policy being seemingly dictated by an interest group – Tory members looking after their property portfolios in the shires.

And so it goes on. By the time either Sunak or Truss wins, they will have accumulated a large, uncontested and reactionary policy programme dictated by an extremely small and unrepresentative clique. Whatever else may be said about this process, it doesn’t feel especially democratic.