Tories Would Abolish the Environment Agency and Natural England
Andrew Griffith will use his first conference speech as shadow chancellor to promise the abolition of Natural England and the Environment Agency, the scrapping of the Future Homes Standard and of the packaging producer scheme, a single developer levy in place of section 106 and the infrastructure levy, departure from the Aarhus convention, and a third runway at Heathrow. The party says the housing measures would cut up to £50,000 from the cost of building a home.
“No one else is coming to save our economy,” Mr Griffith says in his extracts. “Only we can inject reality, tell the hard truths and make this a country we are proud to hand on to the next generation.” He calls the tax code “a cat’s cradle of complexity” and Andy Burnham’s programme “a socialist fever dream of the 1970s”, and on aviation refuses “to accept for a single moment that the country of Brunel and Bazalgette, of the vaccine taskforce and the Mulberry harbours, has to sit around waiting until the 2040s to get a third runway built”. Katie Lam, the new shadow housing secretary, says removing the enforcement bodies means “anti-growth ideologues can never again hold our country hostage”. The weakness is arithmetic: the £50,000 is the party’s own figure, unmodelled and unattributed, and no costing has been published for any of it three weeks before the Budget. The reaction told its own story about where the Conservatives now sit. Robert Jenrick, speaking for Reform, said they were “once again copying our policies” and still could not match a £15,000 tax-free allowance; Daisy Cooper for the Liberal Democrats called them “a pointless anti-growth anti-business party”. Watch whether shadow Treasury ministers, told to simplify the tax code line by line, produce a number that survives contact with 28 October.