The Teal Paper is contagious

Reform UK wrote “The Teal Paper”. This week, the Conservatives are giving it a second launch.

The Teal Paper is Reform’s planning manifesto, very focused on making development viable again and being pro-business.  Every developer worth their sites either has, or should read it because it will change the political view of viability more than anything else published this decade, because parties chasing the same voters copy each other’s homework.

For years, developers have encountered a peculiar version of Conservative economics. Enterprise is celebrated, investment is encouraged and growth is demanded, right up until somebody proposes building something. Then the party of business discovers another landscape to preserve, another restriction to impose and another reason why the homes should go somewhere else.

The retreat from housing targets under the last Conservative government captured that instinct perfectly. The political priority became reassuring existing homeowners that change could be resisted.

Now, the Conservatives are proposing to replace Section 106 and CIL with a single levy, scrap the Future Homes Standard and abolish Natural England and the Environment Agency.  This isn’t going quite as far as Reform generally, but it’s close.

I personally am incredibly in favour of this change.  The arrival of the Building Safety Levy last week was yet another straw upon the camel’s back and everyone in the industry is exhausted by the fact there are more different taxes on housebuilding than cigarette manufacture. 

Badenoch’s conference message, that wealth must be created before it can be distributed, brings that argument into the Conservative mainstream. In planning, it should mean recognising that a viable development is the foundation on which everything else depends.  Politics built around enterprise must accept that enterprise changes places. It brings construction, density, new neighbours and disruption. The instinct to preserve everything as it stands must fall away on the Right.

Reform still has its own contradictions, particularly its determination to constrain greenfield development. And Conservative councillors will need some persuading when this new enthusiasm reaches their wards. For developers and land promoters, that is where the opportunity lies: making the commercial reality of delivery part of the political case for a scheme.

At CCP, we welcome that opening. Viability is moving to the centre of the debate, and the right is being challenged to choose between backing business and blocking the builders.

The Teal Paper is contagious. The Conservatives have caught it.