What can we expect at Conservative party conference?

Article for the MJ

Author: Liam Booth-Smith   |  

Writing for the MJ,  Liam Booth-Smith considers what local government can expect at Conservative party conference. You can read the piece in full here or below.

A party conference is actually quite an impressive affair. Politics at its most professional and amateur in equal measure. The set piece speeches, the confluence of money and media, the sheer maddening concentration of everything. All blended with the activist base, free refreshment and candid conversation. It’s a political miracle that so much policy can come out of something Labour spinner and writer Damian McBride accurately described as an ‘18-30’s holiday in suits’.

So what can local government expect from this year’s Conservative Party Conference?

Given that 2015 gave us business rates retention, we might need to temper our expectations this year, if for no other reason than the fact both Theresa May and Sajid Javid have been pretty consistent with their messaging. Housing, devolution and economic growth is what they want to do business on with councils.

Government has given some signals around housing flexibility in the last two weeks. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see ministers announce a shift in starter home allocations, particularly given Gavin Barwell’s recent comments that the Government needs to consider broader forms of tenure.

The Government remains committed to finding ways of bringing more SME developers into the fold. Since the 1980s, the proportion of houses built by SME developers has more than halved. The Lyons Review specifically identified the ‘volume of builders’ as a concern and government could offer sweeter deals on finance and planning to help de-risk the market for SME developers.

Sweating brownfield sites will likely remain a priority, as will neighbourhood planning. A less well developed area of thinking is ‘off site’ development, where housing units are manufactured off the development site and then transported to it. Government might look to encourage more innovative forms of development with the hope of diversifying the developer market.

On devolution, clearly the new prime minister wants a different sort of relationship between central and local government. I think we’ve been frustrated by what Alexander Pope would call the ‘majesty in simplicity’. The prime minister and secretary of state said it remains an important plank of government policy and haven’t offered anything in contradiction, but the sector has remained sceptical.

The rapid withdrawal of the North East devolution deal, seen by some as a negative, was simply an honest response to a complicated situation. There was no salvageable arrangement in the circumstances and it is better to provide clarity than linger on. The secretary of state was right to act fast.

The key for councils is understanding where devolution needs to be different from previous iterations.

Clarity is an issue raised repeatedly with me. Government sources have been frustrated with the ‘copy and paste’ nature of some devo submissions.

Government still wants to get deals done, but only where it’s actually going to achieve something. If you can’t articulate what you want and why you want it, then you won’t be getting it. The implicit criticism of devo deals is that process has become the purpose. Any announcement made on devolution will be the aim of reversing that.

Mayors have been the central point of tension with regards to devolution. Clearly there’s less enthusiasm from the new administration, but I don’t sense any outright hostility. What we might see is mayors used as an elevated tool for bargaining, whereby the non-negotiable requirement for a mayor to get a devo deal will be relaxed, but for those areas wanting something more radical – dare I whisper it, greater fiscal devolution – then a mayor becomes necessary.

Finally, a reflection on Mr Javid. The communities part of his brief is often overlooked, but given the substantive questions of identity and solidarity posed by the Brexit vote, the symbolic importance of a Muslim secretary of state working to bring diverse British communities together isn’t lost on me.

‘If we’re going to live with each other, work with each other and tolerate each other, we have to understand each other,’ said Javid at a recent inter-faith conference.

His role in the broader question of how to put the country back together shouldn’t be overlooked, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he shared his views on how the Government might go about doing it either.