Tories plan ‘bonfire’ of red tape in bid to speed up development – Griffith

Shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith committed to a “bonfire” of red tape as he set out the Conservatives’ ambitions to lower taxes and speed up development.

The Tories have pledged to scrap net zero rules for new housing, abolish the Environment Agency and Natural England, and expand Heathrow Airport.

Billing the proposals as the “the most ambitious deregulation project in a generation”, the Conservatives said the measures would help cut the price of a new home by an estimated £50,000.

Mr Griffith will unveil the party’s economic plans at the Tories’ annual conference in Birmingham on Monday as the party seeks to reverse its fortunes after suffering its worst ever electoral defeat in 2024.

Speaking to broadcasters before his speech, he said the Tories’ first budget would be “tax-cutting” if they returned to power after the next election but warned some measures would take longer to deliver.

Mr Griffith confirmed both he and Tory leader Kemi Badenoch “ultimately” want to remove inheritance tax, but said the party would first need to ensure the move was funded.

“There’s lots of things that we would like to do, but the job of chancellor is to make sure that those can be paid for,” he told Sky News.

“We’re going to have a very difficult situation. We won’t be able to do everything that we want to do on day one.”

Dismissing suggestions that new pledges like abolishing the £100,000 earnings  threshold for free childcare amounted to “looking after the rich”, he argued the Tories wanted a “simpler” system for everyone.

“We’re talking about GPs, deputy headmasters, senior police officers, people who are in the armed forces, and this is a terrible cliff edge,” he told LBC.

He told GB News: “Our first budget will be a tax-cutting budget and we will get the country growing again really fast.”

Andrew Griffith (right) speaking to workers during a visit to Rolls-Royce Control Systems in Solihull (Jacob King/PA)

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Asked whether new proposals to axe arm’s-length bodies and requirements for new builds were part of a “bonfire of regulations”, the shadow chancellor told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think that’s a pretty fair summary in all honesty.

“What we’re trying to do is get Britain to be prosperous again. Give people hope that their future’s going to be better.”

Mr Griffith denied the proposals would amount to a “free for all” where local objections to new development go ignored.

He said the plans were “about the agencies, about the complexity, the morass, the spider’s web” rather than “removing any constraints on where people can build”.

To cut the price of a new-build property, the Conservatives plan to ditch the future homes standard and housebuilding rules coming into force next year, which will mean planners must include low-carbon heating technology such as heat pumps or district heat networks.

So-called section 106 agreements and the community infrastructure levy, which can require developers to pay for infrastructure including affordable housing in the area where they plan to build, would also be replaced by a single charge in a bid to speed up approvals.

Natural England and the Environment Agency would be abolished and their functions taken into the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) under the proposals.

Elsewhere in Mr Griffith’s plan is a proposal to scrap the extended producer responsibility, which was set up in an effort to make producers pay for the costs of managing packaging when it is thrown away.

Removing it could lift a £1.5 billion burden from businesses, the Conservatives have said.

The shadow chancellor will also pledge to “simplify” the tax code, which he described as a “cat’s cradle of complexity”.

He will promise to back a third runway at Heathrow, drawing a dividing line between the Tories and Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who has so far resisted endorsing the project as he says he wants to avoid prejudicing any planning application.

“Countries on the rise have the best infrastructure and connectivity to the world but our national hub airport is being held back. The next Conservative government will do whatever it takes to end the delays and boost capacity by backing the third runway,” the shadow chancellor is expected to say.

Labour chairwoman Bridget Phillipson said the Conservatives wanted to take the country “back to a politics that let so many people down over the past 40 years”.

She said: “The Tories had 14 years in government to grow our economy and help people get on the housing ladder, but they completely failed at every turn.”

Daisy Cooper, the Liberal Democrats’ Treasury spokeswoman, said: “No-one can take anything the Conservatives say on the economy seriously given their litany of fantasy-land financial pledges.”

Reform UK Treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick accused the Tories of “copying our policies”.

But he said the Conservatives cannot match one of his party’s pledges to raise the personal allowance – the amount a person is allowed to earn before they start paying income tax – from £12,570 per year to £15,000.

He claimed this was because the Conservatives “refuse to cut migrant welfare, net zero subsidies and the ballooning benefits bill”.