The Conservative Party will use its Monday conference slot to announce what shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith calls "the most ambitious deregulation project in a generation." The centrepiece: abolishing Natural England and the Environment Agency entirely, folding their "necessary functions" into Defra. The party claims this would cut £50,000 from the price of a new home — a figure that remains uncosted and unexamined. The proposals target nearly every regulatory layer between developers and profit. Section 106 agreements, which currently require developers to build affordable housing and fund local services like GP surgeries and schools, would be replaced by a vague "one stop" levy. The Future Homes Standard — requiring new builds to be zero-carbon ready — would be scrapped. The Aarhus convention, which gives community groups legal standing to oppose developments, would be abandoned. Kemi Badenoch's accompanying tract, "The Right Way," explicitly models itself on Thatcher's 1976 "The Right Approach," signalling ideological intent rather than technocratic reform. Shadow housing secretary Katie Lam's framing is revealing: environmental and planning bodies are cast as "anti-growth ideologues" holding the country "hostage." This is not regulatory reform language — it is elimination language. The political calculus is transparent. With the Conservatives polling third behind Labour and Reform UK, the party needs differentiation. Griffith frames the pitch against Andy Burnham's Labour conference, arguing Labour lacks a growth plan. The Heathrow third runway — which Burnham has expressed scepticism about — becomes a symbol of Conservative ambition versus Labour hesitation. What the proposals actually do is transfer costs. Abolishing section 106 means developers no longer subsidise the affordable housing and community infrastructure their projects necessitate. Those costs do not vanish — they migrate to local authorities already under fiscal pressure, or they simply go unmet. Communities near new developments get fewer GP places, fewer school places, and fewer affordable homes. The environmental angle is similarly asymmetric. Natural England and the Environment Agency exist because decades of unregulated development produced biodiversity collapse, flood risk, and water pollution. Absorbing their functions into Defra — a department that answers directly to ministers — replaces independent regulatory judgment with political discretion. The bodies' enforcement powers, already underfunded, would be further diluted inside a ministry that must balance environmental protection against its own growth targets. The £50,000 home price reduction claim deserves particular scrutiny. UK house prices are driven overwhelmingly by land costs, planning scarcity, and monetary policy — not by building regulations. The Future Homes Standard adds an estimated £5,000-£10,000 per unit. Even aggressive deregulation of construction standards would not close the gap to the claimed figure without assumptions about land value shifts that the party has not published.
