The Conservative Party should abolish National Insurance Contributions, shift candidate selection away from “gold star councillors” toward “intellectual seriousness”, and be honest with voters that without growth the triple lock risks unsustainability.

Those are among the more eyebrow-raising recommendations in a new report from Next Gen Tories – a group launched in 2023 to highlight how millennials have been hardest hit by today’s challenges – exclusively seen by ConservativeHome ahead of its official launch this week.

Titled Conservative Revival: A New Radicalism, the paper is one of the more ambitious, and potentially internally combustible, pieces of Conservative thinking to emerge since the 2024 defeat.

As James Cowling, founder and managing director of Next Gen Tories – and author of the report, alongside director of policy Josh Smith – tells me: “The risk of inaction and not showing change is greater than the risk of staying still.

“Kemi is doing well, they’re almost there, it’s just turning the dial up. The party needs to set the vision and up the boldness.”

The paper has attracted backing from both ends of the party’s generations. Established shadow cabinet ministers Andrew Griffith and Claire Coutinho have provided supportive quotes, as have three MPs of the new intake recently tipped for promotion: Katie Lam, Blake Stephenson and Jack Rankin.

It was Rankin who perhaps captured the paper’s spirit most directly: “From a single planning code across the UK, to an acknowledgment that the triple lock will be unsustainable without policies that achieve growth.

“This paper signals a clear break from the Conservative Party of the past. This is a blueprint for a party which confronts this country’s issues from core principles first.”

It is hard to cover each recommendation of the 32 page report but the core principles, intended as the golden thread running through Conservative policymaking and communications, are framed through three pillars: wealth creation, aspiration and community.

On economics, the diagnosis is stark. They note that real GDP per capita was barely higher in 2023 than in 2007, with Britain caught in a self-reinforcing loop of high spending, rising taxes and anaemic growth.

“For too long, debates about public spending have been conducted in isolation from economic reality,” the report reads. “Policies such as the triple lock can illustrate the point. While politically sensitive and unlikely to be scrapped, it should be stated plainly that without stronger economic growth, long-term guarantees of this kind become increasingly difficult to sustain.”

The remedy involves tackling three structural constraints: the failure to build housing and infrastructure at scale; public spending weighted toward consumption over investment; and an uncompetitive tax system. France’s nuclear build-out and New Zealand’s planning liberalisation are cited as models of what political courage can achieve. Hinkley Point C – “the most expensive nuclear project in the world” – is the counterexample.

On aspiration, the paper identifies the nearly nine million voters expected to be paying higher or additional rate income tax by the next election as natural, underexploited Conservative territory. “Aspiration,” Cowling tells me, “is open goal territory for the Party”. The ‘HENRY’ voter – High Earner, Not Rich Yet – is heavily taxed, priced out of housing and, the paper argues, ripe for conversion. Hence the pitch to abolish NICs and roll them into income tax to “reinforce the stance of supporting work”.

The community chapter calls for a “civic nationalism rooted in shared values, equal citizenship and common responsibility,” with enforceable language requirements and welfare access linked to integration milestones – an answer, the authors argue, to the fact that “high levels of immigration have been met with almost no policies to promote integration.”

“Framed positively,” the report says, the approach is not about exclusion but “fairness, cohesion and equal citizenship”.

It also makes a more pastoral argument: that pubs, sports clubs and community centres are “civic infrastructure” whose decline has “hastened the atomisation of our society,” drawing a direct line between pro-growth economics and keeping the local high street alive.

One of the paper’s most striking contributions is its diagnosis of “the seven deadly sins” of modern politics – failings attributed not just to the Conservatives, but to British political culture more broadly.

The first and most fundamental is a failure of political courage: the tendency to downplay the scale of national problems during a campaign, only to discover in government that you lack the mandate to fix them. Labour’s ‘Ming Vase’ strategy in 2024 is the cautionary tale – by declining to level with voters about the structural challenges, the paper argues, the government entered office without the authority to act.

The message to Conservatives is clear: don’t make the same mistake in reverse. The paper recommends spending 2026 and 2027 making a frank public case for the scale of change required, without needing to announce bold policies immediately.

The remaining sins – short-termism, institutional sclerosis, stakeholderism, hyperlocalism, demographic targeting and over-reliance on polling – are each dissected in turn. The critique of demographic targeting may act as a wake-up call. The 2024 election saw the party pander so visibly to older voters that it alienated younger ones it needed to win.

Citing Nuffield College research, the report notes that voters in their fifties and sixties actually turned away from the Conservatives partly out of concern that their children are worse off – a cohort potentially representing 17 per cent of the electorate. “Baby boomers,” the paper drily notes, do not in fact have “saturnine desires to eat the young”.

Hyperlocalism is a clear target for Next Gen Tories: the drift toward MPs as “gold star councillors” rather than legislators. They want to see candidate selection, training and parliamentary management refocused – prioritising “intellectual seriousness and communicative strength” over local activism alone.

They propose a Future Leaders Scheme for the best candidates with a proven record of party involvement as part of the selection process, designed to identify stronger prospects without repeating the mistakes of the old A-list. Local constituencies could be offered benefits for picking one of these candidates, like earlier selection and additional resources, to maintain choice but incentivising “better choices”.

The paper also recommends moving the current fresh talent in the parliamentary party up the ranks into shadow ministerial and cabinet level as a way to “demonstrate that the party has changed” and prove there is “a bedrock of talent that Reform simply doesn’t have”. (A subject I have written on before.)

A “Bond with Britain” announcement this summer should be used as a first public statement of renewed purpose, and the 2028 London Mayoral election could road test the new approach among HENRY voters and affluent suburbanites the party needs to recover.

The dividing line the authors want drawn is “serious change with Conservatives versus chaotic change with Reform UK”. Whether the party has the collective discipline to hold that line – rather than retreating, as its own seven deadly sins suggest it historically does, into short-termism and timidity – is the question Conservative Revival asks, but can’t yet answer.

“These influencers have not simply endowed fans with a benign self-help toolkit”

James Ford is a columnist for City AM and a former adviser on transport policy to Boris Johnson when Mayor of London.

The Mayor of London has decided that he – and only he – can fix Oxford Street. That is why he has created the Oxford Street Development Corporation (OSDC) to run the nation’s high street as a Mayoral Development Corporation. Given that no Mayor of London ever turns down extra powers and every occupant of City Hall since the post was established in 2000 has claimed that they wanted to pedestrianise Oxford Street but failed to do so, City Hall’s decision to seize control of the thoroughfare should have surprised no one.

Unfortunately for Londoners and retailers, Sadiq Khan’s pitch for power over the West End is inherently flawed. Pedestrianising Oxford Street will not solve the area’s issues. Cars, dear reader, are not really Oxford Street’s biggest problem. Far from it. Even before City Hall started rolling the pitch for the OSDC, ordinary motorists could not drive along Oxford Street between 7am and 7pm from Monday til Saturday. In fact, that has been the case since the 1970s. We must, therefore, acknowledge that, if Oxford Street has a traffic problem, then that problem is really about the number of buses traversing the thoroughfare rather than the number of cars.

According to a 2017 study by London TravelWatch: “If Oxford Street was a bus depot, it would be the largest in Europe.” Whilst a long-standing driver of congestion and traffic delays along Oxford Street, bus numbers have been falling under the mayoralties of both Boris Johnson and Sadiq Khan. Since 2010, the number of buses traversing Oxford Street per hour have dropped from 300 to around 70. Although 16 different bus routes (and 200,000 bus passengers per day) still travel down the thoroughfare, this is a vast reduction from when Johnson described the street as being “bisected by a panting wall of red metal” in 2008.

Of course, the mayor will not admit that buses are the problem. Why? Because, as Chair of Transport for London, he is responsible for the number of buses that use Oxford Street and already has the power to redirect or reroute them. He could have done this without the creation of the OSDC. However, that would undermine the case for more powers.

Pedestrianising Oxford Street will banish buses to adjacent streets (inconveniencing passengers and residents like), but will that be enough to solve the West End’s real woes? Of course not. The mayor will not want to admit it, but crime is far more of a concern to the businesses and shoppers of the West End than buses. I have written elsewhere about Sadiq Khan’s desperate attempts to gaslight Londoners about the crime rate through the selective use of certain crime statistics, but the West End in particular has a serious street crime problem. Not only has Curry’s installed purple adverts warning customers to ‘Mind the Grab’ on Oxford Street, but Harrods has given in to customer demands to offer unmarked shopping bags so its shoppers are not robbed upon leaving. Recent stats from the Met Police have revealed that an average of 31 mobile phones are snatched a day on London’s thirty most crime-ridden streets. Top of that list of phone theft hotspots? Oxford Street of course, with 8,745 reported thefts in just under two years. Nearby Regent Street was in second place with 2,294 incidents over the same period.

Sadly, phone thefts and shoplifting are not the only crime problems that the West End is battling. A 2025 study by Policy Exchange found that knife crime in the capital had soared by 58% between 2021 and 2024 (and was up by 86% over a decade). Just 20 streets around Oxford Circus and Regent Street accounted for one in every 15 knife attacks across the capital. Whether we believe that crime in the West End is a real problem or, as the mayor would have us believe, a perception problem, it is unclear how pedestrianising Oxford Street will have any impact.

A car-free Oxford Street is also unlikely to serve as a silver bullet to solve the West End’s wider strategic policy challenges. The OSDC will play no role in tackling the candy stores that are fronts for money laundering and the Mayor has shown no interest in pursuing local business calls for business rates reform or to reinstate tax free shopping.

One of the best pieces of political advice in opposition has always been Napoleon’s adage to “never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake”. And, whilst I am loathe to ever offer sound counsel to Sadiq Khan, I feel very relaxed about doing so here for three reasons. Firstly, it is in nobody’s best interests for City Hall to expend its political capital, exhaust its energies and waste vast sums of taxpayer cash forcing the wrong medicine down Oxford Street’s neck. Secondly, I’m pretty sure Sadiq Khan does not read Conservative Home so he’ll undoubtedly miss this warning. And thirdly – and perhaps most importantly – I doubt I am telling him anything he does not already know. I doubt that it will come as a great revelation to the Mayor that traffic is not the biggest issue holding Oxford Street back. I believe that his misdiagnosis of the West End’s woes is deliberate and cynical; the pretext for a shameless power grab. Never mind that Labour-controlled Westminster City Council (at least until May) already had an ambitious plan for Oxford Street ready to go. Never mind either that the mayor already has plenty of means at his disposal – fewer buses, more policing, significant planning and (soon) licensing powers – to improve Oxford Street. Even where the mayor does not have direct powers, he is supposed to be an influential local government leader with the ear of Labour colleagues at the top of government who should be able to lobby and cajole ministers into action. Yet there is no sign that he has ever tried to use his considerable soft power to shift policy in Whitehall to boost trade on Oxford Street.

It is hard not to conclude that, rather than the strong political flex it has been presented as, seizing control of Oxford Street is a hollow gesture. Instead of a manifestation of mayoral authority, this is actually impotence incarnate. Sure, there will be seating, greenery and al fresco dining. But what does all that matter if the real legacy of the OSDC is that all the shoplifters, street criminals and pick pockets can just cross the road more easily? If the fronts for money laundering stay open, our VAT regime continues to drive tourists away and regressive business rates force business under then the OSDC will have turned the crown jewel of UK retail into just another depressed shopping parade full of vape stores, charity shops and shuttered shop fronts. By narrowly focussing on traffic management there is a real danger that bigger issues will be not just ignored but allowed to worsen. Sadiq Khan’s true priority should be fixing Oxford Street’s real problems, not just inconveniencing motorists with an ill-conceived vanity project. But, as always, our mayor would rather look like he is doing something than actually doing something meaningful.

Andrew Griffith is the Shadow Secretary of State for Business & Trade, MP for Arundel & South Downs and a former FTSE100 Finance Director & COO.

With just a fortnight to go, the reality of a new slate of socialist measures which will land on the heads of business in Labour’s ‘April Armageddon’ is setting in.

Just as Reeves’s first budget is looked back on as the catalyst that saw unemployment rise almost every month since, and 1 in 6 young people now unable to find a job, this April too will become a milestone.  It will be looked back on as the moment when Labour showed once and for all that they don’t understand, or don’t care to understand, what makes our economy tick.  What could have been the quiet, administrative start of another tax year will in fact mark a cacophony of a series of anti-growth measures crashing into force.

The broader economic context could not be worse. Last week we had confirmation that this year has started with falling GDP per capita, rising gilt yields and stubbornly high inflation. Business confidence surveys consistently plumb global pandemic depths whilst a declining construction sector is now less ‘build, build, build’ than ‘burn, burn, burn’. And that’s before we talk about energy costs.

The most well understood April assault – thanks to Conservative campaigning and judicious use of opposition day debates in Parliament – is the Chancellor’s staggering rise in business rates. They are already a conceptually flawed tax, levied before businesses have made a pound of revenue or profit and calculated through a capricious method of valuation. Now they’re set to get even worse. While pubs have been granted a temporary reprieve, that U-turn doesn’t extend to shops and restaurants who face an average 50 per cent increase in the coming years.  Nor does it help hotels who will see their rates double.

Conservatives have already committed to exempt thousands on our high streets from business rates entirely, cutting them for a quarter of a million shops, pubs, and restaurants.  This is fully funded by our plan to reform welfare and get those who can back into work. I hope in time we can go further. Unfortunately, before our plans ride to the rescue, Labour’s changes will have shuttered hundreds of beloved high street outlets and the jobs they create along with them.

While private enterprises are hit and firms close, it’s not all bad news — well not for the public sector anyway.

For on the first of April, Labour’s new super-quango will open its doors. The ‘Fair Work Agency’, an Orwellian name if ever there was one, will have Stasi like powers to raid any business, seize documents, and conduct sweeping and expensive investigations even where not a single employee has raised a complaint. It’s a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach befitting a government that already tried to mandate every Briton carry a digital ID. The powerful body is to be run by a left-wing, trans activist, career civil servant who, has never created a single private sector job in her life.  Woe betide the employers her organisation will set its sights on. Along with the repeal of all the job killing measures in the (Un)Employment Rights Act 2025, we will disband this socialist interloper into relations between employers and employees on day one in office.

If having read so far about April’s Armageddon made you feel a little queasy, there is some better news. Under Labour you will now be entitled to paid sick leave at your employer’s expense on the very first day you (don’t) show up for work. It’s a shirkers charter and a policy that could only emanate from a government in thrall to a public sector where recent data shows days lost to “sickness” are surging. The burden will fall brutally on small businesses and those who employ big workforces such as the care, hospitality and retail sectors with the additional cost estimated at around £450 million per year. No one wants the profoundly ill dragging themselves into work, but as so many employers attest: in the real world, the incentive to self-certify a case of the ‘Monday blues’ from under the duvet may be irresistible for some.

Incentives matter and groups representing employers have warned repeatedly that more red tape, the NI ‘jobs tax’ and above-inflation hikes in minimum wages will deter hiring. This is the reason why – shamefully – youth unemployment in the UK is now for the first time ever higher than the EU average. We Conservatives will not let them get away with this. Rumours already abound of a soviet tractor era government scheme for taxpayer subsidised job.  It’s clearly the wrong answer, but it’s also an attempt to solve a problem Government created in the first place.  Instead, unleashing the jobs market now sits alongside unblocking the housing as part of our distinct and optimistic offer to the next generation.

No employees to worry about?  You’re not off the hook; April has its designs on you too.  A special treat is in store for sole traders and the self-employed.  Those who have a turnover over £50,000 will be captured by HMRC’s “Making Tax Difficult” scheme.

Far from bringing HMRC into the 21^st century (or even into the 20^th when the telephones that they refuse to answer were invented) the scheme will require signing up to often expensive and complicated tax software for the taxwoman’s convenience. Once again, the hard-working small businesses and sole traders who create growth are treated like criminals from the outset.  While civil servants shovel cash into any number of Whitehall woodchippers, great care is taken to watch every penny that passes through the hands of businesses regardless of the burden that will impose. For small business owners their scarcest resource is time and Making Tax Difficult will steal away more Sundays lost to unpaid hours wrestling with this.

Here too Conservatives have already announced a different approach.  As I said at our party conference, HMRC must be transformed to be a partner not a predator: competent and respectful of those whose hard work pays their salary.  That’s why we would put in place a rating system, just as companies have with Feefo or Trustpilot for every interaction between taxpayer and tax collector.

There’s plenty more work to be done to hold this anti-business, anti-growth Government to account and develop the carefully considered policies Britain’s businesses need to help us grow.  What’s never been clearer, however, is the contrast between a Labour government packed from frontbench to back with trade unionists, public sector lifers, and activists who simply don’t get it.  They’ve never run a business, they’ve often never even worked in a business, and they’ve never had to take responsibility for employees.

2025 was the year Labour killed jobs.  This year may well prove the year they kill the high street.  Conservatives were quick to spot this and to launch high profile campaigns in support of private enterprise, risk takers and wealth creators on both occasions because many of us know precisely what it takes to run a business.

Businesses are aching for a government that understands them, and that is precisely what we are building.

Jessie Buckley

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