Tommy Birch is a behavioural scientist and Leadership Advisor at House of Birch, a local councillor and CPF Area Leader for Hertfordshire.

Britain’s housing debate is often a theatre of convenient myths. One of the most persistent is the idea that our country is cleanly divided into a righteous tribe of “Builders” and a selfish cohort of “Blockers”. In this narrative, the NIMBY is a fixed character: irrational, anti-growth, and fundamentally anti-young. It is a comforting story for politicians because it turns a complex national crisis into a simple moral binary of good versus greed.

It also happens to be wrong. As the party’s current CPF consultation paper on the Housing Crisis notes, the public is not uniformly opposed to building. Polling consistently reveals a far more awkward truth: support for new homes “in principle” often outweighs opposition. Yet, the moment a spade hits the ground, the silent majority vanishes and local resistance dominates the planning process. This is the great housing puzzle: if the majority accepts the need for development in theory, why does NIMBYism win in reality?

The answer is uncomfortable because it suggests that NIMBYism is more than a failure of information and planning law. It is a predictable response produced by the very architecture of human nature. If we are to achieve the national renewal we must first move beyond “better persuasion” and embrace a more sophisticated, biopsychosocial lens to solve what is, at its heart, a behavioural phenomenon.

To understand the NIMBY, we must first look at the biological layer of the problem. A human being is not primarily a truth-seeking machine; we are threat-reducing machines. For most of our evolutionary history, “change” in one’s immediate environment was rarely a harbinger of prosperity; it was usually a sign of danger.

When a large-scale development is proposed, it is not experienced as an abstract national project but as uncertainty landing on one’s own street. Uncertainty activates stress responses that narrow attention and increases risk aversion. In this state, people naturally prefer predictable problems to uncertain improvements. Academics like Helen Bao have explored this through the lens of “loss aversion,” but a biopsychosocial approach goes deeper, recognising that there is an underlying physiological defence mechanism. When the planning system triggers a threat and responds only with cold facts, it creates a misalignment that only hardens resistance.

The second mistake we make is a psychological one: misreading opposition as mere selfishness. Many opponents of development do not experience themselves as “blockers”, they feel they are defending something worthwhile: community, character, and standards. This is what psychologists often call “identity work”. People rarely defend a technical position on housing; they defend what that position protects: their sense of place and their self-image.

This is why the debate is so resistant to data. The conflict is not over numbers; it is over meaning. Once an issue becomes tied to identity, such as the perceived duty of a Conservative to “protect the green belt”, changing one’s mind is no longer a matter of accepting new facts, but of abandoning a deeply held sense of purpose. Katherine Einstein, who have written extensively on the matter, correctly identifies how “Neighbourhood Defenders” capture the planning process, however she often misses the psychological reality that for these residents, resistance is a form of stewardship, however poorly it may serve the national interest.

Finally, we must consider the social layer. Planning battles are not just private preferences expressed publicly; they are social contests. People watch each other, coalitions form, and status is conferred on those seen as protectors of the community. Research in social psychology suggests that when people engage within these like-minded groups, their opinions become more entrenched rather than more open.

The current planning system systematically rewards this socialised objection while penalising support. Those who oppose developments are highly motivated and visible, while the supportive majority stays silent. In this environment, local councillors respond rationally to the signals they receive. If the Right wants to build again, it must stop arguing with human nature and start designing a system that rewards different behaviours.

This is where the vision of Sir Simon Clarke and Build for Britain becomes so vital. By advocating for a pro-growth, pro-ownership agenda, they are seeking to restore the British dream of a property-owning democracy. But to achieve this, we must move from a strategy of “persuasion”, the endless leaflets and consultations that only provide a stage for opposition, to a strategy of design.

A strategy founded in biopsychosocial understanding of the issue means changing the sequence of engagement. We must reduce the perceived biological threat before we make the economic case. This means moving towards models like “Street Votes” or community-led design codes, ideas championed by Sir Simon, that give residents the agency of the “creator” rather than the victim. When people have a hand in the creation of beauty and the mitigation of impact, the threat-response is replaced by a sense of ownership.

Furthermore, we must change the framing. Development presented as “meeting targets” invites resistance, but development framed as strengthening a community invites cooperation. Language that emphasises continuity and stewardship lowers the psychological bar for acceptance.

The CPF consultation rightly asks how the party can address the challenges facing prospective homeowners. The answer lies in realising that home ownership is the greatest engine of social mobility we possess. Yet, for too long, the party has been caught between national necessity and local revolt.

Treating NIMBYism as a planning technicality is no longer tenable. It is a lived political crisis that is shaping the political allegiance of a generation. NIMBYism is not proof that the public is unreachable; it is proof that policy-makers have ignored a fundamental rule: if you want different behaviour, you need a different system.

Behavioural insight is not a “nice-to-have”; it is a fundamental part of the machinery of government. As Margaret Thatcher famously observed, “the facts of life are conservative”. If we are to build for Britain, we must start by taking human nature seriously. Our housing crisis will not be solved by louder arguments, but by a strategy that finally aligns the instincts of the individual with the renewal of the nation.

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The Ministry of Justice has sent a clear signal to the legal world: the era of the dusty ledger is over. The government is, rhetorically at least, leaning into the potential of technology to tackle the Crown Court backlog, as it has in other departments. As a founder who has spent years building tools to navigate these very challenges, I back the intent.

It’s a vision the Prime Minister feels strongly about.

He has publicly shared his frustration with the culture of paper files during his time running the Crown Prosecution Service. I’ve spoken with him directly about the truly transformational potential home grown technology has for public sector reform.

However, as any founder who has tried to sell a transformative idea to a government department will tell you, the “what” is often inspiring, but the “how” remains the bottleneck.

While Whitehall stumbles forward, there is revolution brewing in town halls. Local authorities across the UK are increasing spending on UK-born innovative technology at a rate that puts central departments to shame.

AI is increasingly being used by social care teams to create accurate, compliant social care documentation, saving over-stretched frontline workers over a day per week. Faced with the tightest budgets in a generation, councils have become the ultimate friends of innovation. Their fiscal constraints and little press coverage for their work show they don’t harness new technology to make a point or because it gives them a headline. They buy it because it secures them much-needed efficiencies, enhances their thin resources, and improves their services for the people they represent. It allows them to do more with less.

They are proving that harnessing tested and secure technology isn’t about replacing the soul of public service. It is about stripping away the administrative sludge that prevents human beings from doing their jobs.

My own experience with government procurement has been a mixed bag, which is a sentiment shared by many in the tech ecosystem. On one hand, there is a genuine desire to engage with SMEs. On the other, state machinery still favours the safe, the slow, and the scale of legacy providers.

The centre of government talks a good game about harnessing technology in its quest to bring services closer to people. In some areas, there’s been decent progress. The use of Claude in the gov.uk app is one. But there is a massive opportunity being missed by treating tech as a procurement exercise rather than a partnership. To truly reform public services, we must move beyond the buyer-vendor dynamic. We need a system that values the speed of a startup and the sovereignty of British-built AI, rather than one that bogs us down in eighteen-month tender cycles that risk outliving the technology itself.

This byzantine system is not only holding back government ambition. It also risks undermining the ambition of UK tech founders. Many of my fellow founders are ramping up focus on selling technology in the US, Europe and Australia, where it is already driving public service reform. It is somewhat absurd that UK tech is driving efficiencies in over a dozen countries around the world before Whitehall wakes up. 

Political will is needed to demand change in the boiler room of Whitehall.

The whole of the UK tech ecosystem has ideas about how to jump this barrier, including changes to the procurement process so specialist startups can compete; increased risk tolerance, accepting that not every pilot will work, but the ones that do will save billions; and a call for buying in proven technologies to be considered on level pegging with building from scratch in-house.

Systemic change is needed, but the first step is in many ways far simpler. We need to ensure Whitehall allows a turbocharged AI-enabled reform of services, to be accompanied by a celebration of UK innovation. UK plc stands ready.

Alex Stephany is founder and CEO of Beam

Iran says it has bombed wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu’s office in Israel. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are also claiming that they have attacked the Israeli air force headquarters.

Palestine Chronicle reported that:

According to Tasnim News Agency, the Public Relations office of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced that the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the location of the commander of the Israeli air force were attacked in what it described as “targeted and surprise attacks.”

The Times of Israel has reported that:

Israel says there were no injuries in the strikes.

And, Netanyahu’s office have dismissed Iran’s claims that the “fate” of the Israeli PM is unclear. As yet, details remain entirely unclear – Iran’s assertions have not been verified, nor has Netanyahu’s location.

At the weekend, Netanyahu – along with various co-criminal Western leaders – crowed about the assassination of Iranian leader Ali Khamenei and his family. It’s hard to argue that turnabout is not fair play. However, it will be no surprise to see Keir Starmer and other ‘leaders’ condemn Iran for ‘disproportionately’ retaliating for what Israel did to it – just as Starmer did on 1 March after the US and Israel slaughtered Iranian schoolchildren and bombed hospitals.

Featured image via the Canary

The US military has admitted that its ally Kuwait shot down three US fighter jets that crashed in Kuwait in a so-called ‘friendly fire’ incident.

Footage of one of the fighters as it crashed also appeared to show pilots ejecting via parachute. The BBC reported that:

US Central Command has just now said three of its F-15 jets “flying in support of Operation Epic Fury” – the US operation against Iran – “went down over Kuwait due to an apparent friendly fire incident”.

All six crew ejected safely and have been recovered, it says.

The news is a massive embarrassment for the US, though it may suggest its other allies may have taken a leaf out of Israel’s book. The genocidal colony murdered hundreds of its own people on 7 October 2023 under its ‘Hannibal directive’. This was admitted by former Israeli defence secretary Yoav Gallant and has been common knowledge in Israel since a few weeks after it happened. Israel also killed the Bibas family, three escaping Israeli captives and numerous other Israelis in Gaza.

However, UK and other western media continue to ignore both facts.

Featured image via