Phil King: Harborough’s warning to Westminster

Cllr Phil King, is the Hon Treasurer of the Conservative Cllrs Association, deputy leader of Harborough District Council and a member of Leicestershire County Council.

The local elections on May 7th delivered a political earthquake.

The left suffered heavy losses across England, Scotland and Wales. Reform, and to a lesser extent the Greens, surged. Trust in mainstream politics weakened further. And the Conservative Party was reminded again, despite some green shoots of recovery, that voters will not return to us simply because they are frustrated with somebody else.

They will return when they believe we can deliver.

Housing sits at the centre of that challenge.

For years, the political response to Britain’s housing crisis has been to chase ever larger targets. Under Sir Keir Starmer’s Government, that instinct has now hardened into dogma: 1.5 million homes by 2029, driven from the centre, imposed at pace, and measured in permissions rather than outcomes.

But Britain does not simply have a housing numbers problem.

It has a delivery problem.

Housing is not a spreadsheet exercise. It is about whether people can actually afford to buy a home, whether infrastructure keeps pace with development, and whether communities can sustain growth without losing their character and cohesion.

On all three counts, the current approach is heading in the wrong direction.

The emerging model is clear.

Targets are set in Whitehall. Pressure flows downward. Local plans are overridden. Scrutiny is weakened. Planning permissions are scattered across rural and suburban areas in the hope that volume alone will somehow produce results.

This is not reform. It is centralisation, loved by the left all over the world.

Local government is not the obstacle to housebuilding. It is the delivery mechanism. Councillors understand flood risk, school capacity, transport constraints and the lived reality of their communities. We are the ones residents turn to when infrastructure fails.

Yet once again, local accountability is being treated as a barrier rather than a strength.

As Conservatives, we should reject this approach.

We believe in stewardship, subsidiarity and ownership. Development works best when it is shaped locally, supported by infrastructure and grounded in consent. Treating councils as agents of centrally imposed quotas undermines both trust and delivery.

And after the events of May 7th, trust is now the defining issue in British politics.

What this looks like in practice can be seen in my own area.

Along the A6 corridor between Leicester and Market Harborough, proposals brought forward by the now ousted left wing coalition at Harborough District Council will see hundreds of acres of prime agricultural land transformed into a new settlement. The site known as land south of Gartree Road would be larger than Lutterworth.

Yet there is still no guarantee that roads, schools, flood mitigation or GP capacity will be in place before the homes arrive.

At the same time, the Council has spent more than £3 million acquiring hundreds of acres of separate farmland to “rewild”.

No serious Conservative opposes environmental improvement. But policy must be coherent.

You cannot concrete over productive farmland in one location while removing farmland from production elsewhere, all while arguing that viability is marginal and infrastructure funding uncertain.

That is not strategy. It is contradiction.

For over two years I have argued that the Local Plan should not be rushed to submission without robust evidence on infrastructure and deliverability. Viability remains in question. Scrutiny has too often been sidelined.

Delaying submission until the facts are clear was not anti growth. Unfortunately, submission was enabled after Reform supported the left wing coalition.

It was a failure of basic competence.

Let me be clear.

We are not NIMBYs.

Our communities have taken significant development over the past two decades. We understand that homes are needed. Conservatives believe in ownership, aspiration and opportunity.

But there is a difference between growth and sprawl.

When residents ask about congestion, sewage capacity, flooding or school places, they are not resisting change. They are asking whether the state has done its homework.

That is not obstruction.

That is common sense.

Simply granting more planning permissions has never, in itself, made housing affordable.

In places like Harborough, first time buyers face what can only be described as telephone number mortgages. Monthly repayments stretch household finances to the limit. Young people delay settling down not through choice, but because ownership is out of reach.

If supply alone were the answer, this problem would already be solved.

Instead, land values remain high. Build out rates are slow. Large sites take years to deliver. And new homes are often priced far beyond local incomes.

Transforming rural landscapes without addressing these fundamentals risks delivering volume without opportunity.

As Conservatives, we should be honest about this.

Home ownership will not be restored by chasing permissions. It requires faster build out, proper competition, realistic viability scrutiny and infrastructure that gives communities confidence to support growth.

Numbers are not outcomes.

This debate reveals a deeper divide.

The left’s instinct is central direction. Set the target. Enforce compliance. Push development outward.

That is a command and control model.

The conservative alternative is different.

Build where infrastructure already exists. Prioritise brownfield. Align development with transport, schools and utilities before occupation. Empower local government instead of bypassing it. Measure success by ownership, not approvals.

Housing without infrastructure is not renewal.

It is instability.

The local elections showed that anger alone is not enough to build a governing coalition.

Kemi Badenoch inherited a party that must rebuild public trust through delivery, not declaration.

Voters do not want just more slogans. They want proof that we can govern competently. That when we talk about growth, we mean infrastructure. When we talk about housing, we mean ownership. When we talk about reform, we mean results.

Housing is a test of that seriousness.

If we drift into centralised managerialism, we abandon our principles. If we retreat into blanket opposition, we abandon aspiration.

The conservative path is harder, but clearer: pro growth, pro ownership, rooted in local accountability and grounded in competence.

Because voters will not return to us simply because the left is failing. Nor because Reform is rising.

They will return when they trust us to deliver serious government once again.

And in housing, as in everything else, delivery is what separates protest from power.