If there are three words that are guaranteed to get the goat of any Conservative parliamentary candidate they are regional, spatial and strategy.
The Tories are already pledged to abolish the hated product of the last Labour shake-up of the planning system, which is routinely described as ‘top-down’ at best and ‘Stalinist’ at worst and housing spokesman Grant Shapps says have created ‘a generation of NIMBYs’.
But statements so far by local candidates include an awful lot more about the homes they don’t want than his new policies to make local communities pro-development.
Over at the official The Blue Blog on the party website, West Worcestershire candidate Harriett Baldwin waxes lyrical about how growth has happened organically in Worcester and nearby villages and towns and is raging about the regional spatial strategy. ‘This centuries-old process changed when Prime Minister Gordon Brown decreed in 2007 that 3,000,000 homes in Britain should be built by 2020,’ she says. ‘Does he know how many bathplugs will be needed too, do you think?’
The county has a particular electoral resonance given the popular view that the votes of so-called Worcester Woman handed New Labour its early election victories. In the city itself, the Tory hoping to unseat Labour’s Mike Foster, Robin Walker, has warned of the danger of Worcester being ‘swallowed up in a gigantic West Midlands urban agglomeration’.
The key issue for both is the imposition of 25,000 new homes in the city, Malvern Hills and Wychavon, where the Conservative-controlled local authorities are backing a six-month delay in adopting their joint core strategy until after the election. Baldwin says Malvern Hills needs 4,900 new homes, not the 11,000 in the strategy, and has urged the joint core strategy team that ‘it would be prudent to phase these imposed housing numbers, so that should the national government abolish the RSS after the General Election, changes can still be made’.
Delay was also urged by shadow communities secretary Caroline Spelman in her leaked letter to local authorities in August advising them to delay major developments. She urged them ‘not to rush ahead with implementing the controversial elements of regional spatial strategies’ and pledged not to pay disappointed developers any compensation.
Baldwin argues on her blog that: ‘There is no question that the open spaces are there to be built on. There is no shortage of farmland that farmers are willing to option off to developers. What is lacking is local demand for the homes, local infrastructure and local democratic control over the scale of development.’
A similar message is being heard from Conservative candidates around the country and my guess is the voters will find it a seductive one - without asking what happens if every district only builds enough homes to meet ‘local demand’.
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