This is a highlight from the event programme of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) – CapX’s parent organisation – at this year’s Conservative Party Conference. You can watch all the panels and interviews on the CPS YouTube channel.
The housing market has ground to a halt in London – in large part because of political decisions that have been made in City Hall. … If we know that tax and regulation is what’s stopping things from getting built, we’ve got to reduce the tax and regulation. And the Mayor can do something about that
Could a Conservative Mayor get London’s housing market moving again? Liam Halligan, the CPS’s new Director, sat down with James Cleverly, former Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary, and now in the running to be the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London in 2028. They also discussed what the working relationship is really like between him and Kemi Badenoch, why Jews don’t feel safe in the capital and Cleverly’s personal test for what a thriving London should look like.
Cleverly has an established interest in housing policy – having served as Badenoch’s Shadow Housing Secretary and contributed a foreword to the recent joint CPS/Onward report ‘Fixing London Housing’. He has a clear message: reduce costs for housebuilders by reducing bureaucracy.
He argues that the central problem is a crisis of viability due to the rules piled on developers by the London Plan, for which the Mayor holds the pen. ‘Additional tax and regulation is adding about £100,000 per unit to the cost of getting anything built.’ Slash that back, and more homes can be built. Not only that, but with less squeezed margins, there’s more room for projects to improve their spend on aesthetic considerations and improvements to the public realm. The challenges to viability, he says, are squeezing ‘all the creativity and beauty out of the system’.
He is also a fan of ‘gentle densification’ of the parts of London that are already well-connected and offer good employment opportunities. That means increasing housing capacity by, for example, making it a lot easier to add an extra storey to existing terraced housing. This isn’t just an economic calculation: it’s about the ‘heartbreaking’ current reality of seeing primary schools emptying out in the inner boroughs as families are increasingly priced out.
‘One of my tests for myself,’ he says, if he wins the mayoralty, will be ‘have I helped create a city where people can genuinely envisage a good, affordable life for themselves and their family?’
That raises the question of safety, and on the marches through London that followed October 7, Cleverly is blunt: ‘I am sure there are plenty of well-intentioned, kindhearted people on those marches, but I sadly think the proportion of people who are cynically using this as an opportunity to intimidate Jews in London is far, far, far too high.’ He says that as Home Secretary he already told the Met to tackle it more robustly. ‘Too many Jews in London do not feel safe in their own city – that is unacceptable.’
In general, he promises to work to make London ‘the best’ for safety – a city where all communities feel safe and young women can be comfortable travelling home alone at night in the public realm. He says that the key is to hold the police to high standards, while also expecting them to act – and to encourage that by promising officers that if they follow the rules, he will always have their backs.
On the current mayor, Sadiq Khan, Cleverly just says Khan’s period in office has been a disappointment: ‘What has he achieved?… It’s not good enough.’ He wants to offer, by contrast, a serious plan for London – and to deliver on it. In the same way, he says, that Badenoch has set out her plans for the country.
Of course, Badenoch is the one who beat his ambitions for the Conservative leadership by a nose. How well do they really get along? He laughs. ‘She knows, as I do, that our best bet of getting her into Number 10 is getting me into City Hall… Adam Smith recognised this when he wrote ‘The Wealth of Nations’. When you get a convergence of priorities like that, wonderful things happen. … It’s a beautiful, synergistic relationship.’
Just as there is a battle on the Right in Britain, so too is there a battle inside the Conservative Party for what the party should focus on. There are those who are concerned about the threat of political Islam, the damage to the social fabric of the Boriswave and other elements of mass immigration, […]
When William Buckley went on the front page of Time magazine, the title was simple: ‘Conservatism Can Be Fun’. That is what Kemi Badenoch has done at this conference. Conservatism can be fun, can be serious and can learn from its old mistakes. But most importantly, what makes it the world’s oldest party is its […]
This is a highlight from the event programme of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) – CapX’s parent organisation – at this year’s Conservative Party Conference. You can watch all the panels and interviews on the CPS YouTube channel. The £23 billion [in welfare savings] is just the start. The number will be higher by […]
