Simon Dudley is the Chairman of the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, a former Leader of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, and the former Chairman of Homes England.
We lost over a thousand great councillors and many tremendous council leaders last week so my thoughts go out to all of them. However, we must avoid a misdiagnosis and an even more toxic dose of NIMBYism. All is not lost but we are now, in my opinion, at the inflection point. Bear with me as I try to explain using The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead (RBWM) where I have lived for 30 years as a “blue wall” case study.
I was a councillor here from 2007 to 2019 (Deputy Leader, Lead Member for Finance in a great team). I was Leader from 2016 to 2019. We held the council in the hard times of the Brexit stalemate of May 2019. Direct comparisons with prior elections (we won four times) are hard because we instigated a boundary review and reduced the number of councillors from 53 to 41 prior to the 2019 “all out” elections. However, in May 2019 we achieved 43 per cent of the vote and 35,999 votes for a Conservative candidate. We held the council by 22 to 19.
We did this with a hugely pro-housing agenda. Developing Maidenhead Golf Club (worth around £300 million to the local taxpayer) with a proposed 1,800 new homes (30 per cent of which will be affordable) as part of a Borough Local Plan which was restarted when I became Leader and is now adopted. It would have been hard for us to be seen as less pro-housing, establishing two housebuilding joint ventures, one with Cala Homes (for the golf club) and another with Countryside for regenerating Maidenhead.
We (and I in particular) had everything thrown at us. A new party (The Borough First Independents) was established on an anti-housing agenda. I joke they tried everything to stop me apart from assassination. Yet in 2019 we held the council. We held it, by way of example, with the same vote share as West Berkshire and pretty much the same number of Conservative votes. Voters knew what we stood for and we won when the Conservative national vote was in tatters due to our then inability to deliver Brexit.
I stood down in September 2019 when I was chairing the national housing agency, Homes England, standing in as chairman, after Lord (Eddie) Lister had moved on to support Boris Johnson.
The Conservative administration faced the electorate last week. I won’t dwell on my thoughts on the reasons for the outcome, but it certainly wasn’t housing. That was fully priced in at the time of the 2019 elections. So what happened? They got washed away. Their vote share dropped to 28 per cent (a drop of 35 per cent from 2019). The number of Conservative votes went to 24,215, a drop of 11,784 or 30 per cent. The Conservatives fell to seven councillors (two of those by a wafer-thin 34 aggregate votes). A landslide against them from the Liberal Democrats (now in control) and independents. My old sparring partners at the Borough First Independents have the same number of councillors as the now Conservative rump. That’s before adding in another four independents “affiliated” with them.
So was this housing? No, it wasn’t. Did our flirtation with NIMBYism in the emerging Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill help us? It didn’t do the slightest bit of good in my opinion. It didn’t stop the Royal Borough from falling. In fact, I would assert it blurred a clear message and reduced our electoral appeal to the millions of younger voters we need in order to renew over time our voter base. In fact a look at West Berkshire for 2023, for example, sees them with a seven per cent plus Conservative vote share and 7,000 more Conservative votes than in RBWM. Again, West Berkshire was lost. In the parallel universe we are in here in Berkshire – but now only Slough may be run by the Conservatives following their stunning gains. The reason for that? The electorate riling against bailout council tax increases. Our old friend – lower taxes – working its electoral magic.
Councils are won and lost through hard work, a consistent Conservative policy message, good campaigning, and good candidates. We must be so careful to avoid losing the mantle of the party of home ownership and therefore aspiration. If we lose that to Labour, they will seal the deal with younger aspirational voters, who rightfully crave the opportunity to rent and/or own a decent home.
So my respectful and supportive message to the Prime Minister is simple. Be brave Prime Minister. Turbocharge the Conservative Party as the party of home ownership. Create “growth areas/zones” of new cities, brownfield regeneration and greater density and height in our urban areas around transport infrastructure (such as Crossrail which is adjacent to Maidenhead Golf Club). Transform areas in London from a density and height perspective to take pressure off the Green Belt of the home counties and south east. Spend tens of billions more on affordable housing grant and brownfield land remediation over the next decade to build the homes (in the right places as the saying goes) and cut the housing benefit bill. Invest to save.
Renew the dream of home ownership. That will deliver your majority, Prime Minister. We have eighteen months. Housing is our opportunity.