Phil King: Home is about place, not just property

Cllr Phil King is Honorary National Treasurer of the Conservative Councillors’ Association, a councillor on Harborough District Council and Leicestershire County Council, and Area Chairman for Leicester and Leicestershire.

Over Christmas, many of us are reminded of what home really means. Time spent in our houses, villages, towns and neighbourhoods brings into focus the places, services and communities we rely on every day.

Home is not an abstract concept. It is where people raise families, care for ageing parents, put down roots, and build a sense of belonging that no national slogan can replicate.

For most people, politics only really matters when it touches their home: whether they can afford to live there, get a GP appointment nearby, feel safe on local streets, and trust that growth will not overwhelm the place they love.

Yet across the country, we are failing at exactly that.

Too often, decisions that shape homes and communities are taken far away from them, by faceless technocrats. Housing numbers are imposed without infrastructure. Health services are reorganised without regard to local access. Transport strategies promise transformation but deliver congestion and delay. Residents are told to trust the system, even as outcomes worsen before their eyes.

As Conservatives, we should be the party that understands home best. Not sentimentally, but seriously.

That means recognising that home is about place, not just property. A home is embedded in schools, surgeries, roads, landscapes, and social networks. When those fail, no amount of rhetoric about community can compensate.

I see this daily in local government. Villages facing speculative development because five-year housing land supplies have collapsed. Residents struggling to access NHS dentistry within a reasonable distance. Families caught in limbo as planning chaos and infrastructure delays leave services overstretched. None of this is caused by a lack of care locally. It is caused by systems that are distant, fragmented, and poorly led.

This matters deeply as much of England enters a new wave of Local Government Reorganisation. Structural change can be an opportunity, but only if it strengthens accountability and delivery. Re-drawing council maps will not, on its own, fix broken services. If reorganisation becomes an exercise in scale for its own sake, producing larger authorities, remoter leadership and weaker local voice, communities will feel even further removed from the decisions that shape their homes and increasingly disenfranchised.

We should also be absolutely clear about what is driving much of this agenda. The erosion of local decision-making is not an accident, nor a failure of administration. It flows directly from socialist and communist traditions that are instinctively hostile to individual choice, local autonomy and personal responsibility, suspicious of tradition, and uncomfortable with the idea that people and places should retain control over their own destiny.

In this left-wing worldview, power must be concentrated, culture flattened, and attachment to home, history and local identity treated as something to be discarded. Individual choice is permitted only at the convenience of the state. Class-war rhetoric is deployed to justify central control, with communities and individuals dismissed as obstacles to progress rather than the foundations of a stable society. This is not reform. It is ideological destruction carried out through an all-too-willing bureaucracy.

The alternative is clear. The state must become smaller, cheaper to run, less authoritarian and more disciplined — focused on enabling people to have real choices and communities to thrive, not micromanaging every aspect of our lives from SW1.

And we can already see the direction of travel when it does not. Independent schools, family farmers, small business owners, investors and entrepreneurs – have all been targeted in turn, taxed, regulated and undermined until independence itself is treated as a problem to be solved.

This is how a crypto-communist state operates. It does not grow the economy; it shrinks it. It punishes those who create wealth and take risks, while expanding dependency by forcing more people into reliance on state support. The result is not fairness, but control – and a country that is poorer, weaker and less free. Those who can, leave.

There is a temptation in politics to retreat into theory: to talk about values without grappling with delivery. But people experience the state not through philosophy, but through outcomes.

If a family cannot get a GP appointment, the system has failed them. If a community sees thousands of homes approved without roads or schools, leadership has failed them. If decisions about place are made without accountability, trust drains away.

Home flourishes when institutions work, and when they are close enough to be held to account.

That is why Conservatives should be unapologetic about reforming over-centralised systems. Not to weaken the state, but to make it effective again. Power should sit as close to people as possible, but it must also be exercised competently. Devolution without delivery is just decentralised failure.

We should also be honest about growth. Homes are needed, but growth without infrastructure is not development; it is damage. Communities will support change when it is fair, planned and accompanied by real investment. They revolt when it is chaotic, imposed and disconnected from reality.

Labour’s instinct is control: more targets, more bureaucracy, more central direction. Reform’s instinct is protest: noise without answers, anger without solutions. Neither offers what communities actually need. Conservatism should.

We should stand for homes that are affordable, places that are protected, and services that work. For planning that respects settlement character. For health systems judged on access and outcomes, not endless reorganisations. For local leadership that is empowered- and expected – to deliver.

Home does not disappear by accident. It is dismantled when ideology replaces competence, when local voice is silenced, and when Conservatives hesitate to stand up, without apology, for the people, places and culture they were elected to serve.