James Yucel: How the next Conservative government can save rural Britain in three steps

James Yucel is Head of Campaigns at Onward and Director of Conservative YIMBY.

Rural Britain is under immense pressure.

I see it every time I visit my family in Suffolk. Pub closures. Emptying schools. Workers priced out and commuting 45 minutes to find a place they can afford. And when local employers try to build homes for their staff or essential infrastructure, the planning system says no – as if the countryside were a museum, not its very own thriving community.

Just ask one Mr Clarkson in Chadlington – a local motoring enthusiast turned farmer whose efforts to bring life back to a village ran straight into the buzzsaw of parish politics.

If we want to save rural Britain, we must understand what’s driving this hollowing out – and face the truth about where the real pressure is coming from.

For decades, our arcane planning laws have pushed homes to the fringes – preserving land in cities and forcing growth into the very villages and fields that would rather be left alone.

The result is a system always shaped by the loudest voices in the room – a handful of well-organised regulars who object to everything, everywhere, all at once.

London is the starkest example. A city once bursting with energy, ambition and opportunity under Boris – now crippled by regulation and fear under the incumbent Mayor of Managed Decline – a kind of urban Narcissus, more interested in admiring his reflection on Twitter than fixing the city beneath him.

Too often, homes in the capital can’t compete with other land uses, political cowardice trumps basic land economics, and boroughs block growth that would relieve pressure on everyone else.

If we don’t fix this, the pressure will keep growing. And it will fall, as it always does, on the South East’s countryside – exactly where opposition is fiercest and infrastructure weakest.

This is the trade-off too few in politics are willing to name: either we build big in cities, or we build over everything around them. If we’re serious about protecting the real countryside – our fields, farms, and village greens – not the scrubland behind a retail park we call the Green Belt: we need an urban revolution.

At Conservative YIMBY, we believe that means three big shifts.

First, Raise Housing Targets — dramatically:

The last annual target of 300,000 homes per year isn’t a credible plan to fix Britain’s chronic housing shortage. The real need, should we want to make up for years of underdelivery and absorb future demand, is closer to 600,000 according to various studies.

This isn’t fantasy. France builds more. Japan builds faster. Germany builds cheaper. Britain simply must catch up – or condemn the next generation to ever higher rents, longer commutes, and virtually zero chance of ever owning a place they can call home.

Second, A Transport revolution for our cities:

You can’t densify London if half the map is a transport desert. Even in parts of Zone 2, the Tube doesn’t reach. Buses crawl. And development is dismissed as overambitious if it dares to rise above three storeys.

We need to champion the ways of Professor Alain Bertaud. That means more stations, better buses, and higher-frequency transit – especially in inner London – so we can build densely and effectively. The goal is simple: make more land viable for homes by making it accessible.

Third, A sustainable migration system:

No long-term housing strategy is complete without tackling growing demand. Net migration has averaged close to a million a year – putting unprecedented strain on housing, services and infrastructure, particularly in urban centres.

According to Onward’s brilliant new research in its latest paper aptly titled Full House, high net migration has added around £132 per month to average rents in England – and £216 per month in London. For renters stuck in the capital’s overheated market, that’s over £20,000 lost since 2001.

We need a system that works for the British people – not one where ‘asylum’ apparently means escaping the horrors of northern France. Especially now that the Labour government has reportedly agreed a “17 in, one out” deal with Paris – the sort of ratio that might fly at Infernos, rather than a functioning border regime.

So, what does this all mean for rural development?

None of this means giving up on it. Quite the opposite, in fact.

We should absolutely be building homes as old England might recognise in our villages and market towns. But all too frequently, ancient planning rules make that impossible.

As James Wright from the Conservative Rural Forum correctly points out, from Exmoor to Sussex, small businesses are blocked from expanding. Workers are forced to move miles away. And thriving rural communities start to die on the vine.

We need a new planning deal for rural Britain. One that supports gentle density, enables business-led development, and recognises that real countryside isn’t a disused car park in Zone 6, immortalised by the CPRE as if it were the Garden of the Hesperides.

But none of this works if we smother our cities in red tape.

That’s why, next Tuesday at our Summer Party, Conservative YIMBY will unveil our London Plan – ten bold, pro-market proposals to get the capital building again. From a Builder’s Remedy which would grant automatic permission in areas where London councils fail to set or meet housing targets – to new flexibilities on affordable housing thresholds to unlock more mid-sized developments.

Rather than counter Labour’s empty talk of planning reform with the politics of Chipping Barnet, Conservatives should say: we can do it bigger, better, quicker and cheaper.

Because if we truly want to save rural Britain, we have to stop treating cities like museums too.