Can Reform ever be YIMBY?

Why I'm, er, doubtful that Reform can fix the housing crisis

The long-expected shift on the right towards Reform is now well underway.

Obviously we’ve already witnessed the high-profile defection of Robert Jenrick and many of the very worst characters from the previous government. But it is happening beneath the surface too, as much of the right’s intellectual and ideological infrastructure is moving too. Think-tanks, lobbyists and campaigners are scrambling to build networks within the ascendant party.

And even though Reform has led the polls for some time, I think this is a relatively new thing. About a year ago, I remember speaking to an advisor to a Tory MP, who told me that he hadn’t yet seen any staffers and bag carriers in the Westminster bubble turn heel yet.¹

But now the direction of travel is clear. And I can see this myself in the YIMBY campaigning world, which is the bit of Westminster I’m most familiar with.

In a sign of the times, at the end of January the Conservative YIMBY campaign, which is closely associated with the Tory-aligned think-tank Onward, renamed itself. Now called ‘Build for Britain’, it opened up membership to Reform supporters too – adding Reform London Assembly member Alex Wilson to its board in the process.

And earlier this week, Reform scored another defection, in the form of Simon Dudley. A former leader of Windsor and Maidenhead council, Dudley is a big figure on the right-side of the YIMBY movement, as he’s also a former Chair of both Homes England and Ebbsfleet Development Corporation.

He’s also closely involved in Build for Britain, and just a few months ago founded the Representative Planning Group – a campaign that aimed to use polling and other tools to give council decision makers ‘representative’ data on local attitudes to specific planning applications, so they have more to go on than just a pile of complaints from local NIMBYs with time on their hands.

Anyway, explaining his defection, Dudley wrote in the Telegraph that:

“We need to do things radically differently. I am joining Reform because I simply do not trust the parties that presided over decades of negligible homebuilding, extreme levels of immigration and regulatory paralysis to reverse the problems they helped create.”

He then continues to lay it on thick about how the scale of immigration has exacerbated the housing crisis, pointing at how house-building collapsed in the early 2000s, around the same time as the 2004 expansion of the EU to include Eastern Europe. He also explains his decision by citing how Robert Jenrick was the only Housing Minister to achieve over 100,000 approvals in a single quarter.²

And on the right, there appears to be some optimism that Dudley could make a positive impact on the party that stands a reasonable chance of forming the next government. One person who is sympathetic told me that they think Reform could be the first party that takes the concept of ‘representative planning’ seriously.

However, on the other side of the ideological spectrum, others take a more cynical view.

Marc Harris, the co-chair of Labour YIMBY, didn’t mince his words when he told me that he thinks Dudley has “completely sold out his principles for the tiniest amount of political expediency and naked careerism”.

However, whatever the case, I think Dudley’s defection is really notable, as it is yet another sign of the changing political weather. And it is definitely worth taking the question of Reform’s housing policy seriously as we could soon find ourselves with Nigel Farage in Downing Street.

And sure, it goes without saying that the government as a whole will be really fucking awful – but is there a chance housing policy could be a bright spot? There’s actually more to it than you might assume.

So let’s dig into where Reform is at on housing, and the optimistic case for how Simon Dudley might be able to make a difference here. But also why I think you’d have to be absolutely crazy to think Prime Minister Nigel Farage will do anything about the housing crisis.