Letter: Beware of the Tories Trying to Out Reform, Reform

Published on: 24 Sep, 2025
Updated on: 24 Sep, 2025

From David Roberts

In response to: It’s Not Nimbyism to Protect Our Green Spaces

It was Ms Richardson’s Tory party that removed most of Guildford’s villages from the green belt in its infamous 2019 Local Plan.

I don’t recall her, as the local MP, raising any objection to this or rushing to defend residents attacked for nimbyism for simply objecting to the over-development of Guildford’s countryside. On the contrary, I recall a very close relationship between Tory councillors and the developers.

She now says that immigration should be “sorted out” before we build more houses, asserting “that shouldn’t be controversial.” But the “sorting out” (whatever that means) is conservatively going to take many years, perhaps forever. Are we really to build no new homes till then? Here we have the usual desperate attempt to out-Reform, Reform by blaming every problem on migrants.

Ms Richardson would also scrap Stamp Duty, claiming that the resulting hole in public revenue of £15.4 billion (2023/24 figure) would be magically filled by a boost in the housing market. A gamble of Liz Truss-like daring!

Could she please provide evidence that house prices would not simply rise to compensate, leaving housing supply static. That has always been the effect of demand-stimulus measures in the past, given the market manipulation of the big housebuilding oligopoly and the logistical constraints of limited labour and materials aggravated by Brexit.

Beware this old Tory fantasy of unleashing the nation’s entrepreneurial juices, which can only spell disaster in a market so fundamentally dysfunctional!