Former Labour Activist Offers Housing Roadmap For Tories To Win Back Public Support
Housing campaigner Chris Worrall announced he was switching sides to the Tories last month (Diego Pinheiro)
6 min read
Former Labour activist and prominent housing campaigner Chris Worrall has switched sides to support the Conservative Party, and tells Zoe Crowther that a Tory pro-growth agenda could create an "activist machine" to get the party back on track.
Worrall had been involved with the Labour Party for around a decade, and founded the Labour YIMBY – ‘Yes in my backyard’ – group last year to push for pro-growth planning reform and a more ambitious housebuilding agenda.
But last month, he announced he was changing his party allegiance to the Conservatives, and now tells PoliticsHome that he believes the party can rebuild if it adopts a ‘YIMBY’ housing agenda to appeal to younger voters and activists.
The Conservatives have languished in the polls since the general election, while Reform has continued to rise and now has nearly twice the public support of the Tories, reaching about 30 per cent compared to the Tories’ 17 per cent.
Despite leader Kemi Badenoch struggling to get the party back on track, Worrall has abandoned his long-standing support for the Labour Party in order to campaign for the Tories, and has taken up a role as industry fellow at the centre-right think tank Onward.
He has also joined the Conservative YIMBY group, which was set up in June to mirror Labour YIMBY. Worrall believes the group is going to play a “big role” in bringing Tory activists back into the fold ahead of the next general election.
Ahead of the general election, the Tories struggled to rally young party activists after a string of policy announcements which did little to appeal to more youthful members (including national service for 18-year-olds and bolstering financial support for pensioners).
More than a year later, the party still has a lot of work to do to remobilise its supporter base and rebuild CCHQ, which party figures have suggested is in desperate need of reform.
“There’s a real buzz here, we're seeing a lot of people come in, hundreds,” Worrall claims.
“And we saw it under Labour YIMBY. Hundreds of young people are going to be coming if they've got a reason to fight for something. The YIMBY movement is an activist machine.”
I believe that the Conservative Party will get behind a higher housing target
Worrall says that this gives the Conservative movement reason to be hopeful, while predicting that Reform are “going to struggle to get the activists, particularly young ones”.
James Cowling, founder of the Next Gen Tories grassroots group, wrote in CapX last week that “signs of a Conservative recovery are finally emerging” and that the party is starting to “plot a pro-growth vision for the future”.
Worrall agrees, in part explaining why he decided that now was the time to switch his party allegiance.
“They [the Conservatives] have got a lot of ground to make up and they’ve got to rebuild that trust,” he says, describing former Tory MP and cabinet minister Simon Clarke and Conservative YIMBY director James Yucel as “leading the charge, getting in the experts, and working out how that can be sold to the public and to Conservative voters”.
He credits former housing minister Robert Jenrick – tipped by many to be leader-in-waiting should Badenoch’s tenure come to an end – with putting planning reform on the national agenda in the first place through the Planning White Paper.
“He's been great on planning, he's coming up with a lot of ideas,” Worrall says.
“His social media is on fire at the minute. But Kemi Badenoch is leader at the minute, and she's been very forthcoming with the Conservative YIMBY movement.”
He says that Labour, in contrast, has abandoned “aspirational” values, and criticises what he sees as Labour’s focus on taxing over enabling opportunity. His break with the party centres on frustration with Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook and his team, who Worrall accuses of presiding over the near “collapse” of the housebuilding industry and treating the private sector with “disdain”.
In July, the government amended its Planning and Infrastructure Bill to strengthen environmental protections, and some housing experts have told PoliticsHome that this could slow down the pace of building in Britain – at a time when government is in desperate search of economic growth.
“We've just seen a deluge of anti-YIMBY, really quiet compromises to green lobbying groups,” Worrall claims.
The pro-housing campaigner says that, in contrast, the Conservative leadership had “already shown very good intent” on the need to take housebuilding seriously, while Reform UK have “not done any thinking in this space”.
“When people start looking at Conservative values, there is a lot to buy into,” Worrall insists, having been “born and raised” into a working class Labour family himself.
“There's a lot of people in the Labour Party with typical working class families that share some of those views. It's just historic legacy family voting patterns that dictate why they were there originally, but now, as economics have shifted, that younger, up to 45 [demographic] is where the battleground is going to be.”
In Worrall’s view, the next election will be fought and won on the basis of whichever party can come up with solutions to the housing crisis that will have a “demonstrable benefit”.
Chris Worrall heaped praise on future Tory leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick (Alamy)
However, the Conservative Party has so far released very few policies while in opposition. Badenoch set up policy commissions to work on the party’s long-term approach on different areas, with Onward being appointed as the official partner on housing and planning.
Worrall insists that there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes. Conservative YIMBY is in the early stages of setting up a cross-party group on representative planning, which Worrall says is needed to “increase the voices heard in the system”.
“The planning system has just been captured politically, and that's why reforms are needed to get more engagement,” Worrall says.
“There's such low participation in our politics. Our voluntary consultation system has a self-selective bias… you put a little notice on a tree, and your planning system just says ‘have a public meeting’ and it's done at 11 o'clock on a Thursday. No-one who is working can attend. It just blocks people off unless you're motivated.”
Worrall hopes that more work can be done to improve immersive polling in order to reach more families and “voices that aren't typically heard in the planning system”.
The group hopes that other ‘YIMBY’ organisations, industry experts, and politicians will back the initiative. Onward is also understood to be looking at this area as part of the party’s policy review.
“If you get that bit right, then you've got the political mandate for the house building. I believe that the Conservative Party will get behind a higher housing target, and I would encourage them to. We're not delivering with what we're doing now.”
