Labour is waging an ideological assault on rural communities — attacking farms,
landowners and local democracy. Conservatives must fight back with law, not lip service, and rebuild trust with the people who keep the countryside alive.

The English countryside is not a museum. It is the backbone of our food security, the beating heart of our national character, and home to communities that still understand what belonging means. Yet for too long, governments of every colour have treated it as a convenient blank space — somewhere to dump problems made elsewhere. Labour’s assault on rural Britain isn’t a distant threat. It’s happening now.

By restoring tougher national housing targets through the revised NPPF, centralising decisions, and keeping the Duty to Cooperate in place, it is tightening its grip. The full impact hasn’t yet been felt — but many villages risk being swamped, infrastructure strained, and local voices ignored.

And here’s the hard truth: we helped create the opening they are exploiting.
The Duty to Cooperate, introduced under the Localism Act 2011, was well-intentioned — meant to encourage collaboration between councils. In practice, it became a blunt weapon by which cities offload their housing obligations onto rural districts. It was a mistake. We must own it — and it must go.

For years, we took rural voters for granted. We assumed their loyalty was automatic, their resilience unshakeable, and their value self-evident. We failed to properly recognise their unique contribution to national security and productivity — a contribution too often maligned by those
who’ve never had mud on their boots or built a business outside the M25. That complacency needs to end now.

The Real Battleground is the NPPF

This fight won’t be won in parish halls. It will be won in the National Planning Policy Framework — the rulebook that shapes every planning decision in England. If we’re serious about protecting the countryside while delivering real growth, we must rewrite the NPPF. That means removing the Duty to Cooperate so rural communities are no longer forced to take on housing quotas from cities.

It means giving neighbourhood and parish plans proper legal authority and scrapping the “tilted balance” — which tilts decisions toward approval when local plans are out of date, a structural advantage developers have learned to exploit.

It also means making brownfield-first binding, not aspirational. Growth must be focused in cities and large towns, through Urban Development and
Investment Boards with active government backing.

Changing the right of appeal would require amending Section 78 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 — but that’s a political choice, not a legal impossibility. Critics will argue this is legally impossible. It isn’t. It’s just politically inconvenient. Reforming this means primary legislation to amend Section 78 and matching NPPF changes. If we’re not prepared to do the hard legislative work, nothing will change.

Making Brownfield Work: Faster, Cheaper, Smarter

Critics say brownfield development is too slow and too costly. They point to contaminated land, remediation delays and complex ownership. But that’s lazy economics. If we look at the full picture — the cost in the whole — the argument turns on its head. Building on green fields isn’t cheaper; it’s deceptively easy. Every new settlement demands new roads, drainage, schools, GP surgeries, broadband, grid connections and public transport links — all taxpayer-funded. The true cost of sprawl is measured in billions of pounds of duplicated infrastructure.

By contrast, brownfield development sits inside the network. Utilities, roads and transport already exist. You regenerate instead of replace. Evidence suggests brownfield-first can deliver greater long-term value and lower lifetime costs when properly managed, even if remediation adds up-front expense.

We should introduce Brownfield Tax Credits to offset remediation costs, empower councils to issue Infrastructure Bonds, and fund conditional remediation grants only where schemes deliver affordable or mixed-use regeneration. Many sites are fragmented under multiple ownerships.

Regional Brownfield Delivery Boards — locally led, with powers to consolidate, clean up and sell ready-to-build land — can fix that. The private sector builds; the public sector unblocks.

Brownfield-first only works if infrastructure is ready or planned. Tie funding to integrated local delivery plans where housing, transport, utilities and schools are aligned. Recycle stamp duty receipts from regenerated zones into local infrastructure so residents see real benefits.

Large developers prefer greenfield because it’s easy. SME builders, by contrast, thrive on smaller, complex plots. Simplify planning for small sites, provide modular construction finance, and release pre-assembled brownfield plots to local builders. That speeds up delivery and spreads opportunity.

A National Brownfield Pipeline — a rolling register of viable sites, updated quarterly and published openly — will bring transparency, accountability and momentum. Brownfield-first Britain doesn’t mean slower growth. It means smarter growth — regenerating towns, protecting countryside, and using national infrastructure efficiently. That’s conservative common sense: build where we already live, work and connect; protect what makes Britain worth living in.

Labour’s Urban Bias

Labour is an urban party — in its leadership, its funding, its instincts. It doesn’t understand rural Britain, and worse still, it doesn’t care to. To Labour, rural land is something to regulate, tax or build on. Farmers are a resource to be managed, not respected. Rural communities are seen as an obstacle to be overcome, not a foundation to build on. And behind this lies a deep ideological suspicion of private property, inherited wealth and landownership.

Labour’s Autumn 2024 Budget — which announced proposed restrictions to Agricultural and Business Property Relief (APR/BPR) from April 2026 — tells its own story. This isn’t theory; it’s policy.

Defending and Empowering British Farming

Farming isn’t a nostalgic postcard; it’s a strategic national asset. Farmers feed the nation, maintain the land, and underpin our resilience. When they thrive, the countryside thrives. Labour’s inheritance-tax changes and regulatory reforms land hardest on family farms. The planned restrictions to APR/BPR strike at the heart of family farming and generational stewardship. That isn’t just bad economics — it’s morally wrong. Taxes that punish families for building and passing on productive enterprises are an attack on responsibility, hard work and continuity.

We should reverse Labour’s attack on farm-business inheritance entirely. Farmers need certainty and protection — stable, multi-year funding, paid on time, tied to productivity and stewardship, not bureaucracy. They need the tools to compete: tax incentives to modernise and innovate without being punished for it. And they need security: farmland treated as a strategic asset, not speculative land. Inheritance-tax relief must be strengthened, not weakened. And we must embed a Food Security Duty in planning and trade policy to stop farmland being treated as interchangeable with tarmac.

Protecting Rural Space and Rethinking Net Zero

It’s time to ask an honest question Westminster avoids: is the current Net Zero framework fit for purpose — or even fit to exist? Targets dreamt up in Whitehall or Brussels mean little if they destroy the very industries and landscapes that sustain us. Britain needs clean air and resilient energy — but it also needs food on the table and farmers who can afford to produce it.

Turning productive farmland into solar farms and battery storage fields is economic lunacy. You can’t eat a solar panel or graze livestock between lithium sheds. Land capable of producing food is a strategic national asset — not a dumping ground for speculative “green” schemes that enrich investors, not
communities. Environmental policy has become a substitute for industrial policy — a convenient moral posture for those who produce nothing and import everything. That must end.

A Conservative government must re-evaluate Net Zero from first principles: Does it strengthen or weaken Britain’s resilience? Does it protect or erode our ability to feed ourselves? Does it reduce global emissions, or merely export them to China and India? If the answer to those questions is wrong, then so is the policy. Our duty is to balance stewardship with sovereignty.

We can and should reduce waste, cut pollution, and invest in cleaner technologies — but not by sacrificing farmland or livelihoods on the altar of ideology. Net Zero, as currently conceived, is a policy of diminishing returns. It punishes production, imports hypocrisy, and rewards virtue-signalling. It must be replaced by a framework rooted in reality — one that prizes innovation, independence and national strength over arbitrary targets.

A Line in the Sand

Who decides the future of the English countryside? Developers with deep pockets and KCs? Central planners in Whitehall? A Labour Party that neither understands nor cares about rural Britain and views private property as a problem to be solved? Or the farmers, residents and landowners who actually keep the countryside alive?

Labour’s assault is ongoing, and its full consequences are yet to be felt. But the lever they’re pulling is the NPPF. Change that, and everything changes. We
must accept where we got it wrong. We took rural voters for granted. We failed to recognise their contribution to national security, productivity and environmental stewardship. But we will not accept — and neither should we — the managed decline of rural England.

These are not official party policies, but my Conservative vision — for how we rebuild trust with rural Britain and restore pride in the land that sustains us. Sadly, we do not currently hold the levers of power. But we must use our time in opposition to galvanise support for ideas such as these — to do the hard yards in preparing the legislative approach, and above all, to be the voice of those who bear the brunt of Labour’s vindictiveness.

This is the time to stand up — for farmers, for communities, for the land itself. If we don’t defend it now, in law not just in speeches, there won’t be much left to defend.