On the heels of a Reform UK press conference this week, PBC Today digital editor Matt Brundrett investigates what a hypothetical Reform UK government could mean for the construction industry
Nigel Farage and other party members, including rejected Tory candidate and party-quitter Zia Yusuf, and Tory defector Suella Braverman, held a press conference on Tuesday, 17 February, perhaps in an attempt to reverse the widely reported drop in popularity for the party, in which they fielded questions, including Reform UK’s construction policy.
It was a packed seven hours, with tiredly familiar talking points and typical Farage-style mudslinging and jeering, including insulting a reporter from the Financial Times (FT), Anna Gross, who asked about Reform’s migration policy and the education of the politicians, to which Farage dismissively responded that she should “just write some silly story.”
Here, we’ll look at what the party has previously said that would be of interest to the construction industry.
Housing
During the conference, Farage announced that if Reform took power, they would establish a new Department of Business, Trade and Energy. This would be led by Richard Tice, the party’s deputy leader.
Tice then spoke at the conference, in which he made it clear that the new department would work to ‘create millions’ for shareholders, reindustrialise the country, and create a sovereign wealth fund. He also somewhat off-handedly mentioned that the department would cover housing.
Tice said: “I’m going to be talking this time next week in the Midlands in great detail about this, a sovereign wealth fund that backs British companies, that buys and promotes British products and that helps ensure that we build hundreds of thousands of affordable homes in our towns, our rural areas and our cities. This is how we make real progress.”
Tice failed to go into any detail about how a department dealing with business, trade, and energy would manage the construction of new housing, so we have no choice but to look elsewhere for their house-building policies.
The Reform UK manifesto from the 2024 election cycle recognises that ‘Britain has a housing crisis,’ but provides very little detail on how it would be addressed. What little there is includes both reforming and reviewing the planning system. This would be achieved by using vague terms such as fast-tracking new housing on brownfield sites via tax incentives, and by creating a ‘loose fit planning’ policy for large residential developments. Again, only minor detail is given on how this would work, but with the benefit of the doubt, it sounds similar to what the current government has done, with investments into brownfield sites and proposed brownfield passports.
The focus on brownfield, however, has been previously criticised, as highlighted by Central Bedfordshire Council, as they tackled the specific question of Why can’t we build more on brownfield sites:
“Brownfield land is land that has been previously developed or built on. This could include land that has been used for housing, industry or car parks, for example. We want to use as much brownfield land as we can. Unfortunately, the supply of brownfield land in Central Bedfordshire is very limited and, in the past, there hasn’t been enough to deliver all the homes and jobs that are needed. This has meant that growth has had to be allocated to greenfield sites. We keep a register of known brownfield sites that we think could come forward for development, subject to planning permission, which is updated annually. We will always look to use this land before we look for greenfield sites.”
This suggests that providing tax reliefs for developers on brownfield sites is tackling the wrong aspect of the issue, as the real issue is availability and the appropriateness of the brownfield land for development. Under tax reliefs, while developers may pay less to acquire the land and go through planning, etc., they may still end up creating less housing at a higher cost due to remediation, preparation, and upkeep costs.
The suggestion of a ‘loose fit planning’ policy sounds like it would remove red tape or bureaucracy that bogs projects down- an approach remarkably similar to the current government’s measures in planning reforms and the National Planning Policy Framework, which has been criticised by Propertymark as not being enough to achieve government targets for 1.5m new homes.
In the Reform manifesto, Nigel Farage writes in the opening statement: “The unprecedented population explosion has pushed Britain to breaking point. There’s a housing crisis. A benefits crisis. Record crime. Record NHS waiting lists. Wages are stagnating. Net Zero has sent energy costs soaring. It is making us poorer and colder, damaging British industry and forcing drivers off the road.”
Further in, the manifesto states a solution: “All non-essential immigration frozen to boost wages, protect public services, end the housing crisis and cut crime.”
And in the most on-the-nose statement of all: “Reform UK will ensure that people can own their own home by unleashing housebuilding across the country and cutting immigration.”
Along with the vague and unsupported solutions they do propose, Reform UK make it very clear that they continue their same old cliché of blaming the lack of housebuilding and the housing crisis on immigration, with no context, evidence, or reasoning given.
Therefore, until Richard Tice can go into more detail in the safety of his fellow Reform supporters and away from the scrutiny of journalists’ questions, all we have been given, and presumably all Reform UK have as a housing policy, is the same thing they have for almost everything else: demonise immigrants.
Editor’s note: When introducing the new Department of Business, Trade and Energy, Farage said that it would be “a new super economics and business department, in many ways modelled on what the Germans did after World War II.” Those familiar with Reform UK’s Euroscepticism will be interested to know that the rapid economic recovery of West Germany following the war is in large-part due to the success of the Marhall Plan, or the European Recovery Program, in which the US and Western Europe lent the country the equivalent of $19bn to promote economic recovery – a far cry from the home-made nature that Farage seems to imply.
Infrastructure, industry, and net zero
Richard Tice continued on “Net Stupid Zero,” speaking about accessing Britain’s “energy treasure” in oil and gas. Again, he failed to elaborate on any points, but previously, Tice stated that if Reform UK took power, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) would be scrapped, along with net zero targets.
Beyond this, last year, Tice stated that the renewable energy sector would also face taxes, called renewable energy “a massive con,” and said that subsidies for wind and solar companies would be “recovered.”
The Reform UK manifesto echoes this line, with one of their key points stating: “Scrap energy levies and net zero to slash energy bills and save each household £500 per year. Unlock Britain’s vast oil and gas reserves to beat the cost-of-living crisis and unleash real economic growth,” and that scrapping net zero “could save the public sector over £30bn per year for the next 25 years”, of course, with no explanation as to how.
As was highlighted in a previous Editor’s View, net zero is far from a lost cause, and will not cost the country nor the taxpayers much at all – in fact, the cost of both creating and maintaining a net zero energy system will only be £360bn more than simply maintaining the current energy system from now until 2050. Coupled with the rise in the cost of food, natural disasters, and other climate change-related costs, the cost of not achieving net zero will be far greater in the long run than creating net zero now.
Of note is Reform UK’s insistence on continuing to rely on the UK’s own gas and oil reserves, referring to them as an “energy treasure.” According to the North Sea Transition Authority, the body overseeing the oil and gas industry in the North Sea, there were 2.9bn Barrels of Oil Equivalent (boe) at the end of 2024, down from the 3.3bn at the end of 2023, suggesting that exploration and discovery of new deposits is not enough to match the consumption, and suggests that from 2024 there was only enough in reserve to power around three years of gas and 15 years of oil. This is only in reserves, it should be noted, and not in resources, which tend to be much more plentiful.
Regarding Tice’s insistence on a UK ‘energy treasure’ in oil and gas, the Carbon Brief ran a fact check sorting out the difference between reserves and resources and why 3-15 years of reserves does not mean the country is anywhere near running out.
However, they go on to say that this does not mean we should not move away from them, especially to avoid warming the world by more than 2 degrees Celsius by 2050, a change that would have disastrous consequences. The UK currently generates 43% of its energy from renewable sources, meaning that even with nearly half of its energy coming from cheaper, reliable, renewable resources, the UK still had to dip into its oil and gas reserves, to the point that we used more than could be replenished.
This is a trend that, as per the graph from the North Sea Transition Authority below, has been mostly consistent over the last 8 years and will likely continue. Relying further on oil and gas would only exacerbate this issue, with consequences ranging from energy shortages to climate disasters.
Conclusion: A whole lot of nothing
Reform UK is currently reaching the end of a period of popularity, focusing on repetitive rhetoric around immigration, climate scepticism, and attacking other parties.
To some, this may seem attractive, but simply looking under the bonnet reveals crumbling arguments based on flimsy or absent reasoning, simply saying something will bring something else as if it were true (reducing immigration will bring more housing), with neither any reasoning for why actioning the former causes the latter, nor how not addressing the former makes the latter any worse.
For those in the construction industry looking for political parties with a plan for the industry, reasonable ideas or arguments that could boost housebuilding or address the skills shortage, they will want to steer clear of Reform UK.
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