Reform UK conference: Funding furore overshadows radical planning proposals

There were no obvious signs of unease among Reform UK’s top team on the first day of last week’s conference in Birmingham. It was the party’s first ever “business day“, an attempt to project a sense of seriousness about economic policy by gathering a few dozen business leaders and some members of the press, with the general public excluded.

Prospective chancellor Robert Jenrick joined various panels to explain his proposed remedy for the UK’s lack of growth. Housing spokesperson Richard Tice unveiled a radical proposal to deregulate the planning system and cut business rates for SMEs. At 8pm, guests sat down for an “exclusive private dining experience”, paying £395 per plate to engage in “strategic dialogue” with senior Reform figures.

It was at this dinner that the phones of these senior Reform members will have started pinging. An investigation by Channel 4, aired at 7pm and picked up by the BBC’s 10 o’clock news, had secretly filmed Nigel Farage and two of his closest aides in a pub in Clacton apparently suggesting how to circumvent electoral law to secure a £500,000 donation from a man posing as the son of an American businessman. Reform UK and the individuals involved in the investigations have denied any wrongdoing.

Reform had been notified of the programme a few days earlier and had reportedly been unconcerned. Farage’s long-serving right-hand man Dan Jukes, one of the aides filmed in the investigation, had looked relaxed on Thursday afternoon as he mingled with the assembled business people on the conference floor.

By 2.30am Jukes, who had described himself in the footage as Farage’s future chief of staff in government, had stepped down, as had the other aide, Reform’s head of policy James Orr, pending the outcome of an internal investigation by the party. Throughout Friday, as thousands of Reform supporters flocked to Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre for the main day of the conference, the controversy dominated the national news agenda. Farage attempted to play down the footage as “injudicious pub talk” by a pair of “contractors” while a carefully planned series of headline-targeting policy announcements were left in disarray as the party’s senior team were forced to field questions about Reform’s fitness to govern.

The furore over the investigation is significant because it has cut through at the exact moment that Reform sought to turn around its flagging poll ratings, which have shrunk from around 32% this time last year to around 22%, behind Labour. Reform strategists saw the conference as an opportunity to regain the initiative after a summer that has seen a steady drum beat of revelations around funding, including an undeclared £5m gift to Farage from a cryptocurrency billionaire.

Reform UK’s falling poll ratings

Instead, an already limping Farage has emerged from the conference further weakened, not in the eyes of the party faithful, who - as the roars of support in the NEC’s main auditorium last week attest - remain as loyal as ever, but among the middle-of-the-road floating voters, whom Reform needs to win the next election.

That is meaningful because it could soften the threat posed by Farage to the Labour government and eases the pressure on prime minister Andy Burnham - who decisively won a by-election in June in the Reform-leaning Makerfield seat on his path to Number 10 - to mimic Reform policies. If Reform fails to recover its momentum this autumn, not only does that leave Burnham with less potential political fallout to worry about if he raises taxes in the autumn budget but it could increase the likelihood of a snap election. Burnham has ruled out such a move but with Labour’s main electoral threat in apparent freefall, the right-wing vote split by a resurgent Conservative party and support for the Greens steadily falling, it may become hard to resist.

That is not to say the game is over for Reform. Farage knows how to make a come-back - he has done it multiple times and he is at his most effective when underestimated. Any possible police investigation into Reform’s funding following the Channel 4 report could also play into the party’s hands in the same way that the criminal trial against Donald Trump in 2024 rallied his supporters during that year’s presidential election.

Reform UK planning reforms: what developers and contractors need to know

If Reform’s support does continue to bleed away there will be some in the construction industry who see it as a missed opportunity. Tice’s proposed planning reforms, which aim to increase viability for brownfield schemes, are about as commerical developer-friendly as it is possible to get. His plan would abolish affordable housing requirements on brownfield sites except in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Bristol, where it would be slashed to 5%. He wants to scrap the London Plan, landfill tax, all community infrastructure levy and section 106 payments on brownfield land, remove biodiversity net gain requirements and all external and internal building standards except those which are deemed “necessary”, such as those on fire safety. Newly completed brownfield schemes would also be exempt from tax on rental income, stamp duty and capital gains for 10 years, at an estimated cost to the Treasury of around £1bn. 

People will say it is a developer’s charter, but if we want to get development going again it’s these kinds of policies we need

Construction professional at the conference

Some would say a plan this radical is an over-correction to the cascade of regulatory blockers on viability that have been introduced in recent years. But there was clear enthusiasm at the conference among those who see the current situation as impossible. “People will say it is a developer’s charter, but if we want to get development going again it’s these kinds of policies we need,” said one construction professional attending the conference.

Tensions within Reform UK’s planning agenda

There are also signs that Reform does not have its approach fully worked out yet. Danny Kruger, a former Tory heavyweight who defected to Reform last year, said on one panel that he wanted people to feel like they were “driving” development in their local areas. That arguably conflicts with Tice’s plans to water down judicial reviews, remove habitat regulations and give applications on brownfield sites a presumption of approval. 

Kruger denied there was a conflict, telling Building that existing policies are “not what the community needs and not what the economy needs”. He said Reform’s approach was to “streamline” the approval process for development, adding: “I don’t think that the way to ensure that we have local consent is to gum up the system with all sorts of environmental objectives, which are adjudicated by remote quangos, and empowering activist lawyers to use the court to stop necessary developments.”

Andrew Taylor, Vistry Group planning and sustainability director, said councils needed to be “honest and open” with people about what communities need. “I spent 19 years in local government as an officer. My dad was a councillor for 20 odd years. I can understand the political reality sometimes,” he said. “But we need to be able to do the best for the communities that we’re working within […] it means being pragmatic about decisions.”

Discussions about policy were naturally overshadowed by a feeling that Reform’s chances of winning the next election may be receding. Giving his closing speech on Saturday, Farage came out on stage to a dazzling display of fireworks, thunderous music and the raucous cheers of the crowd. “Much of mainstream media today says the Reform UK conference was subdued yesterday,” he said, to an eruption of laughter from the audience. “Are you subdued?” he asked. “No!” came the loud response.

And yet, this year did feel, if not subdued, a bit less giddy than last year’s conference. The mood then had been electric. There was no spectacle this year as bizarre as Greater Lincolnshire mayor Andrea Jenkyns striding around the main stage belting out a rendition of a song she had written in her youth, or as dramatic as Farage’s surprise speech following Angela Rayner’s resignation. 

The closest this year came to recapturing that atmosphere was during Farage’s main speech, which was interrupted no less than four times by protesters who were promptly dragged out by security as the Reform leader made a series of mocking remarks: “We’ve got a screamer!”, “These are the benefits of a university education, folks. Tell us love, sociology is it?”, “Boring!”.

This year felt more organised and more professional, partly reflecting the string of big names who have defected from the Conservatives over the past year, starting with Kruger last September and culminating with Jenrick, Suella Braverman and Nadhim Zahawi in January. Reform now feels a bit less like a set of insurgent outsiders, but any attempt to sell the party as a government in waiting has taken a heavy hit from the Channel 4 footage. Harry Cole, former political editor of the Sun and a Reform cheerleader, described the fallout from the report as a “moment of reckoning” for the party. “This is getting serious now, and the structures and internal dynamics in place really need to up their game to deal with an onslaught of fair, reasonable scrutiny that’s going to come down the line,” he said at the conference on Friday morning.

There is no doubt that Reform is facing a significantly more challenging electoral landscape now compared with a year ago. Its slogan in the May local elections, “Vote Reform, Get Starmer Out” has proved a strategic blunder for the party, paving the way for the arrival of Andy Burnham, a much tougher foe than his predecessor.

So can the construction industry afford to write off Reform? Luke Tryl, executive director of influential research firm More in Common, says he is often asked if Reform has peaked. “And my answer is: look at the fundamentals. Look at the core drivers of the Reform vote, which is lack of trust in politics, which is a sense that those in positions of power don’t listen, and that the social contract has broken. None of those fundamentals have gone away over the past year.”