He condemned the government's roadbuilding programme as one of the smallest in the G7 group of leading industrial countries. Collins said: "It's true that recent announcements constitute the largest roadbuilding scheme in the last 10 years, but that's not saying much. It's halfhearted, it's belated and it's too slow. Let's start dealing with the underinvestment in roads."
In a speech to the conference, Collins said a future Tory government would cut the cost and time of building roads by scrapping multimodal studies, which he said have become "a way to delay decisions, not to make them".
At a fringe meeting, Tory housing spokesperson Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said the party's promise to give a million housing association tenants the right to buy their home would lead to the sale of 30,000 properties a year. He said the proceeds would be used to build 15,000 affordable homes.
National Housing Federation chief executive Jim Coulter said the plan was a "very bad idea, representing poor value for money".
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