Mario Creatura was a councillor in Croydon and the former Conservative candidate for Croydon Central in 2019.
Whilst out campaigning in Kent last weekend, I spoke to an older lady who had wanted her road resurfaced for years, frustrated by the lack of investment in something she uses every day. A young couple were wondering how local services would cope with the building taking place around them. They weren’t opposed to development, but couldn’t see the infrastructure being provided to support it.
A father from a family of longstanding Conservative voters took a longer view. Having lived in the area for decades, he was concerned about the scale of change and whether enough thought was being given to the services on which families like his depended.
In more than fifteen years of knocking on doors, these concerns have come up time and time again. People rightly want some reassurance that somebody is thinking about their community as a whole. When they ask where the doctors and dentists are, they deserve more than just ‘.’
Having spent twelve years as a councillor, I know how difficult getting that answer can be. The authority considering a development may not control the surrounding roads, while decisions about healthcare rests with NHS commissioners and providers. It’s the same with water access, phone signal, power, sewage and school capacity. A councillor can doggedly pursue each organisation and still struggle to tell residents when the services they need will arrive.
That frustration helps explain the Halt the Houses campaign in Kent, which makes a reasonable case for development done properly. Local people have already experienced water shortages and hosepipe restrictions, yet Tonbridge and Malling Council faces targets for almost 20,000 additional homes when, as the campaign highlights, South East Water’s plans could accommodate only around 6,300. Dismissing those concerns as NIMBYism hardly answers the question of where the water will come from. “” is no basis for planning the essential services on which families depend.
This is precisely the problem the Conservative 2019 manifesto recognised with its promise of ‘infrastructure first’: roads, schools and GP surgeries would be provided before people moved into new homes. We should consider updating that commitment and explain how we would fulfil it, setting out what we need to do in government to make it a dependable reality.
The practical starting point should be to settle the necessary infrastructure, funding and responsibilities before or alongside development approval, with delivery tied to when the additional demand will arise. Residents should be able to see how the local road network, water supply and healthcare provision will cope before decisions are taken that affect them.
There is an obvious challenge here – if we expect infrastructure to arrive earlier, we must address the time and expense involved in delivering it, otherwise we risk promising a sequence that the organisations responsible cannot finance or achieve.
Our 2024 manifesto addressed precisely those obstacles. Alongside its ambition to cut major infrastructure approval times from four years to one, it proposed proportionate mitigation requirements, quicker changes to consented projects and a clearer role for statutory consultees in improving schemes rather than adding piecemeal demands. Those were national pledges worth revisiting, although major-project reforms alone will not repair an existing road or provide a dentist.
Britain Remade has made useful contributions on this topic. Their ‘Build More For Less’ campaign cites research from the Centre for British Progress that British road projects cost 23 per cent more than comparable schemes in the countries studied, identifying planning and legal uncertainty, procurement and inconsistent investment programmes among the causes of Britain’s wider infrastructure costs. Their work should prompt us to ask how much more our existing budgets could achieve.
Locally, much of the work needs to happen before individual schemes reach the decision stage. Councils already prepare infrastructure plans; the priority is getting highways authorities, utilities and health commissioners to use them together, agree what is needed and commit to delivery.
Several developments may bring patients to the same surgeries or traffic to the same junction, including across Council boundaries. A shared assessment would help identify the combined pressure and the improvements required, while avoiding repeated studies of the same area for every application.
That assessment must distinguish additional demand from existing shortages. A small builder cannot reasonably be expected to repair decades of underinvestment, while public bodies should be clear about the responsibilities that remain theirs. Fair contributions, established early and tested for viability, are more credible than an expanding list of demands.
Existing arrangements for pooling developer contributions can help fund shared improvements alongside public and utility investment. Where infrastructure must be built before all contributions arrive, the financing needs to be agreed upfront, including who carries the repayment risk – moving a payment date does not make the cost disappear.
My time in the private sector has made me wary of plans that depend on another organisation doing something it has not yet agreed to do. That applies particularly to healthcare: premises alone cannot provide appointments, so commissioners must establish how the additional service will be staffed and funded. Expanding an existing practice may sometimes serve local people sooner than a new building.
There will still be difficult funding choices, but those judgements become harder when we leave them until after development has been approved and communities are already feeling the pressure. Bringing the decisions together would give residents a clearer account of what is coming and businesses greater certainty about their obligations.
The people I met in Kent were asking questions that matter in communities across the country. They want investment to keep pace with the changes around them, and some confidence that the services their families depend on have been properly considered before decisions are made. There is a strong Conservative case for meeting that expectation, rooted in fairness to existing residents, a belief in responsible growth and respect for the taxpayers and businesses paying for it.
Kemi Badenoch and her team are well placed to make that case, bringing together our commitment to infrastructure first with the determination to tackle the costs and bureaucracy that hold delivery back. For those of us returning to these doorsteps week after week, that matters: it gives us a practical Conservative answer to a concern we hear everywhere, and a clear purpose behind the work of rebuilding trust