The Big Conference Season Round Up 2026

A crowded conference season

Anyone working in the built environment sector has had plenty to think about over the past five weeks, with a new Prime Minister in Downing Street and a flurry of policy announcements from all the major parties. Housebuilding, energy and infrastructure were all high on the agenda as the parties gathered for conference.

Andy Burnham used his first conference speech as Prime Minister to put council housebuilding at the heart of Labour's offer, alongside a new publicly owned body to invest in the electricity grid. Each of the other parties arrived with its own ideas about how homes, energy and infrastructure should be planned and paid for.

We look below at what each party announced through conference and implications on development proposals across housing, energy and infrastructure in our towns and cities.

Labour: a return to council housebuilding

Burnham told delegates in Liverpool on 29 September that Labour would deliver "the biggest council house building programme since the post-war era", led by Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary Angela Rayner. The £39 billion Social and Affordable Homes Programme, which aims for around 300,000 homes over ten years, will fund it, and a new Council Housebuilding Support Fund will help councils build up the teams to deliver.

Councils will also be able to take control of long-term empty homes and buy up the worst private rented homes where landlords ignore warnings. New council homes will sit outside Right to Buy, although existing tenants keep the right, and Rayner promised a Leasehold Reform Bill before Christmas to cap ground rents and estate charges.

Housebuilders will watch Your First Home most closely. First-time buyers will be able to buy a new-build home with a 2.5% deposit, with the Government lending up to a fifth of the price through an equity loan. Income limits, price caps and what developers must contribute will follow at the Autumn Budget. Savills welcomed the scheme, though others within the industry recalled that Help to Buy purchasers paid around 10% more for new builds.

Burnham also announced Great British Grid, a publicly owned arm of Great British Energy that will co-invest in transmission projects, starting with £4 billion. He wants it to speed up the connections that have held back employment and data centre schemes for years, and developers will be allowed to build their own connections too. A strengthened Water Bill will lift the ban on public ownership of water companies.

Conservatives: deregulation and the end of the Future Homes Standard

Andrew Griffith, the Shadow Chancellor, promised "the most ambitious deregulation project in a generation". The Future Homes Standard would go, and with it the requirement for low-carbon heating in new homes. Section 106 and the Community Infrastructure Levy would become a single charge, and Natural England and the Environment Agency would be abolished, with their work handed to Defra.

The party says this package and the abolition of stamp duty on main homes could take around £50,000 off the price of a new home. That figure leans heavily on a 2023 estimate of what low-carbon heating adds to a detached house, so buyers of flats and smaller homes would save much less. Labour called the plans a return to failed policies, and the Liberal Democrats dismissed them as "fantasy-land financial pledges".

Kemi Badenoch closed the conference on 7th October with a pledge that no one would pay inheritance tax on their family home, and that couples could pass on a further £1 million tax-free. Taking homes out of inheritance tax may give older owners less reason to downsize, which would matter to promoters of later-living schemes. On energy, she promised to keep drilling in the North Sea and to build small modular reactors alongside renewables.

Reform UK: a planning system built around brownfield

Reform met at the NEC in Birmingham in early September and spent much of the conference presenting itself as a government in waiting. Around 600 executives attended its first business day, where deputy leader Richard Tice launched the Planning Teal Paper. The party describes it as a consultation document, so the detail may yet change.

At its centre is a national presumption in favour of building homes on brownfield land. Housing targets would be abolished and Local Plans would become the main planning document, ending the London Plan. Reform would also scrap CIL and Section 106 payments along with biodiversity net gain. Affordable housing requirements on brownfield sites would disappear outside England's five biggest cities, where 5% would still apply, and the party is reviewing its approach to the green belt.

Tice also promised to take £250 a year off household energy bills, mainly by removing policy costs and VAT. The Home Builders Federation welcomed the party's engagement with the industry.

Liberal Democrats and Greens: social housing and local consent

The Liberal Democrats arrived in Brighton in September with around 150 more councillors than last year. Members voted to double government spending on affordable homes and to aim for 150,000 social rent homes a year, with councils setting binding local targets, borrowing to build and able to end Right to Buy locally. Housing spokesperson Gideon Amos MP rejected the Government's "builders versus blockers" language and argued that completed homes matter more than permissions granted.

The Greens also gathered in Brighton, at the start of October. Zack Polanski's headline pledge was an emergency three-year cap on private rents, holding rises to CPI, wage growth or 2%, whichever is lowest. He held up Green-led Bristol and Stroud as examples of councils building homes at scale.

What it means for development and engagement

Every party wants to be seen as pro-housing, though they disagree sharply about who should build the homes and who should pay for what goes around them.

Developer contributions are the clearest example. If Reform or the Conservatives take office, Section 106 and CIL could be scrapped or merged, and the community benefits that often carry a consultation would need a different footing. Promoters who can show what their scheme delivers on the ground, whether a new junction or space for a GP surgery, will be better placed whichever system applies.

The bigger shift may be local. A Reform-led cabinet and a Liberal Democrat planning chair can read the same application in opposite ways, with one asking why it isn't on brownfield land and the other asking whether the community agreed to it. Early conversations with councillors from every group, informed by a clear political audit, count for more now that so few regions are dominated by one party.

Schemes that need new grid capacity should follow Great British Grid closely. The Conservatives and Reform talk about energy almost entirely in terms of household bills, so a project with a generation or grid element needs a local story about costs and jobs alongside the case on carbon.

Affordable housing offers will face different expectations depending on who runs the council. With Labour councils building their own homes and Reform promising to cut obligations to almost nothing, a package that once satisfied a committee may now look too generous to some members and too thin to others.

Font Comms helps developers and infrastructure providers make their case to councillors and communities, whoever is in charge locally. Our political audits show where each group on a council stands before an application goes in, and our consultations give local people a clear picture of what a scheme will deliver for them and are designed to uncover support. If you would like to talk through what this conference season means for your project, get in touch.