Lessons from Conference Season 2026

What did party conferences tell us about the politics surrounding the built environment? UKGBC's Senior Policy Advisor Kirsty Girvan looks back across the conference highlights as parties grapple with questions of how to build the homes people need, strengthen local economies and deliver tangible improvements in people's daily lives.

As conference season draws to a close, the UK’s political parties have offered a useful snapshot of how their priorities might evolve ahead of the next General Election. For the built environment sector, housing, planning and growth dominated the conversation. Climate and net zero remained present throughout, but increasingly featured as part of wider discussions about economic renewal, energy affordability and neighbourhood improvement rather than as standalone environmental issues.

Reform UK

3rd – 5th September

Reform’s recent conference signalled a deliberate transition from protest politics toward a party focused on credible governance, positioning the newly introduced Planning Teal Paper as the structural foundation underpinning their entire agenda for national economic growth. By framing planning deregulation as the primary lever to unlock housebuilding and major infrastructure, the party aims to establish an aggressive pro-growth identity.

The Paper proposes a dismantling of the “barriers to development”, such as abolishing the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL), affordable housing mandates, and Section 106 agreements, removing mandates like Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) – all of which risks creating spaces that fail to function for local communities and threatens to produce developments which remove the green spaces deeply valued by the public. While a policy presumption in favour of urban brownfield development offers a small silver lining, it cannot mask the friction between encouraging unrestricted development and maintaining long-term public confidence in the planning system.

Throughout the conference, the party doubled down on expected climate scepticism, vowing to halt new net-zero initiatives, whilst simultaneously championing energy affordability and international economic competitiveness. They pledged reductions in household utility bills by removing green levies, but failed to offer a clear, long-term mechanism for lowering energy costs while actively forcing a greater reliance on fossil fuels.

 

Liberal Democrats

19th – 22nd September

The Lib Dem’s conference presented a party centred on community, climate action and local empowerment. Housing remained a key theme, with discussions focused on delivering more affordable homes while ensuring development supports thriving communities. The party reaffirmed its support for ambitious climate action, including measures to accelerate the transition to clean energy and improve the efficiency of the UK’s housing stock. All of which were reminders that sustainable development remains central to the Liberal Democrats’ broader vision for the country.

Labour Party

27th – 30th September

The mood in Liverpool was notably more positive than previous years, with an upbeat shift in energy likely due to the ‘Burnham bounce’ which makes the party look increasingly electorally secure. The conversation focused on policy delivery, as opposed to development with a more interventionist, state-led offer championed.

The central narrative uniting housing, regeneration, and energy across the conference was devolution. Rather than relying on top-down structures, the government increasingly frames regional mayors and strategic authorities as the primary engines to drive growth and localised net-zero transitions. For the built environment, this shift offers a massive opportunity to align regional targets with genuine local need. However, the practical reality of this devolutionary landscape remains highly ambiguous. Central government must plan this transfer of power with local authorities to understand the capacity and support required to deliver effectively and avoid a fragmented, inconsistent approach.

Alongside this shift was a notable reframing of the climate agenda, moving away from abstract terminology, the party consistently linked net-zero action to jobs, industrial investment, energy affordability, and community renewal. For our sector, this signals a shift in how we talk about climate ambition, shifting our advocacy towards more tangible things, such as high-quality retrofit training programmes and jobs, green construction skills development, and whole-life carbon as circular economy growth. UKGBC’s Director of Policy and Places, Jo Wheeler, reflected on her time at conference in a LinkedIn post – highlighting that the opportunities increasingly sit at the local and regional level, and the challenge is about demonstrating how our agenda can be delivered effectively and locally.

Green Party

2nd – 4th October

The Green Party entered its Brighton conference seeking to broaden its appeal and place housing more firmly at the centre of its political offer. Alongside its typical focus on the climate and nature crises, discussions increasingly centred on proposals for significant changes to housing delivery, greater tenant protections and stronger controls on rents.

Under an explicitly ‘eco-populist’ strategy, the party has moved away from abstract environmentalism, and instead deliberately anchors its climate narrative within the immediate, everyday material concerns – hence specifically targeting the cost-of-living and housing crises. By framing social justice and climate action as inseparable, the Greens aim to energise their base and appeal to supporters of a more interventionist platform. For the built environment sector, engaging with the Green party means meeting their desire for systemic market restructure with industry and economic realities.

Conservative Party

4th – 7th October

The headline from the Conservative conference has been a determination to outpace Reform UK’s deregulation narrative through a sweeping “bonfire of red tape”. The Tory leadership has retreated from the UK’s net-zero framework, which leaves unanswered questions about how they plan to lower the cost of living with no proactive housing retrofit schemes or energy-efficiency support.

The headline pledge is a plan to slice up to £50,000 off housebuilding costs by systematically dismantling planning and environmental frameworks. This includes abolishing Natural England and the Environment Agency, scrapping the Future Homes Standard, repealing the Climate Change Act 2008, and replacing Section 106 and Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) with a single developer levy. This wholesale dismantling of environmental protections sits in tension with the traditional Conservative vision of preserving a ‘green and pleasant land’, risking alienating some voters. Furthermore, threats to cut the low-carbon Future Homes Standard – a policy introduced by the Conservatives – threatens to cause an industry slowdown, with policy flip-flopping that can damage investor confidence, stall green skills development, and trap future homeowners in volatile fossil-fuel energy markets.

From planning to pride in place: key takeaways from conference season

This is an opportunity for our sector to demonstrate how better homes, thriving communities and climate action can be delivered together.”

This year’s conference season revealed both sharp political differences and some surprising areas of common ground. Housing was the one issue that cut across almost every event, whether focused on planning reform, affordability, regeneration or renters’ rights, all parties recognised the scale of the challenge and the political importance of finding solutions.

There was also a noticeable shift in climate narratives. Rather than talking about net zero in isolation, parties increasingly connected climate action to economic growth, energy affordability, jobs and improved places. The wider political picture suggests a contest for the centre: Labour may currently look like the safer option, while a Liberal Democrat party could gain ground between a more interventionist Labour mandate, a rightward-moving Conservative platform and a radical Green agenda.

As the political debate evolves, this is an opportunity for our sector is to demonstrate how better homes, thriving communities and climate action can be delivered together.

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