Emulating Donald Trump may be a strategy with diminishing returns in British politics, but Nigel Farage plans to channel the US President’s time on The Apprentice if he becomes prime minister, telling his cabinet ‘You’re fired!’ if they fail to deliver within 100 days of taking office.

In a bid to show voters Reform UK is serious about delivering change, Farage will tell his party conference in Birmingham this week that ministers will be forced to resign, or face being kicked out, if they cannot keep their promises. The pledge will form a centrepiece of Reform’s second annual jamboree, where the party will outline its plans for ‘the first 100 days’ in Downing Street. An aide says Farage will dispense with failing colleagues without qualms: ‘Nigel doesn’t give a fuck.’

One of those whose head will be on the block is Richard Tice, the deputy leader and business spokesman, who will use his platform speech on Friday, just before Farage takes the stage, to outline plans to revive house-building and Britain’s high streets. Most politicians promise jam tomorrow, but Tice plans to offer a return to the jam of yesteryear with radical reform of planning law to make it easier to build homes and tax breaks to make it cheaper for developers. ‘Our town centres are in a state of national crisis, to the point of an emergency,’ he says.

‘The plan for conference is for the country to fall in love with Nigel again’

‘The plan for conference is for the country to fall in love with Nigel again’

In an interview with The Spectator, Tice explains how he sees the problem: ‘It’s what I call the doughnut. Twenty-five years ago, every town had some jam in the middle, which was lovely – retail, and then housing on the outside of the retail. Now you’ve got a doughnut that’s not filled with jam, it’s filled with mouldy old cheese. On the outside, you’ve got nice new greenfield developments, out-of-town retail parks, out-of-town shopping centres with free parking. On the inside, you’ve got a war zone of vacancy, high business rates, homelessness, antisocial behaviour, expensive parking.’

At the moment new development is split roughly 50-50 between greenfield and brownfield sites. Tice, who made his money in property development, wants to shift the balance so it is 75 per cent on brownfield sites. ‘Before anybody says there aren’t any, they’re all used up, that’s bullshit,’ he says. ‘There are loads and loads of them, right in the heart of town centres. You’ve got to make planning really simple. On brownfield sites there will be a complete removal of many of the costs, impediments and delays.’

Reform is proposing what Tice calls ‘a five-year emergency plan’ that would ‘get rid of all the affordable-housing requirements’ outside of the few cities – London, Manchester, Leeds and Bristol – where development currently works. That would mean developers no longer have to build cheap homes alongside more profitable housing.

Tice would also ‘remove the need for an environmental statement, remove biodiversity net gain, remove the habitat regulations, remove the newts and bats regulations’ (which allow the presence of these creatures to impede human development). He would also scrap the Community Infrastructure Levy on new development.

On the tax side, Tice says: ‘All new brownfield residential homes would be stamp-duty free, capital-gains-tax free and rental-income-tax free for a decade. We’ve got to dramatically incentivise.’ This, he calculates, will cost around £1 billion a year. But he says there would be a ‘GDP multiplier effect’ that would recoup the costs. ‘If you had an extra 20,000 units a year built because of this, give or take – the GDP on that is £4 billion to £5 billion. If nothing gets built, if I’m wrong and it’s not an incentive, there’s no cost. There’s no government money........

© The Spectator