Cllr Philip Broadhead is the Chairman of the Conservative Councillors’ Association and Leader of the Opposition on Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council

We are a mere six months away from the local elections in May next year. As the Chairman of the Conservative Councillors’ Association I’m determined to see as many Conservatives elected as possible.

It’s fair to say that we have our work cut out. The last few years have been incredibly bruising for the Conservative family. We lost a number of our best champions in Local Government and in Parliament, in part because we stopped delivering on the priorities of the British people and lost their trust. 

It’s pretty clear now that the Conservative Party is at a critical juncture, tasked with not just rebuilding, but reassessing its core strategies and values. That’s a huge job.

But it’s a job I know we can do. The Conservative Party is filled from top to bottom with energetic campaigners and candidates who embrace a can-do Conservative attitude and want to deliver for their communities.

So, for the next six months, we will work tirelessly to show the British people that only voting Conservative can better their community.

One area that we know we can deliver, will show we care and rebuild trust with voters is by recommitting to protecting their local environment. I know that protecting the planet isn’t everyone’s top priority. The economy, cost of living, immigration, and the state of the NHS all poll highly on the list of Brits’ concerns. But we mustn’t take such a two-dimensional approach to winning voters back. Environmentalism sits at the heart of conservatism and is a key credibility test when talking to the electorate.

I know this electoral truth from first hand knowledge and experience. Like many other campaigners, I spent much of the general election campaign travelling the country to help out where I could, as part of my “roadshow caravan tour” (!), knocking on doors everywhere from Somerset to Bishop Auckland. And what struck me was a constant theme of a deep sense of pride and concern about voters’ local natural environment. So much so, that we’re now losing Councillors and Councils in such Tory heartlands as Bury St Edmunds to, of all things, the Green Party. Not because voters subscribe to their loony brand of extreme policies – I’m convinced most are unaware of them. But because they’re selling a credible message of prioritising the protecting of nature.

That has to change. To me, stewardship of the natural world, responsibility to future generations, and the search for resilience are all core tenets of conservatism. Indeed, it was Margaret Thatcher who told Conservative Party Conference in 1988 how Conservatives are not merely friends of the earth, but its guardians and trustees for future generations to come. And more recently, it was the Conservatives in government who seized the economic and strategic opportunities for Britain from cultivating the green economy.

From the Staffordshire Moorlands, to Kent, to Blaby there are hundreds of Conservative councils who have and continue to deliver on the environment. 

But it’s clear that voters either haven’t noticed or don’t believe our record on this. 

Perhaps that’s due to a lazy, almost binary choice that’s been propagated by the Party from the centre: that you have to be either wary of big bang, dubious and costly Net Zero initiatives such as Labour’s Great British Energy, or an all-in, glue yourself to the road crazy. That’s simply not a choice you need to make, nor are most voters in that position. Like many, I care deeply about the environment and conserving our delicate natural world, but balk at big plans not based in evidence, reality or a good ole fashioned conservative pragmatism.

So to appeal to these voters, we need to stop shying away from these issues, meet them head on and own this space once again.

Local Government does this extremely well. I was very proud as Deputy Leader and Leader of Bournemouth Christchurch and Poole (BCP) Council that we updated our Local Plan to build more homes whilst also protecting nature, including all of our precious Green Belt. We balanced the very acute need for more homes with residents’ deep love for the natural landscapes we’re blessed with on the south coast by ensuring more was built on less land. Furthermore, we were one of the first Upper Tier Authorities to build-in Biodiversity Net Gain requirements into all of our planning applications. And not in some “buy some credits elsewhere way”, but with real biodiversity provision on site. Building homes for the future and increasing nature provision: that’s a proper Conservative way to deliver in this area.

Additionally, at this year’s Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, I was reminded of Andy Street’s record on nurturing the green economy, while simultaneously supporting the poorest, protecting the environment, and improving quality of life across the West Midlands. Under his leadership, the combined authority trialled schemes like the retrofit neighbourhoods programme, where homes were retrofitted to be more energy efficient, which cut household bills for those with the most acute needs. This helped to set off a chain reaction when it comes to increasing the pace and scale of retrofitting of privately rented and owned homes.

In Tees Valley, Ben Houchen as Mayor has married a commitment to climate action with economic regeneration for his region. Indeed, under his leadership the former steelworks site has welcomed a number of new green industries, including British Steel’s electric arc furnace for recycled steel. Ben has embraced what it means to be a conservative environmentalist – a proponent of ambitious and pragmatic action to decarbonise our economy and creating well-paying jobs and an invigorated local economy in the process.

And in government we were the driving force for the legislation that attracted private investment into renewables, raised billions in private finance for low carbon projects, started the process of putting nature into recovery, put in place stringent protections for our marine environments, and so much more.

Yet, so many of our detractors minimise many of the significant achievements we made in national and local government. We let the left run with the idea that they hold a monopoly on all effective ideas and solutions that meet the scale of the challenge to halt climate change and put nature into recovery. And we simultaneously let those to our right diminish the very necessity of action on the environment to ensure Britain’s long-term prosperity and security.

Of course, not everything we’ve done has been right, and we must learn the lessons of the last 14 years. But we mustn’t lose sight of how the public knows that a degraded natural, local environment will threaten our quality of life. And that the Conservatives are uniquely placed to deliver pragmatic, ambitious, and market-based solutions to those very threats.

This starts with not ceding ground on the significant achievements in our record. Let’s shout about it more. There is a risk if we do not claim the optimistic vision of conservative environmentalism, we will leave the British people to Labour’s statist and unpopular policies — and then we all may wish to glue ourselves to the road for a very different reason.

The post Philip Broadhead: We rebuild trust with voters by championing the local environment appeared first on Conservative Home.