10 October 2003
Shed 'nasty' image or face defeat, May warns
Theresa May has urged the Tories to shed their image as 'the nasty party'.
The party chair told delegates in Bournemouth they would be 'slaughtered' for a third time unless the party embraced the diversity of modern Britain.
'Soldiering on to the next election without radical, fundamental change is simply not an option.'
May pledged to ensure that in future the party's election candidates were more representative of society. She said Tories would have to abandon their support for 'some mythical place called Middle England' and instead represent the whole of the country.
She told delegates: 'No more glib moralising, no more hypocritical finger-wagging.'
Set up your own schools, say Tories
Parents and community groups would be able to set up their own schools – funded by state scholarships – under proposals unveiled by the shadow education secretary.
Damian Green said each pupil would receive the same funding as their state school counterparts, but schools would spend the money free from Whitehall interference.
Green told delegates the policy would give all families the 'choice' currently enjoyed only by the well-off. 'This will be a revolution in our schools,' he added. 'Why should services funded by the state be run by the state?' Green also pledged to look at the role of local authorities in delivering education and announced that he had enlisted the help of Tory councillors to conduct a review of existing arrangements. They will report their findings shortly.
Later in the session, shadow health secretary Liam Fox unveiled his own version of foundation hospitals. These were based on the Spanish model, he said, and would allow institutions to set their own pay and conditions, develop their own technology and, in a swipe at Gordon Brown, borrow money free from Treasury control.
Right to buy promised for association tenants
Housing sector leaders have rejected the Conservative Party's proposals to extend the right to buy to housing association tenants as a 'distraction'.
The National Housing Federation immediately hit out at the proposal, unveiled by David Davis – John Prescott's shadow – at the Tories' annual conference in Bournemouth, saying it would exacerbate an existing shortage of social housing.
James Tickell, deputy chief executive of the NHF, said the focus should be on efforts to generate more resources to build low-cost accommodation. He rejected the claim that extending the right-to-buy scheme would be a way of raising new funds to invest in social housing.
'The stock of affordable homes in areas of high demand should not be further reduced, for the sake of future generations,' he added.
'The intention may be to invest proceeds from right-to-buy sales to develop new social housing, but we simply don't believe it is possible to replace what's been sold.'
Davis, addressing the conference on October 8, said it was wrong that housing association tenants did not have the same right to buy their homes at a discounted rate as council tenants. He pledged that a Tory government would reverse Labour's plans to suspend the scheme in some areas and extend it even further.
'There are more than a million housing association tenants who do not have the right to buy. It's a lottery, because if they had been offered a council house they would have had that right. That must change. That will change.'
Davis told delegates that the money raised by sales would be put back into building more affordable homes, which would be made available to new tenants. This would be a way of raising funds to prompt a new wave of investment in social housing, he claimed.
'Expanding the right-to-buy scheme will reverse an alarming trend which has seen the quantity of new social housing plummet by 29% since Labour came to office,' Davis said.
He also turned his fire on the government's plans for elected assemblies in the English regions, dismissing them as nothing more than expensive talking shops.
'Regional assemblies would cost £200m a year. That means £200m of extra bureaucracy, £200m of extra paperwork, £200m of extra talk.'
PFoct2003
