The Conservatives have pledged to take up to £50,000 off the cost of buying a new home and scrap a levy they say pushes up the cost of the weekly shop as they kicked off their annual conference.
Andrew Griffith, the shadow Chancellor, set out his vision in his first major speech on Monday – as the Tories put the economy at the heart of their Birmingham gathering.
The party said the new home saving would come from scrapping red tape and net zero building rules. It would also abolish extended producer responsibility (EPR), a packaging levy it calls the “grocery tax”.
Griffith said lower, simpler and fairer taxes would be his “personal North Star” as chancellor, adding that the party would cut taxes “only when we can afford to do so”.
He accused Prime Minister Andy Burnham of wanting to return to a socialist “fever dream” of the 1970s, in which, Griffith wrote, “the strikes, decline and blackouts never happened”.
Griffith described his plans as “the most ambitious growth package in a generation”. Here is what he has announced.
How the Tories want to cut tax
Scrapping the ‘grocery tax’: The extended producer responsibility scheme, which the Tories have dubbed the “grocery tax”, requires supermarkets and food manufacturers to pay a levy on the packaging they use.
The money goes to local authorities to fund bin collections and recycling plants. The British Retail Consortium (BRC) has claimed the scheme costs businesses an extra £1.5bn each year. The Conservatives have today pledged to scrap it, saying it raises “the price of everyone’s supermarket shop” as retailers pass on the costs.
Fixing tax codes: Griffith has claimed that the UK’s tax code system – which is used by employers and HMRC to work out how much tax someone has to pay – is a “cat’s cradle of complexity”. He has said time spent on tax returns or waiting on HMRC helplines takes small business owners and the self-employed away from their work and families.
To tackle this, he announced on Monday that every Treasury minister in a Conservative government would be given a mission to simplify it.
Removing the 60 per cent marginal tax rate: Griffith said it is his “ambition” to end the 60 per cent tax rate. This applies to earnings between £100,000 and £125,140, where the tax-free personal allowance shrinks by £1 for every £2 you earn. He said ending it “will take time”, and gave no timetable for when it could be achieved.
Dropping Labour’s ‘family homes tax’: Griffith announced today that the Conservatives would scrap what Labour calls the High Value Council Tax Surcharge, often known as the ‘mansion tax’. It was announced by former chancellor Rachel Reeves in her November 2025 Budget and will charge owners of homes in England worth £2m or more between £2,500 and £7,500 a year from April 2028.
Ending stamp duty: At the 2025 Conservative Party conference, party leader Kemi Badenoch announced that they would scrap stamp duty – a tax you pay when you buy property or land over a certain price – on primary residences.
Scrapping the tax would cost the Treasury around £9bn, but she said doing so would “unlock a fairer and more aspirational society” by making it easier to buy a house.
How quickly would the Tories cut taxes?
Not immediately, according to the Conservatives’ own shadow Chancellor.
Griffith says the party’s first Budget back in government would aim to be “a tax-cutting Budget”, telling GB News on Monday that further cuts would come “only as and when we can, living within our means”.
One tax that Conservatives have suggested they would like to scrap is inheritance tax – the duty paid when a deceased person’s estate is passed on to inheritors.
But Griffith told Sky News this morning that it was unlikely the party would be able to commit to that.
“There are lots of things that we would like to do, but the job of the chancellor is to make sure that those can be paid for,” he said.
Griffith added that he and Badenoch both favoured removing inheritance tax, but that the party “won’t be able to do everything that we want to do on day one”.
Opposition parties have also suggested that the Tory pledges to cut taxes are unrealistic.
Labour Party chairwoman Bridget Phillipson said the Tories “had failed at every turn” to grow the economy during their 14 years in power, while Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper described their plan as a “litany of fantasy-financial pledges”.
She also said the Conservatives had “cemented their position as a pointless anti-growth, anti-business party” by rejecting closer ties with Europe.
How the Tories want to cut house prices
Another of the big pledges Griffith has announced is to take up to £50,000 off the price of a new home by cutting red tape.
Scrapping net zero building rules: The party would axe the Future Homes Standard, a set of rules on how environmentally friendly new homes have to be. Under the rules, builders would have to fit things like heat pumps in new homes from 2027.
The Tories claim these rules add more than £30,000 to the cost of building a home. They also say separate rules to protect wildlife add almost £6,000 to the cost of a new home, and would also be scrapped.
Replacing planning levies: At the moment, developers have to pay councils money when they build through two mechanisms: Section 106 agreements and the community infrastructure levy. The money pays for things like affordable homes, roads, schools and GP surgeries in the local area.
The Tories have said they would replace both with one “simple and transparent” fee. Griffith says the paperwork needed for these mechanisms can hold up building by up to 17 months, and that the new fee would give local councillors more say over how the money is spent.
Abolishing Natural England and the Environment Agency: The Tories would scrap both government bodies and hand the work they say is still needed, such as flood defence, to Defra, the government department for the environment and farming.
The party blames Natural England for holding up more than 160,000 homes because of rules aimed at cutting river pollution. It claims the Environment Agency has done too little to stop flooding.
Shadow Chancellor Andrew Griffith speaks during day two of the Conservative Party Conference (Photo: Getty Images)Will the plan to cut house prices work?
The £50,000 figure is the Conservatives’ own estimate, and has not been independently corroborated.
Questions have also been raised about whether removing bureaucratic hurdles will boost housebuilding and cut costs.
Paul Johnson, the former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told Times Radio on Monday that the party’s diagnosis that regulation is holding back the economy was “at least partly right”.
But he said the Tories needed to “put some flesh onto those bones” by setting out how they would scrap the rules.
Politicians from several parties have long recognised that regulation holds back the economy, he said, but have struggled to do anything about it.
James Alexander, chief executive of the UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association, also warned that scrapping the Future Homes Standard could “weaken the financing environment for housebuilding”.
He said investors had backed strong standards for new homes because the UK’s ageing housing stock posed a risk to families and the property market.
The environmental impact of the Tory plans has also been criticised. Craig Bennett, chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts, said scrapping Natural England and the Environment Agency “would do nothing to encourage growth or deliver development”.
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