Tories to pledge to scrap Environment Agency and Natural England

Shadow chancellor will also promise to scrap affordable homes regulations as part of strategy to refocus on growth

The Conservatives will announce a bonfire of regulations including abolishing affordable homes and community funding rules as well as scrapping Natural England and the Environment Agency.

The announcements on Monday are a signal that the party intends to refocus on the economy, an area where it has made relatively little progress in the polls.

Tory strategists believe there is a major opening to make gains against Reform and Labour, given the limited focus on growth from Andy Burnham and the chancellor, John Healey, at the Labour conference last week.

The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, published a new tract on Sunday called The Right Way, which she said would be the bedrock that underpinned the party’s policy development before the next election. Polls have the party still trailing third behind Labour and Reform UK.

“Keir Starmer didn’t have a plan. That’s why he’s gone,” she said. “Andy Burnham doesn’t have one either and that is why I know the announcements he is making will all come to naught. We have to be different, different from Labour, and different from the party we were two years ago.”

The party will promise to replace section 106 agreements and the community infrastructure levy that oblige developers to build a proportion of affordable housing and support school and health service demands locally. Instead, there will be a “one stop” levy on developers, Griffith will say.

Griffith will say in his first speech as shadow chancellor that the Tories would continue to back the expansion of Heathrow airport and leave the Aarhus convention, which makes it easier for community groups to oppose developments.

In his speech, he will say: “No one else is coming to save our economy. Only we can inject reality, tell the hard truths and make this a country we are proud to hand on to the next generation.

Griffith will say that the government must speed up the building of a Heathrow third runway in whatever way it can. “I refuse to accept for a single moment that the country of Brunel and Bazalgette, of the vaccine taskforce and the Mulberry harbours, has to sit around waiting until the 2040s to get a third runway built,” he will say.

The new shadow housing secretary, Katie Lam, will say the scrapping of housing regulations and of enforcement bodies would mean “anti-growth ideologues can never again hold our country hostage”.