Record results, in a very quiet room

The Liberal Democrats have had their best twelve months in a generation. The mood in the hall was more muted.

On paper there was plenty to celebrate. The party is building on its biggest gain in seats at the 2024 general election,  took three new county councils in 2025, and  now runs or co-leads more local authorities than at any point in its history. Between them, those councils oversee over £17bn of public money and serve a combined population of more than 13 million. Despite all this success, Brighton did not feel like a conference for a party riding high.

Spread across the Brighton Centre, the Grand and the Hilton, the conference is likely to be the second smallest of the major party conferences, ahead of only the Greens, and attendance was almost entirely made up of the party’s elected representatives and voting members. There was relatively little industry presence and very little money behind either the exhibition or the fringe: nearly every exhibitor in the hall was a Lib Dem-affiliated group, a charity or a public body. The exhibition floor rarely looked busy, and exhibitors and attendees alike seemed in no particular hurry to find each other.

The mood among members was telling. Questions about Ed Davey’s leadership ran through the national coverage all week, and debate ensued over whether the criticism was warranted.

Largely under the national radar, the party yet again made major advances in May’s elections, winning 150 additional seats and gaining control of three councils. It is the second largest party in local government and holds more councillors than at any point since 2010. However, the party’s polling average has slipped over the past year from 12.7% to around 10.3% and Davey’s own ratings have barely moved in twelve months: 21% approve, 28% disapprove. Strikingly, after six years as leader, half of voters cannot offer a view on Davey either way.

The mood in the conference was neither angry nor exuberant. Nobody we spoke to was looking to remove the leader. Nobody was especially enthused either. For an organisation that has just had a genuinely successful year, the prevailing feeling was that third in seats and fourth in the polls is neither a triumph nor a crisis.

Local consent to end planning polarisation

The Liberal Democrat answer to the housing crisis is not targets and directives. It is more conversation.

Gideon Amos, the party’s Housing and Communities spokesperson and a chartered architect and town planner before he entered Parliament, argued across the week that the Government has polarised the planning debate. Setting builders against blockers, he said, sets people against each other; the Liberal Democrats instead want to bring communities along with new housing and the conversations that do that must happen in town and parish halls rather than in Whitehall.

The message is aimed squarely at the party’s own voters, many of whom feel they are losing their say over what gets built near them as the Government reshapes the system. However, there was policy underneath it. Amos accepts both the housing crisis and the need for more homes, saying that the party would double the current Government’s spending on affordable housing. He regards targets for social and affordable housing as the ones that matter most, while arguing that the formula for market housing needs to be looked at again.

He was unusually direct about where the bottleneck sits: ‘planning permissions don’t matter as much as bricks and mortar’. The party notes that consents are already being issued in volume and are not turning into homes, and that too few of the homes inside those consents are affordable ones. The binding constraint he identifies is capacity to build, including the 250,000 construction workers he says Brexit took out of the UK industry. He would like to see a ‘brickies visa’, while acknowledging it is not party policy. ‘Britain isn’t broken,’ as he put it, ‘it’s being held back.’

What conference actually voted for

Liberal Democrat conference is sovereign: what the hall votes for becomes party policy. Two of the motions carried in Brighton land squarely on housing and development.

A motion proposed by Gideon Amos calls for minimum standards for outdoor space and natural light in all new homes, including those created through permitted development orders, and for powers to require existing conversions to be remediated. Alongside that, it restates the party’s housing commitments: 150,000 social rent homes a year; binding targets for social and affordable housing set by local authorities themselves; councils allowed to borrow to build their own; and councils to be given the power to end right to buy in their area.

A transport motion with implications for development also passed. It states that too many new housing developments still leave residents with little practical alternative to the car and calls for the NPPF to be reformed to require continuous, high-quality walking and cycling infrastructure in all new housing from the outset, as well as for new development to connect to existing active travel networks, public transport hubs and town and city centres.

The local consent question

The open question is how a policy built on local participation performs in the places the party actually runs.

This was the tension we felt running underneath the week and it was never directly addressed from a platform. A great many Liberal Democrat authorities are rural or semi-rural and our experience of working across them suggests communities there are often apprehensive about development and sceptical of the process that delivers it. The housing numbers the country needs tend to land hardest in exactly those places. More participation, earlier and deeper, is a coherent liberal answer and a popular one locally; whether it can also deliver homes at the rate the party itself says is necessary is an open question.

This is not a reason for pessimism, but rather a steer as to where efforts should be directed. In Lib Dem authorities, the route to permission is likely to run through local consent rather than around it: engagement that begins before a scheme is fixed and is visibly capable of changing it; evidence that the response has been heard; and a design and stewardship case councillors can defend in public without spending political capital they do not have. On that basis, we would expect schemes that arrive fully formed to find the Committee room a colder place than the local plan suggests.

Affordable homes to buy and run

A home that is affordable to buy or rent is not necessarily affordable to live in, and Liberal Democrat council leaders have started saying so.

Cllr Sarah Conboy, who leads Huntingdonshire District Council and sat on its development management committee for eight years, wants developers to think about what a home costs to run, rather than treating affordability as a box marked ‘affordable housing’ and ticking it. She is looking for innovation in Huntingdonshire on homes that are efficient to run, efficient to build and careful with the resources that go into them.

A Cabinet Member of another Cambridgeshire district council made the same argument to us separately during the week: affordable homes need to be cheap to run once they are built, not simply cheap to buy or rent.

Energy performance, heating and hot water strategy and the bills a future occupier will actually face are increasingly what members want to talk about. Schemes that can put numbers against them, via modelled running costs for an affordable unit, set against a policy-compliant baseline, will arrive at Committee with an answer to the questions being asked by Lib Dem council leaders.

Reorganisation limbo

Nobody in Brighton could say whether local government reorganisation is paused or cancelled, and the uncertainty is now the substantive problem.

Frustration at the Government’s handling of LGR was consistent across councillors and MPs and it came up unprompted in almost every conversation about the next two years. The fact that council leaders cannot tell whether the process is suspended or dead is, on its own, a serious obstacle: authorities are left in limbo, unable to plan, recruit or commit.

Some leaders are quietly relieved, on the basis that the Government appeared to be heading for a reorganisation option they did not support. Others are alarmed; a group leader in one West Midlands authority told us their council cannot service its debts without reorganisation going ahead.

Particularly in the English regions, the practical questions are the obvious ones, and they are not currently answerable by those running authorities: which authority will be determining applications in two years’ time; whether plan-making continues at pace in the meantime or quietly stalls; and whether the political leadership you are building a relationship with today will still be in post to honour it.

The postponement of previously-anticipated elections to new unitary authorities across England in 2027 also narrows the playing field for the Lib Dems politically next year.

Women’s safety in the Framework

Anna Sabine MP celebrated changes she had secured through her own campaigning on the NPPF, which now includes references to designing public spaces, streets and routes to be safe, secure, inclusive and accessible for all, including women and girls. For applicants, safety by design has moved from good practice to a material consideration that consultees and committee members can cite.

What next?

The next real test is the 2027 local elections, where the Liberal Democrats expect to add to an already record number of councils. Whatever happens to the Lib Dems’ poll rating, the party will be running many of the planning authorities that determine schemes across England for the rest of this decade and the conference set out fairly clearly how those administrations think: keep the decision local, make the applicant earn consent and judge the scheme on the quality of what is left behind.