Rarely has the construction industry enjoyed the limelight as much as it did at the Conservative Party conference. Nothing communicates a commitment to investment like a busy construction site, and the government increasingly uses infrastructure projects like Crossrail as totems of action - even if total level of investment are down from their peak. Only if Boris Johnson had announced the London Assembly's purchase of an emergency fleet of concrete mixers could construction's agenda have been more central to conference proceedings. The positioning of construction at the conference was not coincidental - Britain needs to be building after all. Accordingly, the agenda was bookended by two policy announcements that could reverberate for years - firstly, by taking politics out of infrastructure planning and secondly, by fumbling an overly narrow planning intervention in response to the housing crisis.
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