Helical Bar chief executive Mike Slade today hit back at criticism of property industry donations to the Conservative Party.
Slade said he would continue to chair Conservative donor club the Property Forum despite criticism in the national press of the group’s practice of charging industry players for access to high-ranking Conservatives.
The Daily Telegraph, which is campaigning against the government’s draft National Planning Policy Framework, last week reported that the Property Forum raises £150,000 pa for the Conservative Party and charges members £2,500 to meet senior MPs. Slade himself was revealed to have given more than £300,000 to the Conservative Party over the past decade, individually and through Helical Bar. The newspaper said that this could give rise to fears that the planning reforms had been influenced by powerful figures from the property industry
Speaking to Estates Gazette editor Damian Wild at a Profile Network event held in association with estatesgazette.com, Slade said: “The innuendo is that, as developers, we’re trying to bend their ear to obtain more planning consents.
“There is nothing in the land, and there should not be anything in the land, that stops you raising funds for a political party,” he said, adding that he has been “actively spurred on” to continue running the forum.
He argued that industry groups such as the forum perform a legitimate role by engaging with ministers “to advise ministers of the rights and wrongs of what they’re trying to do”.
Slade added that he is “always horrified” with the naivety of ministers on entering government, and highlighted housing minister Grant Shapps: “He’s only a kid – why should he know what goes on in local authorities?”
“They know nothing, they’ve never been in the real world, and they need to be told what the facts are and the BPF, the Property Forum and lots of other people they engage with do that.”
Watch the interview with Mike Slade
daniel.cunningham@estatesgazette.com
