‘This is political expediency’: how the Tories turned on 15-minute cities

Imagine a city in which you could walk or cycle to almost anywhere you needed to go in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. Shops, medical facilities and artistic sites would be spread throughout neighbourhoods. Remote and home working would be embraced.

Children could easily and safely cycle to school, breathing cleaner air. With less need for commuting, quieter streets could even be turned over to parks. Known as the “15-minute city” after the time it takes to get around, it’s a model that promises a return to local living – and a greener, healthier, more sustainable way of life.

Sound idyllic? Not if you’re Rishi Sunak. The prime minister used an interview before this week’s party conference to “hit out” at the 15-minute city concept, saying there was a “relentless attack” on motorists who “depend on their cars to get to work, take their kids to school, do their shopping, see the doctor” – ignoring that this dependence is exactly what the model aims to reduce.

The transport secretary, Mark Harper, went further, telling delegates the 15-minute cities concept was “a Labour-backed movement … to remove your freedom to get from A to B how you want.

“What is sinister, and what we shouldn’t tolerate, is the idea that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops, and that they can ration who uses the roads and when, and that they police it all with CCTV.” The government would look into ways to stop “overzealous” councils restricting road use “if they don’t follow the rules”, he said.

All of which may sound like a lot of airtime for an arcane local planning policy, but to a small number in his audience, 15-minute cities represent a lot more than that. Since it was first outlined in 2016 by Carlos Moreno, a Colombian professor in urban planning at the Pantheon-Sorbonne university in Paris, the model has been embraced by city authorities in Paris, Seattle, Bogotá, Melbourne, Shanghai and beyond. In the UK, cities including Oxford, Bristol, Birmingham and Canterbury have proposed versions of the scheme.

But for a vocal few, the concept has become bound up in conspiracy theories about a “great reset” that will see people confined to highly restricted zones by a cabal of climate-obsessed authorities. The climate crisis, they believe, is a contrivance to allow sinister powers to restrict individual freedoms – and this is one of their tools to do so.

“This is totally insane,” Moreno said. “If we wanted to examine their arguments in reality, they don’t have arguments, they have only fake information. Never, never, never have I proposed limiting people travelling for commuting, for escaping.”

His model, he says, is “an urban policy for living with more healthy proximity to local jobs, local commerce, green areas, sports activities, cultural activities. This is a way to liberate our economy, liberating our ecology with more bikeability, more walkability. It is not, not, not a traffic plan.

“I have not proposed a new traffic plan for cities. I am not in a war against cars.”

The Tories may be reaching to the right amid desperate polling numbers, but their explicit evocation of a known conspiracy theory is new territory. In an interview with the BBC, energy minister Andrew Bowie said local authorities were “dictating to people that they must choose to access services within 15 minutes of their house”. Challenged that this was a “pretend argument”, Bowie said the issue was “coming up in discussions on forums online”.

“I can’t really think of another example where we’ve had the government in this country lean into a conspiracy,” said Daniel Jolley, an assistant professor in social psychology at the university of Nottingham, who researches conspiracy theories and their social impact. “The government hasn’t generally played into conspiratorial narrative – on Covid for instance, or climate change – so this seems to be a unique spin.”

It’s also a clear pivot. As recently as March, the government was explicitly debunking fears, stating: “15-minute cities aim to provide people with more choice about how and where they travel, not to restrict movement.”

Moreno began developing his model in 2010. The idea came to particular prominence after Paris’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, adopted the policy in 2019.

After Covid hit, some city authorities, such as in Milan, turned to 15-minute cities as a way of rebuilding better communities, said Moreno, but to conspiracists the model was swept up in broader fears of state control.

Moreno points to the controversy over proposed measures in Oxford as being pivotal in the debate – and it may be a confusion of two separate schemes which have poured fuel on the conspiracists’ fire. One is a plan by the city council that included developing 15-minute neighbourhoods, the other a proposed traffic filter system devised by Oxfordshire county council to deal with the city’s famously terrible traffic that would restrict access to certain roads at certain times without a permit.

Noisy protests have been held, including by far-right activists from outside the city and local councillors have had death threats. The controversial Canadian academic, Jordan Peterson, pitched in, tweeting about “idiot tyrannical bureaucrats” accompanied by maps of the Oxford ring road.

Traffic management schemes such as low traffic neighbourhoods have been controversial in many towns and boroughs, and you don’t need to be a conspiracist to have concerns, said Jolley. “There are some questions to ask about 15-minute cities, but unfortunately, the conspiratorial rhetoric [dominates], so that questions or concerns that people may have are ignored because of some people’s overarching suspicion.”

Harper’s language is “startling” in its similarity to conspiracy rhetoric, according to Rod Dacombe, the director of the centre for British politics and government at King’s College London, “because previously [the Tories] have not embraced conspiracies really in any kind of substantive way at all”.

However, he added: “I don’t think this is emergence of conspiracy theories as policy, I think this is political expediency. They think this is a potential wedge issue that will work for them. Emphatically it will not – hardly anybody thinks this stuff.”

In fact, he said, polling data suggests “there’s reasonably decent support around the country for the idea of 15-minute cities”. “As a political tactic, I don’t think it will be very successful,” he says. YouGov found 62% of Britons would support the scheme’s adoption in their own area.

Moreno, who has also faced intimidation and death threats, has called on Sunak to “pull himself together”. “It is a great pity that the prime minister doesn’t consider the vital importance of tackling climate change. Our common public enemy is not 15-minute cities, or myself. Our common public enemy is climate change.”