Tories pledge to abolish nature itself, promising it was "slowing down the driveways"

The Conservatives have moved beyond abolishing the regulators of the natural world and will now abolish the natural world, conference heard on Monday, in what the party is calling the boldest simplification of outdoors since the invention of the patio.

Under the proposals, nature would cease to be a separate entity with its own opinions and would instead be folded into a government department, where it could be managed sensibly and made to apply for permission before raining. A party spokesman said the countryside had been "operating without oversight for roughly four billion years" and that "frankly the results speak for themselves, look at bogs".

The centrepiece is a plan to cut the cost of a new home by removing everything a home currently has to be near. Officials confirmed that under the new one stop levy, developers will pay a single simplified fee, which is then kept in a drawer, and that any requirement to build a GP surgery, a school or a pavement will be replaced by a laminated card reading THESE ARE COMING.

An escalation came in the afternoon, when delegates were told that weather itself would be streamlined. "We have identified nine kinds of weather and we believe four of them are duplicative," a shadow minister said, to applause. "Drizzle, for example, is just rain filling in a form. It is red tape falling from the sky." Asked which four would be kept, he said the consultation would be short and the consultation would be him.

The party's growth estimate, that abolishing hedgerows would unlock 340,000 homes and 1.9 per cent of additional GDP, was traced by reporters to a figure arrived at by a man looking out of a train window between Reading and Didcot and saying "you could get loads on that". Pressed on the methodology, a spokesman said the figure was "impossible to disprove while the hedge is still there, which is rather the point".

On the third runway, the shadow chancellor said Britain built the sewers and the Mulberry harbours and should not be made to wait until the 2040s for anything, including the 2040s. He proposed bringing the decade forward by statutory instrument. "If a species objects," he added, "it may do so in writing, in English, by Friday."

Environmental groups responded with a statement so long that it has itself been identified for streamlining. One ecologist warned that removing the concept of soil would have unintended consequences, to which the party replied that unintended consequences were precisely the kind of unplanned development it had spent all week trying to make legal.

Nature was unavailable for comment on Monday, having been placed in a holding pattern over Heathrow.