UPDATE: I see that Dave's already poo-pooed this idea in a Q&A session with Telegraph readers . Is there going to be anything left of this report that will actually make it to party policy by the time it's released on Thursday?

In more of the drip, drip, drip of revelations from the Gummer-Goldsmith "Quality of Life" report the Telegraph today reports that the Tories are to end out-of-town free parking:

Tories to end out-of-town free parking
By Graeme Wilson, Political Correspondent

Shoppers using out-of-town supermarkets would be forced to pay car parking charges under new Conservative proposals to defend the traditional British high street.

Under the plans, councils would be given the power to demand that big supermarkets and other stores on the outskirts of towns charge their customers for parking.

Seeing blue over Tory plans
on out-of-town retail?
Originally uploaded by Alastair Montgomery

The proposals - which are contained in the party's quality of life policy review that will be published on Thursday - are likely to face a backlash from shoppers, who have grown accustomed to free parking at the out-of-town supermarkets and shopping complexes. The 800-page report tries to deflect the inevitable criticism by stressing that the parking charges would be no greater than the amount people would pay in the nearest town centre.

All well and good. Liberal Democrats should note that our own tax proposals already do this in effect. By substituting Site Value Rating (LVT by another name) for the National Non-Domestic Rate (Business Rates by another name) the land occupied by these car parks would become subject to a tax on their land value along with the stores.

This would end the huge benefit out of town stores have over their town centre competitors without the micro-management of the Tory plans to implement a similar thing by imposing parking charges. It would be difficult for them to pass on SVR to customers of their in-town stores because they are competing with in-town neighbours who would not have this added burden and would not have an increase in costs - indeed heir taxes may in fact fall by a little once out-of-town store car parks were also paying tax.

Of course everyone's allowed to change their mind, Keynes style, when the facts change, but looking back to 1997, I seem to remember that it was a Labour manifesto policy to stop the growth of out-of-0town retail (another one they signally failed to achieve of course) which had grown like topsy under the Tory government with their powerful retail backers such as Peter MacLaurin at Tesco, James Gulliver's Argyll Group, Archie Norman's ASDA and so on. Even some of Zac's own fortune is connected with out-of-town retail, when his old man sold Argyll Brands to James Gulliver whose Safeway went on to be an early adopter of the model.

Today's Observer highlights a story about the Conservative's upcoming report on "Quality of Life" which includes measures to be outlined to "burnish their green credentials". Amongst the measures highlighted is that a future Tory government will ban the provision of "standby buttons" on things such as TVs:

Ban the standby button, say Tories

Conservatives target plasma TVs in radical report on how to tackle global warming

Nicholas Watt, political editor
Sunday September 9, 2007
The Observer

Television sets and other domestic appliances will be fitted with special devices to switch off standby power as part of a radical plan to cut wasteful use of electricity, a special Conservative report will recommend this week.

Now, I know these policy review groups have been going on since sometime shortly after BC ("Beginning of Cameron") but I thought I had heard something like this previously. So taking a quick look around I found this...

July 12, 2006
TV standby buttons will be outlawed

By Lewis Smith and Mark Henderson

THE Government is to outlaw standby switches on televisions and video and DVD players to cut the amount of electricity wasted in the home. etc, etc...

It's not by any means a record time-lapse between original announcement by someone else and the Tories deciding to brand the policy as their own, but thirteen months is really quite impressive. I know it's difficult keeping an eye on what's going on in the big bad world out there, but if you hope to run the country one day, it's quite an important skill I'd have thought.

ConservativeHome today covers the latest vapourware announcement in the Tories' slow progress towards finding a policy. This time it's the "Green Tories" (who, you would have thought, might have given up when their tree was repainted - presumably with lead based paint to boot - the other week) and their ideas for Green taxes.

Now of course, many of the tax proposals would have been easy to lift from our Tax Commission work a whole year ago, but I guess what with imitation and flattery and so on we ought to be pleased. But there's a couple of opportunities hinted at in it that I think they, and we, have both missed a trick on...

The list of proposals on air travel issues according to the Evening Standard/Daily Mail includes:

• "A moratorium on all airport expansion, including Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted;
• The imposition of VAT on fuel for domestic flights;
• A "single flight tax" to shift tax burden from passengers to airlines;
• Domestic flight slots to be handed to long-haul trips instead."

The Mail also suggests that the BAA London airports 'monopoly' will be broken up and 4x4 cars will face higher duties.

It looks like a lot of "tinkering" legislation might be on the way, interfering by government diktat in the market. When actually what's happening is that the market is already skewed and not operating efficiently compared with other forms of transport.

You don't need to put a moratorium on airport expansion, you just need to make sure that all the externalities of airport use are properly compensated for. Airports are vast spaces with huge footfall. Their current land value in enormous. LVT on existing airports and any land converted to airport use would concentrate minds. That would also effectively break the "BAA monopoly"

You don't need to create some confiscatory mechanism to rip domestic slots away from domestic flights and "hand them" to international long haul flights - a form of protectionism of course; air space is ours. Technology can, as it has done over the years, mean that aircraft can use airspace and landing slots more efficiently, but it is essentially finite - as people looking up and the sky over London will realise. LVT can apply to landing slots/airspace use. It would be conducted usually by auctioning slots with the proceeds going to the public purse. It would become less efficient for airlines to pay for slots for domestic flights compared with the overall costs of other forms of domestic transport.

Airports are huge magnets for economic activity. Most of the high-tech industry to the west of London out as far as Oxford is, one way or the other, there because of Heathrow. These businesses do not compete against, say, Devon & Cornwall, but against Silicon Valley or the Rhine Valley areas of Germany so they need good international connections. Auctioning landing slots would encourage airlines to think about where they want to land in the UK and bring into use spare capacity at other, regional airports. This could have a massive potential effect of encouraging those businesses that need international connections to release valuable land in the "Western Arc" around Heathrow and move their economic productivity to, I don't know, near Teeside airport, or Humberside or wherever the landing slot auctions made most feasible for the airlines.

I thought the Tories liked to position themselves as a party of minimal interference. These policies seems to show that protectionism is alive and well and that they do not have a grasp of perfectly natural mechanisms that would encourage the results they want to see without low level market manipulation by governments.