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.1

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.2

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”.

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• 1. “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.
• 2. “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.”