New government, new towns, new focus on sustainability

The new Labour government has unveiled planning reforms including proposed new #towns aimed at ending shortage of affordable housing for rent or purchase that is undermining the social and economic #sustainability of Britain’s towns and cities. But can they be built in a way that avoids #environmental mistakes of the past?

New towns are at the heart of Labour’s manifesto commitment to build 1.5 million new homes over the course of its first parliament. The taskforce to identify potential locations on green field land, headed by local government guru Sir Michael Lyons, will not start its 12-month programme until September but deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has set out some concepts.

Each of the new settlements will contain at least 10,000 homes — around the size of Tring in Hertfordshire or Sandy in Bedfordshire — although it expects a number to be “far larger in size” and that they will provide hundreds of thousands more homes over the coming decades. It will “target” rates of 40% affordable housing with a focus on genuinely affordable social rented homes.

Some will be standalone new towns on green land, while others will be urban extensions and regeneration schemes that will work with the “grain of development” in any given area, but which encroach on green belts. Crucially in terms of environmental sustainability, they will be well-connected, well-designed, sustainable and attractive places where people want to live and have all the “infrastructure, amenities and services necessary to sustain thriving communities”.

Central to that ambition are the five “golden rules” of housebuilding that prime minister Keir Starmer set out before the election of which three apply to new towns (the first two favour  development on brownfield and “dirty” grey-belt land)). The others mandate improved genuine green spaces, boosting public services and infrastructure, and a high share of affordable housing.

A big ask, overall. Clearly the model from history is the New Towns Act set out by Clement Attlee’s 1945 Labour government that led to the creation of 32 new settlements from Milton Keynes to Warrington in Cheshire. Many were successful but some, as well as other urban expansion projects, were blamed for failing to supply the community infrastructure to match.

Growth and jobs

Before thinking about what they might look like and where they would be, it is worth noting that new towns are likely to provide only a small share of the 1.5 million homes target. Analysis by the Centre for Cities thinktank provided to The Guardian shows that new town development corporations in England oversaw the construction of 307,000 homes over the 46 years of the various programmes up to 1993. This is the same number as would need to be built in one year to meet the 1.5 million target and compares with fewer than 190,000 built in 2023.

But as new towns saw residential construction progress more rapidly compared to other areas nationwide, according to Centre for Cities, they have the potential to allow the new government to show it is delivering on its manifesto.

The taskforce is likely to favour areas where there is greatest need for new homes, either because of the level of unaffordability or because of the expected growth in employment, as that will make the successful creation of a community more likely to succeed while also relieving the main pressure points. That points towards London, southern England and the growing city regions in the North and Midlands.

One analysis by Urbanist Architecture, an architecture practice, appears to support the argument. It identified 20 potential sites that stood out for economic prospects, current development and potential for robust population growth. Its top five were the area around Cambridge that has long been seen as a prime site; the M1 corridor near Milton Keynes; the Thames estuary near Ebbsfleet; south Hampshire; and the Midlands, particularly around Birmingham, Leicester and Nottingham.

Wherever they are located precisely, the government will hope to reduce “Nimby” objections with its five golden rules and commitment to make the towns sustainable and attractive places where exemplary development is the norm not the exception and that avoid the mistakes of building masses of housing without infrastructure such as schools, shops and parks.

In fact, by building them on greenfield land, objections from local residents will be smaller (the big fight will be over extensions to existing towns). The next five years could be interesting if, as housing minister Matthew Pennycook told the BBC, there will be “spades in the ground” by the final year of this parliament. It may not be until the start of the next decade before we can see if the new towns are genuinely sustainable.