When Lewis Silkin, Minister of Town & Country in Clement Atlee’s Government, visited the site of Britain’s first proposed new town in Stevenage in 1946, furious local residents made their feelings clear by erecting a huge placard at the local railway station reading “SILKINGRAD”. Undeterred, Silkin chided his hostile welcoming committee with emissarial disdain by informing them that “It’s no good you jeering, it’s going to be done,” a taunt that earned his ministerial car slashed tyres and a sand-filled fuel tank for the journey back to London.
Keir Starmer and new Housing Secretary Steve Reed have received a significantly warmer reception this week when announcing Government plans for 12 new towns in England, a response prompted by the publication of the New Town’s Taskforce’s long-awaited report into a new generation of urban settlements.
Much of the broadly positive coverage the plans have received have been centred on No. 10’s clever positioning of the new developments as architectural successors to Poundbury, the canonical Dorset development led by the King during his long tenure as Prince of Wales that has now emerged as one of the defining, and most successful, urban extension projects in the 21st century. And one whose principles of traditional, high-quality community-led design have long been supported by Policy Exchange’s Building Beautiful programme.
There is very little in the taskforce report … to stop the next generation of new towns looking more like Peterborough than Poundbury
But the reality is sadly different. There is very little in the taskforce report, which is largely silent on aesthetics, to stop the next generation of new towns looking more like Peterborough than Poundbury. But even worse, the new towns model is poorly equipped to provide a meaningful uplift in housing supply and, even though Reed has committed to starting construction of at least three before the next election, they are highly unlikely to make any contribution to the Government’s increasingly insurmountable headline target of building 1.5 million homes by 2029.
To their credit, neither the Government nor the taskforce has presented new towns as an instant solution and it is right that as much time, care and consideration as necessary is taken to ensure they are planned, designed and built to the highest standards possible. Absolutely no one should lament the injection of long-termism into the British political cycle.
But with this in mind, why did the Government make new towns one of the centrepieces of its plans to ease the housing crisis in this Parliament? New towns are excellent at triggering a high localised rate of development — in 1954 the rate of housebuilding construction in new towns was almost four times higher than in local authorities outside them.
Yet historically, new towns have only made a slight contribution to national housing supply and were responsible for only 3.3 per cent of national housing delivery during their peak construction phases between 1946 and 1986. Additionally, most of the twelve planned new towns will deliver only between 10-15,000 homes each — not insignificant but a long way from the Government’s national target. And even today Britain’s last and largest new town, Milton Keynes, has a population that is smaller than the London Borough of Ealing, as well as that of thirteen other boroughs in the capital.
Yet the biggest obstacle to the Government’s new towns programme is perhaps the most familiar — money. New towns are expensive, they require significant and early capital outlay before development value can be accrued and they maintain a disproportionate reliance on infrastructure like health facilities and public transport which, by their nature, are primarily publicly-funded.
Even with the taskforce’s exhortations to the Government to capture a greater amount of land value uplift as a financing stream, a mechanism proposed in the 2014 Policy Exchange Wolfson Prize’s Garden City of Tomorrow prize-winning entry, one of the taskforce’s 44 recommendations remains a blunt reminder that the Government will need to provide “significant upfront funding” to make the programme work.
Can our inclement fiscal climate support such municipal largesse at this time? For its part, the Government has promised funding from the National Housing Delivery Fund, the National Housing Bank and its £39nm Social and Affordable Housing Programme. But if funding falls short, then the latest new towns venture will fail before it’s begun.
While it is imperative therefore that immediate expectations are managed, none of these impediments in any way invalidate the long-term merits of pursuing a new towns programme. In 1972 celebrated Washington Post columnist Leonard Downie described Britain’s postwar new towns programme as “the most ambitious government-supported new town building effort in the world” and it is right that we should seek to recapture the pioneering spirit of experimentalism and innovation that, from the London square to the Garden City, has made English housing one our most exportable commodities.
Moreover, the taskforce report contains many of the tools to realise this ambition. An unwavering commitment to placemaking, a recognition of the critical value of infrastructure, a preference for extension rather than standalone settlements and even an impressive resolve to densify inner-city areas in Plymouth and Manchester are all positive and welcome measures.
But to these we can perhaps add others. Firmer leadership and more rigorous protection against the unique long-term structural vulnerabilities of the new towns development model could come in the form of the appointment of a dedicated New Towns minister, as recently recommended by the House of Lords Built Environment Committee.
The appointment of City or Town Architects for each new town project could also help crystallise and drive the vision necessary to develop them into beautiful and successful communities. And, as so much of Policy Exchange research has argued, an unwavering pursuit of the highest design standards and an openness to both public opinion and local vernacular will help ensure that the new towns of the future will be inspired by the old ones we built today.
