The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government needs to up its efforts to explain the purpose and benefits of plans for a wave of new towns with the potential to deliver more than 300,000 houses and flats over the coming decades, peers have warned.
An interim report from members of the House of Lords Built Environment Committee says the government “urgently needs a clear, engaging vision” that explains what the new towns are for, what they are designed to achieve and why they matter.
At the end of last month, the government’s New Towns Taskforce published a shortlist of 12 locations across England recommended to host new town settlements of 10,000 homes or more.
MHCLG has pledged to start construction of three new towns before the end of this parliament, against the backdrop of its 2024 general-election manifesto pledge build 1.5 million new homes by 2029.
In response to the taskforce report, it said that sites at Crews Hill, in north London, Leeds, and Tempsford in Bedfordshire, looked the “most promising" options. MHCLG also announced the creation of a New Towns Unit that will work with departments and agencies to ensure new towns are “a test bed for innovation and to unblock barriers to delivery”.
Members of the Built Environment Committee have been looking into aspects of the new towns programme since March this year and are due publish their first full report in the coming weeks.
However, in interim findings timed to coincide with the taskforce report, members made a number of recommendations – and stressed the need for government to secure public buy-in for large-scale development.
Committee chair Benjamin Gascoigne said the panel had taken a “high-level and strategic” approach to scrutinising the new towns programme and concluded that ministers need to do more to make sure communities and investors are on-side.
“The government has a major opportunity to deliver high-quality, affordable, and sustainable new towns and expanded settlements at scale,” he said. “However, as it stands, the government’s programme lacks a clear, engaging vision that provides a rationale for these new towns. It needs to explain to the communities that will be impacted and the wider public what new towns are designed to achieve and why they matter.
“New towns and expanded settlements have the potential to prompt huge public opposition so, before announcing the selected sites, the government must set out a clear engagement and consult the community in a meaningful way.”
As well as making a robust case for the entire programme, peers said MHCLG would need to ensure that the vision was clear for each individual project – and that this should also be “consistently” communicated in a way that also secured the support of investors and local authorities.
Elsewhere, they said "high-level design standards” should be mandatory for the future new towns, to guarantee high-quality construction and restore public trust in development. Peers added that “local nuance” should be a feature of schemes, with specific design codes for each new town that reflected the area’s traditional building styles and context.
The Built Environment Committee also said ministers should use the new towns programme as a “testing ground” for “alternative and novel” financing instruments such as bonds, tax-increment financing, business rates supplements and mayoral community infrastructure levies.
Civil Service World asked MHCLG for a response to the committee’s report. It had not provided one at the time of publication.