A House of Lords committee investigating the government’s plans to deliver dozens of new towns in England has been told the policy will require a cross-government drive capable of overcoming numerous obstacles and need to be commanded from the very top.
More than 100 sites are currently under consideration for new town status, with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s New Towns Taskforce due to make recommendations on preferred locations to ministers this summer.
London School of Economics government expert Prof Tony Travers this week said the programme, which envisages a minimum of 10,000 new homes at each site, could only form part of the solution to the nation’s housing shortage.
He told peers on parliament’s Built Environment Committee that new towns should not be viewed as the sole answer to high house prices and the failure to build sufficient new homes in recent decades.
Labour pledged to deliver 1.5m new homes by the end of the current parliament in its 2024 general-election manifesto, an average of 300,000 a year. The last time 300,000 homes were delivered in England in a single financial year was 1969-70. In 2017, then-prime minister Theresa May declared an “ambition” to ramp up housebuilding to the 300,000 level and the aspiration was maintained by later Conservative governments, but it was never realised.
The Starmer government’s ambition for a future wave of new towns – some of which are likely to be large-scale extensions to existing settlements – is that 12 should be under construction by the end of the current parliament.
At Tuesday’s session, peers heard that coordinating the delivery of roads, utilities and amenities for new housing was already difficult and that stepping up efforts for a 21st century wave of new towns would require concerted action.
Travers said there was a sense from the government’s recent infrastructure announcements that things would “need to be imposed” in order to cut through, and that this was likely to be the case for elements of the new towns policy.
“I think that if this policy is to work, the whole of government and ancillary institutions, such as utilities, will have to be brought into line,” Travers said. “And that requires central government making sure the policy is pushed all the way through and doesn’t just leave councils trying to negotiate as they go along with other institutions which have their own agendas.”
Travers said that while the delivery of new towns would be a priority for MHCLG, it would require much wider cross-cutting action, including – but not limited to – No.10, HM Treasury, the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Business and Trade.
“This is going to have to be dealt with at the highest level in government, so the NHS is told ‘you have to support this policy’,” he said. “The business department or whoever regulates the relevant utilities will have to tell them to get those utilities to deliver on the ground.”
Travers warned ministers that political opposition to choices for the next wave of new towns was “inevitable”. He said a significant counter would be the ability to demonstrate how areas selected to host new towns will benefit from that development – something that would not be easy.
“There has to be some financial advantage to having more people settled locally, otherwise people will oppose it," he said.
“The difficulty with the local government finance system as it operates, and to some extent the surrounding funding arrangements to do with Section 106 [planning-obligation contributions from developers] and [the Community Infrastructure Levy] and so on, is that they are opaque to the point of impossibility.
“Therefore, it’s very hard to say to people ‘look, there will be benefits to you from this’, because they will see the disbenefits and all the benefits will be either so opaque as to be impossible to understand or – actually – there won’t be any.”
Travers added that better amenities, such as shops and ATM machines, and improved bus or rail services could be tangible benefits of new developments for existing communities.
However, he said proposed new towns would require “a significant amount of explanation to the public” because some would be built on green-field sites and most would be likely to have higher housing densities than new towns of the 1940s and 1950s, potentially fuelling opposition.
Churn of institutions ‘not helpful’
Elsewhere in Tuesday’s session Travers flagged trends in local and national government in recent years that would not aid the government’s new-towns drive.
He pointed to changes in central government, and the looming reshaping of county councils into unitary authorities as an extra structural complicator – as well as pressures on local government finance that have squeezed planning departments in favour of spending on social care.
“Whitehall departments are reconfigured regularly," he said. “How many housing ministers is it now since 1997? Twenty-five, 30? Some number like that. Local government is regularly reorganised – and is about to be significantly reorganised.
“Governments have swung from, on one side, believing in very little planning to now believing in lots of planning. We’ve had housing targets, and then they were abandoned. And now they’re back.”
Travers said the environment housing policy had operated in over the past three decades had changed a great deal.
“Paradoxically, it’s often the developers who survive through all of this," he said. “They’re companies that are more likely to survive than any of the agencies, public authorities and ministers concerned.
“And so I do think that the churn of institutions, as well as the constraints on the planning service, have rendered the delivery of housing and other development just a bit more difficult than it might otherwise have been.”
Examples of institutional churn would include the 2008’s creation of the Homes and Communities Agency from the Housing Corporation and regeneration agency English Partnerships. The HCA was subsequently replaced by Homes England in 2018.
Travers noted that the government’s plans for the reorganisation of two-tier local government in England, kicked off with December’s English Devolution white paper, would be a further complication for the new towns agenda.
He said policy implementation would commence under the existing set of county and district councils before passing on to a new set of unitary authorities and combined authoroities.
“That’s a lot of management to handle as it moves along,” he said.
The Built Environment Committee’s inquiry is ongoing. Its first module is hearing oral evidence until July on the question of whether the construction of new towns and expanded settlements is practicable and achievable.
If the answer is “yes”, further modules of the inquiry will look at how the rollout can be achieved in relation to enabling infrastructure, social infrastructure, housing delivery, and creating communities.
Written evidence for the inquiry is being accepted until 12 May.