Solving the housing crisis means building near where people want to live, not creating white elephants in the middle of nowhere, says Ben Hopkinson
Angela Rayner yesterday announced Labour’s plans for the next generation of new towns. Labour are planning to build these developments with high standards of design, quality, affordability, green spaces and infrastructure.
In tackling Britain’s, and crucially London’s, growth-killing housing shortage, Labour have the right priority but they should be careful with new towns built far from our existing cities. Recent British history is littered with grand plans for thriving and bucolic new towns built from scratch. Yet in actuality the developments rarely live up to their claims. If Labour are to deliver their planned 1.5m homes in the next Parliament, experience shows us that they should focus on their urban extension plans, instead of relying on new towns, which often under-deliver.
Take Northstowe, for example. Planning for the 10,000 home new town outside of Cambridge began in 2007. Yet progress has been slow, with only 1,200 homes completed and the first residents only moving in a decade after the initial plans. Even after these first ‘pioneers’ moved in, amenities and services weren’t built. The town does not have a single shop and 76 per cent of residents said in a survey that they are either ‘fairly’ or ‘very dissatisfied’ with local services. Since Northstowe is built on the opposite side of the green belt from central Cambridge, residents are faced with nearly hour long commutes by public transport or cycling into the city centre.
Or consider the challenges with the expansion of Ebbsfleet. Announced in the early 2000s, with a high speed 20 minute rail connection to Central London, it should be perfectly placed to be a thriving example of what a new town could be. Yet the permission to build densely near the Ebbsfleet International HS1 station has been held up by half of the site being designated an area of Special Scientific Interest because of ‘rare spiders’. This has led to a partial scuppering of the plans for the centre of the new development. Because of these delays, the HS1 station isn’t surrounded with a dense, mixed-use and prosperous town, but instead with car parks and fields. Without bold reforms to the planning system, Labour risks repeating the failures of the current Government.
Labour wisely mentioned considering urban extensions and regenerations alongside new towns. This approach is more likely to succeed than building completely new towns far from where people currently live. Britain needs to build in and around our thriving cities so more people can live close to where friends, family and jobs already are. Our most successful new towns were actually expansions to existing cities. Edinburgh’s New Town, renowned for its beautiful Georgian architecture and its walkability, brought much needed housing to the city and expanded its prestige. Plans for a potential Cambridge extension have the opportunity to add vital lab space and housing, enabling the city to compete internationally at the forefront of life sciences and technological research.
Land exists in and adjacent to our cities for such extensions. Cities like Cambridge, York, and Oxford have low grade fields just a couple miles of from the city centre. There’s currently 2,100 hectares of strategic industrial land in London near existing tube or train stations where building new homes is effectively banned. That land could provide more than 300,000 homes, nearly a quarter of all the homes Labour is hoping to build over the course of the next Parliament. Or consider Labour’s plans to build on the so-called ‘grey belt’. There’s enough grey belt land in London around existing transport links to build a further 350,000 homes at gentle densities.
When deciding where to build the homes needed to end the housing shortage, we should build near where people want to live. This means building in and around our existing cities, where jobs are, and friends, and family currently live, instead of building white elephants far from anything, which take more than a decade before people can move in. If Labour gets into government, let’s hope they’re much more ambitious than this plan suggests.
Ben Hopkinson is policy researcher at Britain Remade