The government’s renewed enthusiasm for building new towns may make for bold headlines, but it risks missing the people who need housing most. Even senior planners involved in the postwar new towns programme have warned that the current proposals lack ambition on social housing and may not reach those in greatest need (Key figures in creation of Milton Keynes criticise UK’s new towns plan, 25 December). Other analyses suggest that new towns have historically contributed only a small proportion of the homes required and are unlikely to deliver at the scale ministers claim.
Instead of pouring resources into speculative new settlements, we should focus on the towns and cities we already have – places with infrastructure, identity and communities that are being steadily hollowed out. Across the UK, redundant land, vacant upper floors, derelict retail units and brownfield sites offer enormous potential for affordable, well‑located homes. This approach would deliver housing faster and more sustainably, and in ways that strengthen existing communities rather than displacing them.
At the same time, our high streets are being drained by the gravitational pull of out‑of‑town shopping malls. Every time a retailer relocates, it accelerates decline, reduces footfall and undermines the economic and social fabric of our town centres. If we are serious about revitalising local economies, we must stop incentivising retail flight and instead reinvest in the places where people already live, work and shop.
New towns may suit developers, but they will not solve the housing crisis for those who need help most. Strengthening and repurposing our existing urban areas while protecting and revitalising our high streets would deliver more homes, more quickly, and with far greater social value.
Richard Eltringham
Leicester
The former planners of Milton Keynes are right to criticise the government’s new towns plan for failing to meet the priority need for social housing at council rents. They are also right to stress how well the earlier new towns met this need.
It nearly didn’t happen at Milton Keynes, though. The Labour government’s policy was already swinging towards owner-occupation when the city was designated in 1967, and among its board members was Stanley Morton, chairman of the Abbey National building society and previously of the Building Societies Association. The board was undecided on the relative weight to be attached to homes for sale and homes for the corporation to rent. As the economist in the consultant team, I was charged with analysing the implications of the choices, and I prepared a report for a meeting of the board, which Mr Morton hosted at Abbey National’s headquarters in Baker Street, London.
I generated forecasts of household income distribution under various assumptions and concluded that Milton Keynes would have to build at least half its housing for social rent. Otherwise it would fail to achieve the board’s objectives of social and industrial mix. I was regarded as a bit insubordinate, but my argument carried the day. It was a close shave.
Michael Edwards
Honorary professor, Bartlett School of Planning, University College London
In 1981, I moved to Peterborough – “cathedral city, new town – with my partner and our two-year-old son. I had a new job, part-funded by Peterborough Development Corporation (PDC), to establish a social welfare organisation for the city. Most critically, having a job meant we were eligible for housing, and so we swapped cramped, overpriced privately rented accommodation in Brighton for a three-bedroom house and garden.
Thousands of houses were being built for sale and rent, but this was only part of the picture. PDC’s master plan addressed all aspects of making the city home for a population that was set to double. Employment, leisure opportunities, a network of safe cycle routes, and a number of discrete self-supporting neighbourhoods with schools, libraries, shops and play facilities as well as teams of community workers assisting people to settle, made the city a vibrant place for incomers and locals alike.
The process of attracting public and private money to work together also acted as a catalyst for the county and city councils and the health authority to “dream big” – and deliver. Maybe the experts now expressing concern about government plans should turn their attention to protesters such as those in the village of Adlington, Cheshire, who just see more houses and cars, not people and progress, in the plans to build 20,000 new homes on their doorstep in a new standalone development.
Les Bright
Exeter, Devon
I spent almost all my career as an architect/planner in the UK’s new towns programme. I started out as a year-out architecture student in Skelmersdale, then, having graduated from Liverpool School of Architecture, I spent the early part of my career working there.
After a brief spell in private practice, I moved to East Kilbride in Scotland to work on the early planning of the ultimately abandoned new town at Stonehouse in Lanarkshire, originally proposed by Ted Heath as a gesture to economic growth in Scotland. After another six years as head of planning at East Kilbride, I was appointed chief architect and planning officer at Livingston in West Lothian, before retiring when the Conservative government eventually managed to wind up the entire programme in 1996.
I have always regarded the British new towns programme as one of the most significant and successful planning initiatives of any British government. Their success was attributable in no small part, particularly in Scotland in the 80s and 90s, to continued support from government of whatever colour. This was in some respects pragmatic, and counter to generally espoused policy, but the delivery of new jobs in the newly emerging industries of microelectronics and healthcare research delivered significant numbers of new jobs that were an important component of government credibility and re-electability.
A job and a good-quality house provided by the development corporation were sufficiently powerful incentives to retain ambitious families in Scotland who might otherwise have emigrated to the US or the Commonwealth.
New towns were – and if we are to build more, should be in the future – not just massive housing developments built for developer profit (it should be noted that Lord Reith, the father of the new towns programme, resisted the blandishments of Wimpey and co, who tried to persuade him that the private sector could deliver his new towns).
What is needed now is dynamic developments providing new jobs in emerging industries, supported by good-quality public housing and community facilities to engender community development, efficient public transport and all that goes with the requirements to provide sustainable communities.
But above all, it requires sustained central government support, politically and financially, and the establishment of a new tranche of development corporations with the power to acquire land at existing use value, and planning powers equivalent to those of their predecessors.
Gordon Davies
Dornoch, Sutherland
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