Will new towns solve Britain’s housing problem? Only if barriers to delivery are properly addressed, writes Victoria du Croz, partner and head of planning at Forsters
Delivering on its new towns agenda is a critical part of Labour’s ambitions to address the UK’s chronic housing shortage – and is set to play just as big a role under a Burnham government as under Starmer, albeit with perhaps a slightly different focus on tenure.
Yet a number of recent stumbling blocks, including Enfield Council’s challenge to the government’s proposals on the grounds of protecting the greenbelt, alongside an estimated two-year delay to Manchester’s Victoria North scheme, highlight the scale and complexity of this challenge and the hurdles that remain.
Designing and delivering spatially planned towns from scratch, with considered connectivity, green space and social infrastructure – alongside housing numbers at levels to meet local need and sufficient commercial land opportunities to improve local employment opportunities – is an admirable goal. But to bridge the gap between aspiration and implementation, several significant barriers to delivery must be first be overcome.
Who foots the infrastructure bill?
The largest challenge is, unsurprisingly, cost. With the biggest local criticisms of new towns – and indeed, residential developments of any scale – centring around the provision of adequate social infrastructure (schools, roads, GP surgeries) to support the roll-out of new homes, there is a strong argument to be made for delivering key infrastructure earlier in the development process, rather than years after residents arrive.
The difficultly is, of course, identifying who pays. Large-scale developments often require significant upfront investment, with infrastructure commitments usually funded and built out at a later stage, once viability has been confirmed and a site is profitable. One solution which the government is considering is bringing in more private capital based on public-private partnerships.
Bringing to life the wider benefits of the development to the local community at an earlier stage can only be a positive in terms of mitigating local concern. However, the question
remains over how the government can successfully bring this forward, given that previous similar funding mechanisms, private finance initiatives, were highly controversial and saw significant cost overruns.
Long-term development vs short-term politics
Another obstacle is timing. New towns are long-term projects operating within planning and political systems that often favour shorter-term decision making. And residential schemes don’t have the luxury of being fast tracked through the planning process in the same way that Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) do, meaning obtaining consent can be lengthy and vulnerable to changing local and national politics.
Recent local elections delivered an increasing number of councils where no single party has overall control, meaning it can be even harder to deliver large-scale, potentially challenging, developments. Delays can quickly accumulate through appeals and legal proceedings.
This is why delivery vehicles matter and where specially set up development corporations (DevCorps) with planning powers can help speed things along.
DevCorps can provide a dedicated institutional focus that local authorities – who may be resource and time poor, and managing competing priorities – often struggle to achieve.
I acted for the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) in securing planning permission for the legacy residential-led redevelopment of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford, and having one body with a clear delivery mandate for the whole area was very helpful.
Maintaining momentum
Land assembly can be another obstacle, with voluntary arrangements not always being enough to secure the relevant land holdings needed for large-scale projects.
This is where compulsory purchase powers can play a critical role. While compulsory purchase is rarely popular and should never be exercised lightly, if government is committed to delivering new towns at scale, it must be prepared to use the tools already available to it.
As such, establishing development corporations with appropriate planning and compulsory purchase powers, clear milestones and delivery deadlines could help maintain momentum and avoid projects becoming trapped in years of procedural drift.
Utilities capacity
Another challenge that is well publicised is reviewing the capacity of existing utilities. Recent challenges experienced elsewhere demonstrate the risks of pursuing housing
growth without sufficient consideration of water, energy and wastewater capacity.
Given the opportunity to build an all-encompassing development from scratch, new towns will require engagement with utility providers from the earliest stages of planning to ensure that upgrades are identified, funded and delivered in parallel with the scheme, rather than becoming a bottleneck years later.
Balancing growth and conservation
Additionally, while there is widespread support for prioritising brownfield land, it is increasingly clear that brownfield redevelopment alone will not deliver the number of houses required. Many of the proposed new towns are located (at least in part) on greenfield or greenbelt land. The development of such land can often have significant environmental and ecological impacts and finding the right balance between growth and conservation may well continue to test policymakers.
The government has recently published the draft Nature Restoration Levy Regulations, which will enable developers to mitigate the impact of development on nearby protected sites by paying a levy.
While the proposals were welcomed by the development industry as a way to unlock recent environmental blocks to development delivery such as nutrient neutrality, they were widely criticised by environmental groups as “cash to trash”.
There is no easy solution when trying to balance development and environmental protection and the tension between the two is unlikely to lessen in the future. This is where political leadership becomes critical. Andy Burnham’s experience as Greater Manchester’s mayor may provide a greater appreciation of the complexity involved in coordinating housing growth, infrastructure and local priorities across multiple authorities, and give him the political drive necessary to see these projects through.
Ultimately, new towns are complex by their nature; if they weren’t so difficult to design, secure planning for and deliver they would have been built already. But these barriers are not insurmountable, nor can we let them become so if we are to deliver the housing that this country desperately needs. By thinking carefully about funding, timings and planning powers, our newest Labour leader may find he already everything he needs to turn the new towns vision into a meaningful reality.
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