Since the New Towns Taskforce was announced back in the summer, there has of course been a huge amount of interest in, and speculation about, the potential locations for any new settlements. Identifying suitable locations and securing public support for the developments will be essential. And through examining historic attempts to deliver new communities, clear risks emerge that must be navigated if the thriving communities envisioned are to be delivered.
Call for evidence
The Taskforce has launched a call for evidence, inviting submissions of sites with potential to deliver regionally significant new communities. This evidence, alongside the Taskforce’s own spatial analysis, will inform the recommendations on appropriate locations for new communities, due to be made by July 2025.
The call for evidence notes that the ‘new settlements will contain 10,000 homes, at the very least, and that most, if not all, will be far larger’. The aim is for all settlements to provide 40% affordable housing and they ‘must be well-connected, well-designed, sustainable and attractive places where people want to live and have all the infrastructure, amenities and services necessary to sustain thriving communities’.
The call makes clear that this is not a bidding process and that sites will not be scored, instead this is about ensuring that the Taskforce is aware of all potential opportunities as part of their evidence gathering.
Our Shared Future: A TCPA’s White Paper for Homes and Communities sets out the history of past attempts to deliver new communities, and details the lessons from the past, the pre-conditions for success and ten steps to make a new generation of healthy and thriving new communities a reality. But it is worth reflecting on two contrasting programmes.
Post-War New Towns
The post-war New Town locations were identified through a constructive and strategic dialogue between central and local government. When central government set out the vision and requirements for New Towns in 1946, they benefitted from over a decade of regional and sub-regional studies matching housing need with infrastructure provision painting a clear spatial picture. The resulting clear offer of loans and wider investment to the development corporations enabled further work by local authorities to identify and progress evidence-based opportunity areas.
Despite this collaborative and strategic approach, the early New Towns still ran into opposition due to their lack of public participation. Importantly, the government had engaged in a strong national conversation around the need for affordable housing and the value of new communities. The context the New Town Taskforce is operating in is very different and they are faced with public distrust of development and the planning system, compounded by the lack of a clear vision or promise of support for the infrastructure required.
Eco Towns
In 2007, the Eco Towns programme opened a bidding process for interested parties, including many private sector bodies, to submit sites for new communities which would be required to meet a set of high-level objectives but would benefit from a Planning Policy Statement effectively limiting local authority’s capacity to reject the schemes. Whilst some of the proposals were good ideas, the programme was criticised by many as a way to subvert the plan-led system without central government offering the funding and delivery mechanism required to actually deliver these sites.
Learning the Lessons
The lessons from these programmes are vital to the success of future new communities.
The TCPA has been clear that the essential primary steps to planning a new generation of New Towns are the creation of a national vision and a national spatial plan for renewal and growth. This statement of vision must be produced through engaging in a national conversation about how future generations can thrive and would set specific minimum requirements for the development of new, as well as regenerated and extended, places. This vision would aid in the pulling together of all spatial data necessary to understand where such growth can be sustainably located through a national spatial plan that takes into account housing needs, environmental constraints, and existing and planned infrastructure.
By setting out a national spatial plan, it reduces the risk that analysis about the location of new communities may be worked around available sites rather than being led by data. Should this occur, it would render impossible the visionary, strategic, participatory and transparent approach that is so needed.
There is also a need for clarity around:
- The type and standard of development required as this will influence land prices, development viability and the suitability of sites; and
- The proposed governance structure, involvement of different public and private actors and the level of funding available for infrastructure.
Whilst we recognise that the government is keen to deliver at pace, a new generation of new communities must be based on robust and detailed evidence alongside a transparent national conversation, in order to be fair to all parties.
There is a clear continuum between the post-war New Towns (arising from strategic regional analysis and a strong national conversation around vision and need) to the Eco Towns (representing effectively a private-sector wish list and seen as subverting the planning system). The Taskforce must carefully consider the lessons of both historic attempts, to navigate this continuum and contribute towards rebuilding public trust.
