There is magic in the invention of new towns. Who wouldn’t want to plan out their ideal urban community, like Sim City and its many video game imitators, or Babar the elephant building Celesteville with its palace of work, palace of pleasure, perfect jobs for each citizen and a lake for swimming and sailing? Our king had great fun devising his Poundbury model town. The lucky members of the government’snew towns taskforcehave been dreaming up a modern generation of new civic places, and are due to unveil their plans in July.
They work in the shadow of the great 1946 New Towns Act, and plans drawn up under a similar committee, chaired by Lord Reith, which led to the building of Stevenage, Harlow, Crawley, Corby and others. In the next waves came the ambitious city of Milton Keynes, Peterborough and others.
The new committee has been travelling the country, looking at the successes and errors of the past. It looks, too, at lessons to be learned from the great failure of the last Labour government,which pledged to create 10 eco towns. Only one very small development came to fruition in North West Bicester and “disappointing” was the verdict. Built on an isolated greenfield site, with no shops or buses, contrary to what was promised in its desirable original masterplan, residents are totally reliant on cars.
This time, from talking to those close to the action, I sense real urgency, not just a nice-to-have addition to Labour’s housing plans, but flagships of growth and regeneration in a nation stymied by a lack of homes. Michael Lyons, ex-chair of the BBC and with enormous experience in building, planning and local government, heads the committee, whose members likewise have deep knowledge of what has and hasn’t worked in the past. Can they summon up the spirit of 1946, or of the earlier garden cities, or of Milton Keynes, which is now highly popular? Can they keep the government on track to follow through a massive programme, and trust that it will be farsighted enough to know it takes years to deliver, with many obstacles?
The taskforce conducts its work in strict secrecy, for very good reasons. No one knows where it has been or what it has looked at. The moment it announces recommended sites, the land values will soar: it needs to move fast to secure land at agricultural prices and establish development corporations to own it. The entire financing depends on that, so it can borrow to build, and eventually sell to homebuyers and businesses at far higher new town prices than the old pre-planning permission agricultural value to recover the cost. The added value of the development and all its facilities needs to be captured for the benefit of the new town, not landowners, developers and speculators. Development corporations were how previous new towns were built, and how Michael Heseltine financed his Liverpool and London dockland regenerations. It requires developers’ buy-in too: another risk is that they get cold feet, only wanting to build a few houses to stop prices falling.
One reason for Labour’s eco towns failing to get off the ground was that the Treasury tried to finance most of the scheme, with private developers who never want to build amenities bidding for plots. But building new towns will always require that public development corporations control land, building and finance. So the great question now is how much will the Treasury put up in this summer’s spending review? This shouldn’t be in competition with any other funds, as it’s essentially a loan, an investment, most of which will be paid back eventually. Nor is this analagous to the plea made by every department that a pound spent now will prevent a £10 cost later. This really is a mortgage on land, but the Treasury may refuse to put it on its books as an asset, not a debt.
The other reason for top secrecy is to avoid giving early warning to inevitable local opponents. Scouting their favoured sites, the taskforce quietly seeks local political buy-in, but even so opposition is guaranteed, and will be noisy even if coming from a minority: forget any hope of cross-party agreement. The government has to stand ruthlessly firm on the side of the silent many who will live in the new towns, not the noisy few already living in the vicinity.
The taskforce’s prescription for a good new town sounds like this: at least 20,000, preferably 60,000, homes, intensively built at high-enough density with a critical mass of population to support good transport, shops and services. The taskforce was delighted that 120 zoneswere put up in answer to its call for applications, with a fair spread around the country. Inevitably some were uselessly unsuitable sites for which developers or landowners had tried and failed to get planning permission many times over many years, which had been refused with good reason. Brownfield sites in or near large towns and cities will be chosen mainly, not the out-of-the-way green fields favoured by private developers. There must be jobs nearby. The design must have character; the community must have libraries, sports and arts facilities, parks; the towns must be easy on the eye. The pledge is 40% social and affordable homes, though as the Treasury will know, social housing doesn’t repay like the rest, even with decades of rent, as so many tenants draw housing benefit.
These new towns will be rolled out gradually, so the upfront money can be spread across time and the scarcity of construction workers accounted for. The plan is for much of the housing to be system-built in factories. Really? Legal and General’s pioneering modular housing factory just closed with culmulative losses of more than £350m, as have others. Ah, that was because they relied on erratic orders from developers, who refuse to build many at a time. New towns will be system building’s salvation, offering a reliably steady flow of orders for years that should kickstart the industry, ending the reliance onexpensive building skills that have remained essentially unchanged since ancient times, creating factory jobs instead.
How long-termist is Keir Starmer? He has always talked of a 10-year focus. Only a few early spades will have broken any ground by the time of the next election, but towns should be springing up halfway through the next parliament – if government has the patience. If Labour loses, these plans could suffer the fate of the few eco towns instantly cut by the incoming housing minister, Grant Shapps, like everything else in 2010. But if the government hits its ambitious target of 1.5m homes, which the Office for Budget Responsibility predicts will bring housebuilding to itshighest level in 40 years, and new towns sprout as symbols of new life, it might help ensure Labour does get re-elected.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist