In this blog, Labour PPC Chris Curtis sets out his vision for a new generation of New Towns to address the UK's housing crisis - bringing multiple advantages with them and learning from past mistakes.
Note: The Social Market Foundation has invited parliamentary candidates from across the major parties to contribute an essay on a policy topic of their choice. To be clear, this does not represent an endorsement of any candidate in the election. The SMF remains strictly non-partisan.
Britain is not building enough genuinely affordable new homes, and we are all facing the consequences. It’s time for a new generation of New Towns.
Overleveraged homeowners who have seen their mortgage rates soar are teetering on the brink of losing their homes. Renters are living in increasingly expensive and unsuitable accommodation, often with little security and few rights. Even parents and grandparents, who have paid off their mortgages, are seeing their children and grandchildren frozen out of following the same dream.
Next year, I hope to be the first MP who was born and grew up in the new town, and now city, of Milton Keynes. I owe everything to the farsighted decision of Harold Wilson’s 1960s government, which built the home me and my brother grew up in. I am a child of the new town promise: good jobs, affordable housing, and decent local services.
While much has changed since Harold Wilson occupied Downing Street, and the solution to Britain’s housing crisis is a vast endeavour, building the next generation of new towns will be critical.
There are multiple advantages to this model.
Firstly, New Towns allow for new homes to be built alongside the infrastructure required for a development to thrive. This is possible because the creation of a new town usually involves a development corporation buying up a large amount of land, at just above agricultural prices. The land is then given planning permission to build new homes. The profits from the sale of those homes funds the infrastructure the area needs to thrive.
This includes transport networks, where a modern public transport network can be built alongside a road network, thereby avoiding the congestion that has plagued older towns. Pedestrian and cycle routes can be easily built separate from roads, allowing everyone to move across the city quickly, safely, and easily. And the funding provides for all the extra services that make people nervous about new developments, like schools, GP surgeries, dentists and hospitals.
Just as importantly, the new developments can include a range of recreational activities. In Milton Keynes, we have local sports centres in every neighbourhood, a large indoor shopping centre, and the country’s first multiplex cinema. Old class distinctions were upended: my working-class parents first met learning to sail on one of the city’s many balancing lakes. In a new town like mine, where amenities aren’t just run for a profit, even an activity as exclusive as sailing is open to all, not just a preserve of the well-to-do.
Secondly, the scale of new towns means that we can build hundreds of thousands of affordable houses at scale and at pace. The longer we leave it, the worse our housing shortage becomes. The government can bring about a range of partners on a single site to ensure that spades quickly start hitting soil. The large new developments means that many of the hold ups that stall smaller projects are overcome by sheer scale.
Because they are all being built in one place, the number of people who are disrupted by the new developments (e.g. through road closures / building disruption) are also far smaller than lots of smaller developments.
Thirdly, new towns are more than dormitories where people live while working elsewhere. At their best, they are their own economic powerhouses: new, exciting, places that companies invest in, talent flocks to, and economies boom.
While this wasn’t achieved in all the earlier new towns, it was in Milton Keynes. Often labelled a “commuter town”, my home town is anything but. More people commute into the city than out of it each day. The city has the ninth highest proportion of start-ups of anywhere in the country, and is the base of many national organisations, such as Santander and Network Rail.
The elements that made this a success – building somewhere large enough, in places with good transport links, and keeping aside land for commercial use – can be emulated in future developments.
To me, New Towns are all this and so much more. They are a blank canvas, on which visionaries can build beautiful places. They are a place where new houses can become homes that people actually want to live in.
There is a risk, as we try to scale up housebuilding in Britain, that we care too little about variety, beauty, and community.
We can’t just be a country of identikit estates. We can’t build everything to pre-set, prefab specifications. We can’t only design for the median consumer. The New Town model means that large developers can work alongside SME builders and create housing that is as varied as the lives that will be led in them. And with varied design comes varied price and tenure, allowing for more socially mixed and balanced communities.
The thousands of new homes can be built alongside beautiful green spaces, emulating the visionary Ebenezer Howard’s “garden city” model. In Milton Keynes, 40% of the city’s footprint is parks, lakes, river, canals, or brooks. And infrastructure doesn’t have to be limited to roads and, dare I say it, roundabouts. New Towns can fund art projects, new sculptures, and beautiful public buildings.
Beyond just infrastructure, the profits from the sale of new town homes can also build a community. In Milton Keynes, an endowment was put aside, now run by the Parks Trust, a charity that manages and maintains 6,000 acres of parkland across the city. New organisations were set up, such as the community foundation which still supports with charitable work across the city. These institutions, still here decades later, have fostered a new community and built a place that is far more than mere bricks and mortar.
Britain’s New Towns weren’t perfect. They didn’t arrive without problems. But each generation of new towns built on the lessons learned from the previous one. Milton Keynes, the most recent of the New Towns, is one of modern Britain’s greatest success stories. It is a genuinely wonderful place to live, and now an economic powerhouse.
And you can take it from me: a proud son of Milton Keynes who now hopes to serve the city he loves in Parliament. There I will unashamedly make the case for a new generation of New Towns, even better than the last, fighting for something even better for a new generation to come.
