I owe a big part of my identity to the New Towns Act 1946. I was born and raised in Telford; it’s integral to who I am, and being a New Town is integral to what Telford is.
Towns like Telford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and Washington have a unique story to tell, and it’s a story not enough people know. We’re living, breathing embodiments of the aspiration and social mobility that characterised Attlee’s and Wilson’s Britain. New Towns made a new life possible for families like mine: it wasn’t just a massive increase in the housing supply – though that was significant – it was access to jobs, education and training, high-quality green space and nature, new communities. New Towns were a new vision for a new Britain.
To this day, if you take a visit to Telford you can see that vision. Telford & Wrekin Council builds homes at a faster rate than almost any other local authority in the country – with more than 1,200 new homes built last year alone – and the design of our town means there’s no conflict between housebuilding and protecting green spaces. Quite the opposite: access to green space is one of the most important assets a new home can have, and Telford was designed with that in mind. The work of the Labour-run council, including during my time as Leader, has given our town 20 designated nature reserves (with three more proposed) covering over 600 hectares, and more than 300 protected green spaces – comfortably above the national average. The great strength of New Towns is that they’re built to facilitate community, giving residents access to schools, education, retail and other key infrastructure on their doorstep.
Existing towns, cities and villages have a tendency to entrench inequality and deprivation. Living in a poorer area – an area with higher crime rates, worse transport connectivity, fewer schools, fewer jobs – can deny you opportunities, and without those opportunities it can be hard to escape the area that’s holding you back. New Towns – or, as we call ourselves now, young towns – like Telford offered a fresh start, and in a time when living standards were rising and families could dream of a better future for their children, that new start was an opportunity to forge a better life.
There’s an all-too-familiar twist in the New Towns fairytale, though: like with most of what’s great about this country, it all changed when the Tories got their hands on it. New Towns aren’t a fait accomplit; you’re trying to recreate the centuries of development that most towns have under their belts in just a few decades, so you need continued investment and attention to sustain the rapid growth.
Instead, the Conservative Governments of the 1980s and 1990s did what Conservatives do best: wash their hands of all responsibility, and turn growth into decline. New Town Development Corporations – key to successful building, planning and growth – gave way to inert quangos and private corporations, which served to block growth rather than facilitate it.
Every New Town MP and council leader will tell you the same thing: all our housing and infrastructure was built at the same time, and a lack of regeneration means it’s all crumbling at the same time. Population growth, job creation and urban development have all stagnated because there hasn’t been the drive from central government to grow them, despite the obvious opportunities to do so. Starting with Thatcher, successive governments grew complacent; they saw the rapid growth of New Towns, and concluded that they were a complete project which would take care of themselves. They should have inferred that even more growth was possible if the effort was sustained.
Thanks to the new Labour Government, we’re seeing renewed focus on New Towns. The Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister both appreciate the massive role New Towns can play in fixing the housing crisis, and in kickstarting the growth and social mobility that we haven’t seen for far too long. Britain today isn’t the aspirational nation it once was, thanks to the Tories’ age-old approach of managed decline. Inequality has widened and solidified, and it’s grown much harder for parents like me to imagine greater prosperity and security for our children. New Towns can help fix that, offering parents stuck in deprived areas the chance of a safer, friendlier community, with better access to jobs, schools and more.
Given the scale of the housing crisis – and the nature of the solutions – we need to get to work quickly, and the Government has done that. The New Towns Taskforce has been fully established and begun its work, and the first step of the process – identifying potential sites – is well underway. Building New Towns is far from a quick fix, but ambition and urgency will make a major difference to the timescales we’re looking at. The Prime Minister has pledged that construction will start before the end of this Parliament – that’s exactly the kind of ambition we need.
What’s even more encouraging – but not appreciated enough – is that the Government understands the roles young towns can play in delivering new ones. New Towns have never been built from scratch; they’ve always been expansions of existing villages. When looking for sites, it would be foolish to overlook the towns with the highest rates of housebuilding and growth, and the greatest potential for more building – that’s New Towns, many of which are awash with space and boast strong track records of delivering high-quality homes at speed and scale. To that end, the reports that the 12 sites selected will include some young towns are very welcome.
What I and other champions of New Towns are at pains to stress, though, is that this isn’t all young towns have to offer when planning for new ones. The questions of how to resume growth of existing New Towns and how to successfully deliver the next generation of New Towns are one and the same. As I said earlier, the current generation of New Towns remain a work in progress; similarly, the success of the next generation won’t just be measured 20 years from now, it’ll be measured 60 years from now, when we’ll see whether these New Towns unlocked their full potential, or just became like any other towns.
In Telford, Stevenage, Basildon and other young towns, we have a blueprint for the next generation – and in some cases, we have the structure around which the next generation will be built. Now is the perfect opportunity to revive the political will of our Labour forebears and make our New Towns the major urban centres they can be, so that when the next generation of New Towns have been set up, they’ll know where to go – and they’ll know that the sky’s the limit.
And in more practical terms, if we want to deliver exponential regional growth – which is an imperative given the anaemic growth outside the South-East we’ve seen over the last few decades – we need to create new hubs around which to build future settlements. One of the most important variables in the trajectories of existing New Towns has been their proximity to a town or city that itself has been growing. Milton Keynes, for example, has benefitted from having London on its doorstep; Telford is likewise better off for having Birmingham as a neighbour. It’s much easier to entice people to a New Town if you can offer the jobs and opportunities of a thriving population centre a short drive or train journey away. Now, what London was (and is) to Milton Keynes, Milton Keynes can be to the rest of Bedfordshire; what Birmingham is to Telford, Telford can be to Shropshire and Mid-Wales. If we create jobs, wealth and vibrant communities in our young towns, it’ll become much easier to create new settlements in areas around them with the potential to build.
2024 wasn’t quite 1945 – there’s been no world war, no destruction, no big reset – but we can see that same need for optimism and aspiration today that drove Attlee’s governments back then. Building a New Jerusalem meant making what had previously been pipe dreams possible for people who had previously been trapped in poverty or insecurity, and while the scale might be smaller today, New Towns are part of the New Jerusalem that’s needed. New Towns symbolise that aspiration and the chance of social mobility, and they symbolise turning decline and inequality into growth and opportunity. This Government must be a successor to Attlee, not to Thatcher, and deliver that New Jerusalem.
These clusters of housing and economic growth, created by Labour and protected by Labour, now stand ready as confident young towns – with the ability, the aspiration, the hunger to once more contribute to the re-building of Britain.
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