new towns Archives

A new generation of New Towns – tree-lined and with character rooted in local history! Angela Rayner outlined Labour’s ambitions at a UK housing conference in Leeds yesterday. The announcement adds more detail to the headline-grabbing New Towns plan unveiled at the Labour Conference in October 2023.

Housing campaigners have been delighted to see Labour’s priority for tackling the severe shortage of homes in England, but there have been some words of caution from economists on the lessons to be learnt from previous New Towns.

Rayner set out a robust code for Labour’s proposed New Towns with six principles. The boldest is a gold standard of 40% social and affordable housing. Another is a guarantee of public transport and public services such as GP surgeries. The code aims to overcome common objections to new developments with a focus on characterful buildings, incorporating local design, and access to nature and children’s play areas.

There has been some pushback from researchers who worry about the possible locations of New Towns. According to Ant Breach, Associate Director of the Centre for Cities, all “the easy fruit has been picked”. Breach emphasised that “you have to lean into the geography of the economy in Britain.” Others have pointed to the lack of delivery on new community infrastructure in more recent iterations of New Towns. Northstowe is one such example, where over 2,000 residents lack any shops, café or GP surgery.

New Towns such as Milton Keynes have been successful because they have close connections to vibrant existing economies. They attracted new residents with the promise of well-designed new communities with good transport links to job opportunities in nearby cities.

Some of the most successful New Towns are urban extensions to existing cities, such as Edinburgh’s New Town or Barcelona’s Eixample. Less successful New Towns have been poorly located with no such links to jobs nearby or there were already lots of local housing options already. Skelmersdale and Cumbernauld are often mentioned as New Towns that struggled to thrive for these exact reasons. The key is location, location, location.

New homes in Britain are difficult to build in part due to complex and lengthy planning processes. New Towns can help with that and may even help sidestep the political logjams that currently block homes. One motivation for New Towns is that Labour could get the best electoral outcomes by choosing deep rural locations with good rail connections, to avoid controversial measures in the more electorally challenging suburbs.

There are clear lessons from previous plans that New Towns need to be in the right locations and that delivery is a challenge. The Department for Levelling-Up, Housing and, Communities has limited resources, as does Homes England. It will be important to pick New Town sites that deliver the biggest social and economic benefits. Urban extensions of existing unaffordable towns and cities such as York, Oxford and Reading would be a great way to do this. Locations in areas where homes are more affordable, or less unaffordable, such as Nottingham or Stafford, offer less opportunity for land value capture to fund infrastructure and more social housing. Labour’s new commitment on New Towns is a bold proposal to build affordable, plentiful homes. A Labour Government must be focused on delivering homes at scale to tackle Britain’s housing crisis. New Towns can offer hundreds of thousands of people the opportunity to have a home of their own. It can also unlock the economic potential of some of our most constrained cities, helping with housing, jobs and public services across the whole country. The key will be delivery at pace. I have confidence in Angela Rayner to do that.

Everyone knows that Clement Attlee’s 1945-1951 Labour Governments created the NHS, brought the coal mines and railways in to public ownership and gave India and Pakistan independence. But one of Attlee’s lesser celebrated achievements was building one million new homes at a time when building materials were in short supply and when the construction labour force was reduced to a third of its pre-war size.

From a slow start in 1945 -1947, new housing completions averaged around 200,000 a year for the next four years from 1948 -1951. By 1951, a total of 1,016,349 new homes were built, of which 806,857 were new Council houses. On top of that, 156,623 ‘prefabs’ were built, many of which provided decent and much-loved homes for many years to come. In addition, hundreds of thousands of existing homes were repaired and converted in the six years after the war.

Michael Foot rightly claims, “This achievement was no small one in the first years after the war when the country was also engaged in a big factory-building programme. It far surpassed anything achieved in Britain after 1918 or in most countries after 1945”.

However, despite the heroic efforts of Aneurin Bevan and his colleagues, more could have been achieved had Labour stuck to its Manifesto commitment and created a separate Ministry of Housing and Town Planning. Attlee gave Bevan the job of ‘slaying’ two of Beveridge’s ‘five giants’ – Squalor (caused by poor housing) and Disease (caused by inadequate health care provision). As Nick Thomas-Symonds argues:

“Having the same Cabinet minister responsible for both the creation of the NHS and housing the nation after the destruction of the Second World War was more than overload. It left Bevan to deal with the intricacies of both sides of his department when either half in itself would have been too much for a single minister.”

Should the housing building programme have been led by a ‘National Housing Corporation’, as Douglas Jay had recommended in the first few months of the Government, rather than by the local authorities, many of which had little experience of building new homes at scale.

Certainly, a national organisation with regional offices would have made planning, direction and control easier, but it could also have taken some time to establish. By harnessing the experience of the big city housing departments in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Glasgow, which had been building new out-of-town estates for over a decade and more, Bevan was able to combine real expertise with local knowledge.

The downside was that outside the big cities, experience was strictly limited with many local councils simply unable to move quickly. Overall, perhaps a key factor in this debate is that, six years later, Harold Macmillan was able to build 300,000 houses a year based on the same local authority ‘delivery system’ established by Bevan.

Should Labour have been more pragmatic and built more homes at lower standards, as Macmillan did during the 1950s? The average new three-bedroom Council house increased in size, from 860 square feet in the pre-war period, to 1,026 square feet in 1946, to 1,055 square feet in 1949, falling back to 1,032 square feet in 1951 and down to 947 square feet in 1952.

By 1959, the average size of a three-bedroom Council house had fallen to 897 square feet. Bevan was surely correct to increase space standards, remaking famously in Margate on 22nd May 1947, “We shall be judged for a year or two by the number of houses we build. We shall be judged in ten years’ time by the type of houses we build”.

There is little doubt that the new, larger Council houses built in the years immediately following the Second World War were some of the best ever built and have stood the test of time. In 1950, the first four blocks completed on the Churchill Gardens estate in Pimlico won Festival of Britain Architectural Awards. It wasn’t just the architectural critics who praised the flats. In 1962, tenants in the ‘posh’ private flats in Dolphin Square next door opposed a rent rise arguing, that “many of the flats are not as nice as those put up by the Council in Churchill Gardens opposite”.

Other post-war estates were similarly feted. In 1998, English Heritage listed the Spa Green estate in Finsbury as Grade II*. The Survey of London describes the Spa Green Estate as ‘heroic’. Nikolaus Pevsner called it ‘the most innovative public housing’ of its time.

Perhaps where Labour’s lofty ambitions most obviously failed was in the goal to create new communities where the ‘spirit of companionship’ would flourish and “wartime sentiments of social solidarity and shared purpose could be maintained and strengthened in the post-war world”. Aneurin Bevan harked back to the time where “the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street”.

Similarly, Lewis Silkin’s ambition that class distinctions would fade away in the New Towns was never achieved. He hoped that “different income groups living in the new towns will not be segregated” and that after attending a town centre event, “When they leave to go home I do not want to see the better-off people to go to the right and the less well-off to go to the left. I want them to ask each other, ‘Are you going my way?’”.

There can be no denying Labour’s fundamental achievement to meet the aspiration of very many working class families to live in high quality affordable housing – which the Conservatives followed with great success over the next 13 years. The lives of so many working class families – who had been ignored by every previous Government – were transformed for the better.

As the historian Kenneth Morgan so clearly concludes:
“The rehousing of several million people in new or renovated houses, at a time of extreme social and economic dislocation, was a considerable achievement. Housing, therefore, deserves its honoured role in the saga of Labour’s welfare state.”

His book, ‘Building the New Jerusalem: How Attlee’s Government Built 1 Million New Homes’, is available in paperback and Kindle https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08N1H3PYL

All royalties will be donated to Foodbanks in Westminster.

Paul Dimoldenberg

Paul Dimoldenberg was first elected to Westminster City Council in 1982. He was Leader of the Labour Opposition Group from 1987-1990 and from 2004-2015.

He is the author of ‘The Westminster Whistleblowers’, published by Politicos in 2006, which tells the story of the Westminster ‘Homes for Votes’ scandal of the 1980s and 1990s. He also has recently published Cheer Churchill. Vote Labour.

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