Tag: new towns

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Lessons from our history: Britain must build places, not units

There is a growing consensus that something has fundamentally gone wrong at all levels with housing in Britain.  We often search for new approaches and policies to meet society’s needs when in fact we should instead look at our history for the solutions.

The Labour Government understands that the housing market is dysfunctional, that housing supply for decades has been inadequate and is rightly appalled at inheriting a situation where there are over 300,000 people, including more than 170,000 children, in all forms of temporary accommodation.  In this context, the response to set an ambitious target of 1.5 million new homes over 5 years is appropriate.  I am, however, concerned that even with a record £39 billion committed to the affordable housing programme, this will not produce anywhere near enough truly affordable homes, and in particular, the right kind of social rent homes to meet the crushing levels of housing need.

My worry is that in a drive to hit house building targets we lose sight of something of enormous importance, and that is the need to create communities where people want to live and want to put down roots.

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This is where looking at our history becomes so important. During the inter-war years of the early twentieth century, and then in the post second world war period, pioneering planners and local authorities in Britain, despite the most challenging of circumstances, created garden cities and new towns that have stood the test of time.

The Dagenham and Rainham constituency that I represent contains much of the Becontree housing estate started in the 1920s. The planners of the London County Council had the foresight to adopt much of the thinking that inspired the earlier garden city movement. Building 2, 3 and 4 bedroom houses with gardens, in an area where parks and other green public spaces were created, gave life changing conditions for families moving from slum tenement blocks in east London.  

The housing supply of the last decade or two has been driven, predominately, by the targeting of numbers and by building viability arguments from developers. This has resulted in the over-supply of 1-bedroom flats and a nearly complete absence of 4-bedroom properties.

Instead, we must treat building as a part of place making. We must consider nurturing sustainable communities which are more balanced, incorporating the essential social and transport infrastructure needed to support new and existing communities.

That would also mean changing the housing mix in terms of tenure and house sizes and to build sufficient numbers of homes suitable for families. It would mean building specific accommodation for elderly people designed to promote and extend independent living. This would in fact save revenue spending on social care and demands on health services.

I strongly suspect that this model of housing development would not just have greater longevity than the high-rise apartment block estates do, but would engender much higher levels of wellbeing, with all of the positive social and health outcome benefits that flow from it.

It would also not surprise me if this approach reduces opposition from existing communities to new housing schemes.  This would also save planning expenses and time, and give a greater feeling of ownership and of being done by, rather than done to.

As a nation we did this before and did so in even more financially challenging times. Not only that, but those places and homes have stood the test of time.

Building for the future means planning neighbourhoods around the flow of life. From having the infrastructure to provide the best start in life, affordable first homes, places to work and socialise, family sized homes for social rent where people can put down roots, to sheltered options where people can grow old in the community they call home.

Only a legacy plan will help us surmount the housing crisis, not a dash for units.

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A new generation of new towns in England

Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire, one of the constituent towns which came to form Milton Keynes

80 years after the Act which launched the post-war Labour government’s New Towns programme, the current government has set out its proposals for a new generation of New Towns. Between 1946 and 1970, 32 New Towns were designated in the UK (21 in England), generating homes for 2.8 million people. It was the most ambitious urban development programme ever undertaken by a UK government and was a key element in that government’s plans for tackling the acute housing problems it faced following six years of war and all the damage that had resulted.

Although the economic and housing problems facing the UK today differ in a number of respects from those of 1946, they are no less acute and call for bold and radical responses. Recognising that a New Towns programme could make a very significant contribution to resolving today’s challenges, the government decided, soon after coming into office in July 2024, to set up a Taskforce, chaired by Sir Michael Lyons, to recommend a new generation of New Towns. This week’s announcement is the government’s response to the Taskforce recommendations. The Taskforce report covered four main themes;

  1. The rationale for a New Towns programme
  2. The placemaking principles which should underpin the programme
  3.  Proposed New Town locations
  4.  The necessary delivery mechanisms and arrangements. 
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There are strong economic as well as housing justifications for developing New Towns. Shortages of suitable and affordable homes constrain growth in many areas. Tackling the undersupply of homes requires a step change in output, which in turn depends on maximising the contribution of all potential providers, across both public and private sectors. A programme of planned developments at scale, comprising a variety of homes to meet the full range of needs, supported by necessary infrastructure, provides a real opportunity to accelerate the anaemic rates of housebuilding which have characterised recent years. It is no co-incidence that we have as a country failed to deliver over 250,000 homes a year since the 1980s when the earlier New Towns programme was wound down, along with the council housebuilding programme, by the Thatcher government.

If expanding the number of homes we build is an important objective, just as important is raising the quality of our new homes and their environment.  With this in mind, the Taskforce recommended a set of placemaking principles which should underpin the New Town programme. These are vital to ensure that the New Towns created under the new programme are exemplary places in which people will want to live, and in which they can feel proud and at home. The aim must be to create strong communities with the necessary facilities, social and physical infrastructure, attractive parks and green spaces, designed to meet sustainability and biodiversity objectives and to encourage healthy lifestyles.

The Taskforce proposed 12 locations, each suitable for developments of at least 10,000 homes, and with the potential to deliver between 250,000 and 300,000 homes. The government has given the go-ahead to seven of the recommended sites, with a combined potential for a little under 200,000 new homes. While this goes a substantial way towards the Taskforce aspirations, it does change the geographic spread, leaving a programme heavily focussed on London and the South East (Thamesmead and Enfield in London, Tempsford near Bedford and Milton Keynes), with two northern cities (Leeds and Manchester) and Bristol as the only outliers.

More peripheral sites proposed by the Taskforce (Marlcombe near Exeter, Plymouth, Heyford Park in Oxfordshire, Wychavon Town in Worcestershire and Adlington in Cheshire) are not being taken forward.  They are expected to receive support from government under other programmes, but their exclusion from the New Towns programme risks undermining its credibility as a national initiative. There is also the question of potential future sites elsewhere, which could potentially be added to the programme, as happened successfully in the 1950s and 1960s. This option should in my view be kept open, not least to ensure that the country takes the most benefit from the experience gained by the trailblazers.

The Taskforce made a series of recommendations on delivery mechanisms and arrangements which need to be put in place to enable the New Town programme to be progressed to best effect and most cost-effectively. The establishment of single-minded Development Corporations to oversee the planning and growth of each New Town, and the early public acquisition of land to enable the Development Corporations to control the pace and nature of the development in line with its approved Masterplan, are among the most important issues to be resolved. The foundations for a New Towns programme are now clearly in place and the government’s commitment this week to take it forward is very much to be welcomed. The challenge now is to ensure successful implementation.   

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Back to the Future

Bristol (Hartcliffe) from Dundry Hill by stevekeirstu is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

As part of Rachel Reeves’ Spending Review the Government announced 25 trailblazer neighbourhoods which will receive up to £20 million of ten years. One of the areas named was Hartcliffe in Bristol. It is an area I know well: I grew up there, lived there for over 30 years and represented it as a councillor for 11 years. The day before the trailblazer announcement, I received a national award for a book charting the early history of the estate, “Hartcliffe Betrayed” which I believe has lessons which the current Government could learn from.

Built in the 1950s and 60s, Hartcliffe was part of the wave of post war housebuilding which is often cited when people talk about the golden age of government achieving over 300,000 homes per year, much of it council housing. Estates sprung up across the country, and our towns and cities expanded to accommodate the new growth. However, mistakes were made: urban extensions were often distant from facilities, poorly served by public transport, with local shops more expensive than the city centre retail they replaced. To speed up development, new forms of concrete and steel construction were employed and there was a switch from building houses to high rise flats to hit the targets. In the case of Hartcliffe ambitious plans for a wide range of community services were shelved or delayed, roads links were downgraded and housing standards compromised.

Hartcliffe was an urban extension planned as a new town. If it had been a new town, it would have been treated far better, as they were much better served by infrastructure, facilities, and even local democratic institutions.

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 Today Hartcliffe is a community struggling because of economic expediency and chasing housing numbers at the expense of everything else. In recent decades, housing policy has not helped as the council housing which dominates the area is prioritised for the most desperate and marginalised, ensuring that the poverty statistics deepen each time they are measured. Clearly it would not have been allocated funds by the Government if that was not the case.

Following a piece of research conducted before the Second World War by Bristol University and published after, it contained a set of principles which could be applied to urban extensions. Six in total, four were very specific about housing finance of the time, however the remaining four still stand up to scrutiny 80 years later. These were:

  1. “The need for less segregation of estates from the life of the city as a whole”. The main recommendation is to have affordable, effective public transport, giving residents easy access to all that a city has to offer. It also suggests areas should be planned to be as economically and socially self-sufficient as possible with facilities and employment incorporated from the beginning.
  2. “The need for less isolation of the poorer section of the population on the estates.” This emphasises the need for a mix of people with different incomes and not recreating ‘council estates.’ Some on the left argue that all housing should be social housing. Given allocation policies and the demand for housing this would be self-defeating and would reinforce area based stigma.
  3. “The need for more flexibility in fixing densities on new estates.” The garden city model much used in the 30s and 50s is often seen as beyond reproach, however it leads to low densities which can undermine the social and commercial economies meaning that often people are too far from services to use them. Higher densities concentrated on ‘town centres’ should be encouraged.
  4. “The need to encourage self-government on the estates.” New towns tended to have town councils, urban extensions often find their governance centred far away. As we face further local government reorganisation and the combining of county and district councils together, the case for urban parish councils or the equivalent to give communities more control over local resources and decision making becomes stronger.

Too often we ignore the lessons of the past, but now that we are planning for the largest house building programme of a generation maybe it is time to dust off research of the last century to ensure we do not repeat the mistakes of those years.

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The promise of New Towns

Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire, one of the constituent towns which came to form Milton Keynes

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.

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Building the New Jerusalem – How Attlee’s Government built 1 Million New Homes

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.

<strong><span class="has-inline-color has-accent-color">Paul Dimoldenberg</span></strong>
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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