Starmer should use the state’s powers to buy land for housing cheaply
Opening of Crawley New Town
PA Images/Alamy Stock
4 min read
We won't get the new housing need unless the current government does what Clement Atlee did and buy land for development at agricultural prices
If we want more housing, and want to do so without endless urban sprawl, we need new towns. It’s not a controversial idea: we regularly see people calling for a wave of new town development, echoing that of the post-war Labour government, and for 18 years administrations have committed to delivering them.
In 2007, Gordon Brown announced 10 new ‘eco-towns’, ultimately limited in scope to Northstowe. During the Coalition government, George Osborne announced and repeatedly re-announced Ebbsfleet as a new ‘garden city’, and under the following years of Conservative administration new towns regularly made an appearance in policy debates.
New towns alone will not fix the UK’s housing shortage, but they are an important part of the mix. The only time since the Second World War that UK housing supply growth has exceeded housing demand growth was during the construction of new towns.
So why, for all the cross-party support, has delivery failed to replicate the success of the post-war period? I believe the clearest reason is the failure by ministers and civil servants to understand and apply the delivery mechanisms used in constructing the post-war new towns.
The 1945 Labour government was elected on the promise to “Win the Peace”. This was more than rhetoric. The Second World War had demonstrated that the state and central planning could beat Adolf Hitler – why could they not also address the evils on the home front, evils like poverty, homelessness and disease? This mindset gave us our NHS and a wave of other social reforms, including new towns.
They bought the land at agricultural prices, delivering a record saving in development costs
The commissions set up by government to build the new towns were powerful – far more so than any more recent structure – and made up of people who not only had the greatest available expertise in planning and development, but who believed deeply in the work of creating these new communities. Instead of endless consultation and delay, they could grant themselves the permissions they needed to work at pace.
Within 13 years of designation, my constituency of Crawley had grown from a population of 9,500 to almost 52,000; in contrast Ebbsfleet’s population at the latest census was still less than 5,000 people. Since the 1970s, no new towns have been built using the powers of the New Towns Act (1946), and none have replicated the speed and scale of the original new towns.
For all the snobbery towards these towns, I’d recommend people take a deeper look at them before judging. The buildings were built to the best standards of the day, almost entirely as affordable housing, with some of the largest volumes of urban green space in the country, and unparalleled community infrastructure.
There was only one way to afford this, both then and now: they bought the land at agricultural prices, delivering a record saving in development costs. The many problems with master planning, district valuations, and land pricing are worthy of a much longer piece all of their own but, simply put, the number-one constraint upon enabling housing, infrastructure and economic development isn’t newts – it’s inexcusably overpriced land.
Less than one per cent of the population owns 70 per cent of the land, the majority of whom have held it since 1066, when they took it at sword-point. At a time when we desperately need housing and economic growth, there is no justifiable excuse for maintaining a system where the wealthiest people in the country are able to hold the government to ransom for the land we need to address the UK’s very real problems. It’s a matter of putting country before narrow sectional interests, and without tackling this the impact of new towns will be heavily limited.
Our new government has shown its ambition around new towns, having already announced one location, and tasking a heavyweight like Sir Michael Lyons to identify new sites evidences its seriousness around delivery. Yet it is in the 1946 New Towns Act that ministers will find the framework necessary for achieving their ambition.
Peter Lamb is Labour MP for Crawley
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