Delivering New Towns of the 21st Century

Following publication of the report from the Government’s New Towns Task Force, and the accompanying Government announcement, using our experience from supporting the delivery of new communities, we consider the challenges for the New Towns Programme in seeking to build towns fit for the 21^st Century.

Recap

The Task Force was formed in July 2024, as one of the first acts of the new Government, with clear aims and objectives The New Towns Taskforce - GOV.UK.

There were over 100 expressions of interest from across England for potential new towns, which had to be at least 10,000 homes in scale.

An interim report was published by the Task Force in February, looking at lessons from previous new towns and setting an approach to new towns of the future, together with a promise to look at delivery issues as their next phase of work Building new towns for the future - GOV.UK

In the meantime, the Planning and Infrastructure Bill has progressed to the Committee stages in the House of Lords and makes provisions for greater flexibility and local democratic involvement in development corporations.

On 28^th September, to coincide with the Labour Party Conference, the report of the Task Force was published New Towns Taskforce: Report to government - GOV.UK alongside a Government commitment to take forward the 12 locations identified and deliver on 3 of those before the next general election – Crews Hill in Enfield, Tempsford in Bedfordshire and Leeds.

The big challenges that need to be addressed

In our previous article on the subject of new towns Think piece: Planning for new towns – have we got the right tools? we reflected on the challenges with the current planning system. Some of these issues are now picked up by both the Task Force report and Government response, such as the need for each location to produce a Spatial Planning Framework. Alongside these, we know from experience that there are a number of delivery related challenges that will need to be addressed, the most significant of which are:

• Providing capital funding for critical infrastructure. A key challenge in sustainable placemaking, is the delivery of early and timely infrastructure. Current planning and funding systems are not set up to particularly encourage or enable this, with funding often coming through once significant numbers of homes have been built, meaning that new residents can often be left without access to convenient schools, community facilities and other services that go to make sustainable communities. It is critical that residents are encouraged to form sustainable habits from the outset, which means that the new park, local primary school, convenience store etc are provided from the outset alongside the means to move sustainably, such as convenient and safe pedestrian and cycle routes, bus service etc. Even more challenging is the ability to provide timely new strategic infrastructure, such as a rail station, new motorway junction etc.

  
  

  The Government appear to have acknowledged this challenge through its 10 year Infrastructure Strategy UK Infrastructure: A 10 Year Strategy - GOV.UK involving the setting up the National Housing Bank Over 500,000 homes to be built through new National Housing Bank - GOV.UK and the allocation £5 billion of new capital grant funding for infrastructure and land, administered by a new, single national housing delivery fund that will complement investment from the national housing bank. The Government’s response to the report makes a commitment to co-ordinate central funding further and work with local areas to agree an appropriate approach.

  
  

• Capturing land value uplift. The previous New Towns programme was successful in capturing any land value uplift resulting from development, by effectively allowing development corporations to purchase land at existing use value. This enabled any uplift in value to flow back into new town investment. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill is seeking to improve the CPO process and land compensation rules and remove hope value, to enable more effective land assembly through public sector-led schemes. As part of the current announcements, the Government has confirmed a commitment to the use of CPO and the removal of ‘hope value’.

  
  

• Ensuring the right structures and mechanisms for delivery are in place. Places at the scale of new towns require dedicated and focussed delivery vehicles to ensure the co-ordination of planning, funding, infrastructure delivery, land acquisition etc. There is a challenge to ensure that these mechanisms are fit for purpose, adequately funded and resourced and have a democratic mandate. The Task Force state that “development corporations are generally best placed to deliver new towns, particularly due to their powers of land assembly and their capacity to provide effective long-term certainty and stewardship” and go on to recommend that all New Towns are delivered via development corporations. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill proposes widening their use and creating greater flexibility on their designation, including the ability to take on transport planning functions. It will now be interesting to see how these are implemented across the locations identified, in a bespoke way that deals with the specific circumstances of each town.

  
  

• Ensuring the right level of resources. A wide range of skills and resources are required to plan and deliver developments at this scale. And that’s before you begin to consider the pressures on the construction industry. At a time when many of the skills required are at a premium, new ways of focussing skills and resources will need to be developed. On the plus side, a new towns programme has the potential to drive innovation by creating the long-term certainty needed by investors and commercial enterprise, but this will need to be accompanied by the appropriate levels of investment and innovation in the public sector partners. The Government have committed to setting up a New Towns Unit to work with Homes England and new expert advisory body to understand how these issues can be addressed and it will be interesting to see how this works and who will be involved.

  
  

• Co-ordinating statutory consultees and Government Departments. Nationally important projects such as New Towns require input and involvement from a wide range of national bodies. This range has become far wider and more complex since the post war new towns programme and the requirement for sustainable, high-quality place-making means that in modern times, schemes of this nature involve a significant array of Government departments, agencies and statutory consultees. It is important that priorities and programmes are aligned to support planning and delivery and this will require continued Government involvement at the highest level, together with appropriate powers for new delivery mechanisms/development corporations. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill has the potential to address some of these issues and the Government have promised greater central co-ordination going forward.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the challenges that lie ahead in ensuring the delivery of a programme that has the potential to be truly transformative for the country, as the post war New Towns were. But it does highlight the significance of the challenges and these are not to be easily dismissed. The Task Force have made an excellent job of making recommendations across a wide range of areas requiring further work and attention and the Government’s initial response is very positive and encouraging. As is often the way, we now await further detail with interest, but the commitment to and focus on delivering a range of new, large scale communities is certainly to be welcomed.