Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
More than 100 sites across England have put themselves forward to be considered as potential new towns, with Sir Keir Starmer claiming that some would be under construction by the end of this parliament.
The prime minister will announce the new town programme on Thursday as part of what he claims will be Britain’s largest housebuilding programme for over half a century.
“We will knock down those who are standing in the way,” he told journalists ahead of the announcement.
Starmer said demand from local authorities to build new towns — in practice most will be extensions to existing settlements — showed that local people were embracing “the dream of home ownership”.
Applications had been received from every region in England, he added, and about a dozen sites are expected to be approved. The largest number came from London and the south-east.
Starmer has vowed to build 1.5mn new homes over the current five-year parliament, a target that many industry experts think is stretching, if not impossible.
In the longer term he wants to jump-start a fresh generation of new towns, each with the potential to deliver at least 10,000 new homes.
Starmer said all would be built under strict conditions, and that he expected construction to start before the next election, which has to be held by 2029.
In addition to requirements for new towns to have good facilities and affordable housing, he said their design would have to be “neutral” so that it would be impossible to tell from the outside whether a home was social housing or privately owned.
Starmer said: “In our new towns, our aim is for at least 40 per cent of homes to be affordable, including social housing.”
Last year Starmer launched a “new towns task force” including industry experts such as former local council chief executive Sir Michael Lyons and economist Dame Kate Barker. The group has since published a draft set of design principles for the new conurbations.
On a visit to a housing development on Thursday, Starmer will say the next Treasury spending review in June will provide “financial certainty and stability” for the programme.
Downing Street officials said publicly funded loans would be available to development corporations behind the new towns but that they would be recouped as land was released, making the scheme cost neutral.
Starmer hopes to replicate the successful wave of new towns built in the aftermath of the second world war in places such as Welwyn Garden City, Crawley and Stevenage in England, Cwmbran in Wales and East Kilbride in Scotland.
But more recent attempts to revive the concept — such as “ecotowns” under Gordon Brown’s Labour government or new towns under David Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition of 2010-15 — have largely failed to get off the ground.
Ministers claim that a “new homes accelerator” programme is managing to unstick the delivery of some housing sites held up by unnecessary delays.
But the National Housing Federation, which represents housing associations, and the Home Builders Federation, an industry group, warned in October that the government was on track to miss the 1.5mn target by almost a third because high house prices and interest rates would limit market demand.
