Building new UK towns needs radical approach to planning and funding, says task force chair

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A slew of new towns promised as part of a UK housing revolution will not drop “magically” from the sky, but require a radical approach to planning and funding infrastructure, the chair of the government’s New Towns Taskforce has warned. 

Sir Michael Lyons, a former BBC chair and local council chief executive, said that he expected construction to increase from the end of the current parliament, with possible locations for the new towns identified by the middle of next summer.

“This is about a big, bold statement of the ambition of growth and a much larger-scale response to the housing crisis. We need an additional 5mn homes by 2040 and we’re not going to do that by incremental change,” he said in his first national interview since being appointed in August.

Lyons and a board of expert advisers have been given 12 months to deliver a report to housing secretary Angela Rayner identifying locations for the new towns and setting out the mechanism by which they can be built.

It is a decade since Lyons delivered his last housing report for Labour — the Lyons Review into how to kick-start housebuilding after the financial crisis — but he said he was determined that it will not be “just another report”.

As inspiration he cited the fact that Lord John Reith, the first director-general of the BBC, took only a year to compile his own “seminal” Commons Committee report in 1945 that gave birth to the original postwar new towns such as Milton Keynes and Stevenage. 

Lyons, who recently held meetings in Cambridge where the previous government announced plans to build more than 100,00 new homes, added that it was too early to say where the 21st-century versions would be built, but the focus would be on high-productivity areas.

“This isn’t about magically dropping these towns from the sky,” Lyons adds. “What is important is that they are long-term plans, with infrastructure up front, and that we pick places with good growth and employment prospects.”

Delivering the new towns was one of the most ambitious and potentially controversial pledges in Labour’s election manifesto. When setting out the government’s housebuilding targets in July, Rayner warned MPs that local communities would have a say only on “how to deliver new homes, not whether to”.  

The official remit asks Lyons to identify sites for new communities of “at least 10,000” homes “built on greenfield land and separated from other nearby settlements”, with 40 per cent in the “genuinely affordable” social rent category

Exact locations will be identified via what Lyons called “detailed and fine-grained spatial analysis”. Some would be entirely new sites, others, “urban extensions” of existing towns, but many would be more than 10,000 homes, he added.

As for the timescale, Lyons said that realistically the new projects “will gear up five years from the point at which the report lands”, taking them beyond the current government’s term.

Lyons said he had not reached definitive conclusions about how the new towns would be delivered or funded, but was clear that independent Development Corporations would be central to driving projects forward, with necessary infrastructure delivered up front.

As well as visiting Cambridge, Lyons has consulted executives at London’s Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation, which is overseeing the delivery of tens of thousands of new and affordable homes in a site near the HS2 railway development.

A report published last month by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge university, whose co-director Dame Diane Coyle is on the task force, cited examples of projects such as the Grand Paris Express and the expansion of the Swedish city of Gothenburg as potential models.

Labour has said it intends to strengthen compulsory purchase power introduced by the previous Conservative government in order to enable public bodies to assemble land for public development without paying overinflated valuations.

Lyons said the ideas in the Bennett Institute report were “congruent” with those being explored by the New Towns Taskforce, including securing land at “best value” and putting infrastructure in early. “When it comes to the discussion of how that’s funded, well I think that’s intriguing,” he added.

The UK would also need to radically improve the co-ordination of infrastructure so that all the elements needed to support new towns — water, power and transportation — could be delivered together, Lyons said.

Asked what would provide the ‘carrot’ for local authorities to accept the new developments, Lyons said that aside from the prospect of new affordable homes helping councils cut their reliance on temporary accommodation, they would be offered new levels of certainty.

“First clarity about the areas; secondly a clear commitment to early investment in infrastructure, both physical and social, well ahead of the pace of development of housing and thirdly the governance arrangements that bring strong leadership for that development,” he said.