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“The UK’s housing crisis is deeper and has lasted longer than most comparable countries, both in Europe and North America,” said Anthony Bridge, a researcher at the Centre for Cities, an urban policy think tank. He added that Britain had gone from having one of the best housing stocks in Europe since the Second World War to lagging behind.
To meet growing housing demand, Britain’s ruling Labour Party has vowed to “unleash” development potential and build 1.5 million homes in the next five years, a pace last reached in the 1960s.
One of Labour’s strategies is to build new towns by expanding small communities or creating settlements, reviving an idea from the 1940s. Days after taking office, finance minister Rachel Reeves announced the government would step in to unblock stalled housing projects including Northstowe.
“When I moved here, I thought, wow, a new community, wow, a new school,” said Thompson, who was one of the first people to move to Northo in 2017 and is the town’s representative on the county council. But she acknowledged that development has been slow, which has frustrated many of her fellow citizens.
“It’s very difficult to build new towns because of the pandemic and because construction costs have risen dramatically,” she said.
Nationally, the problem goes back even further. Over the past few decades, a reduction in the supply of new homes has turned into a housing crisis, leaving the UK with a shortfall of more than 4 million homes, while the average pace of homebuilding in European countries lags behind, according to the Centre for Cities. As a result, house prices have soared and homelessness has increased. The housing shortage has also made it difficult for people to find good jobs and for companies to attract talented employees.
Much of the blame lies with the country’s development planning system. In the late 1940s, the country introduced a system that required buildings to be approved by the Planning Authority, which was controlled by local residents. Around the same time, concerns about urban sprawl led to “green belts” being created around cities to restrict development. Over the years, the planning system has led to delays, as residents are often wary of new developments and protection of green belts forces buildings away from areas with existing infrastructure.
Bridge said it was “an accident of history” that Britain’s planning system had become so strict, and that the situation had been made worse by the rise of NIMBYism, the “not in my backyard” phenomenon of opposition to local development.
“The discretionary system in the UK is very specific and difficult to predict,” he said. “Even if you follow the rules, you can still be refused planning permission.”
To overcome resistance, the Labour government has reintroduced mandatory construction targets for local governments in England that will cumulatively seek to build 370,000 homes a year. Lawmakers said they would intervene more actively in development, including plans to build power infrastructure, laboratories and data centers. Officials said they would rely on private developers rather than local councils, which have been the main contributors in the past.
The government has a broader ambition to revive the concept of new towns, a policy introduced by the Labour Party after World War II to steer construction away from London. The first new town was Stevenage, founded less than 30 miles north of London in 1946. The most famous new town is Milton Keynes, which was built about 60 years ago and now has 250,000 residents.
Last month the government announced a taskforce to develop a strategy for new towns (settlement sites with more than 10,000 homes) and make recommendations on their locations within a year. The government has not yet set a target for the number of towns, acknowledging that they will take a long time to build.
Housing minister Matthew Pennycook recently told the BBC: “I think it’s not unrealistic that in the last year of this parliament, which is five years, work could start on several large new communities. In many cases, if we’re lucky enough to have them completed in the second term, they’ll be fully operational.”
But building settlements can be divisive and difficult to get right.
“The risk with new towns is that they’re built too far out of commuting distance from the city, and you try to create self-sufficient mini-economies,” Bridge said. These towns end up being “too small to really compete in the global economy, but they’re too big to simply be charming little villages with high amenity.”
After the New Towns Act was enacted in 1946, waves of new town communities emerged over the following decades. Some, such as Skelmersdale, in the north of Liverpool, which is not easily accessible to the city, have struggled. The last official use of the title “new town” was in 1970, but since then, some large new settlements have been built, such as Ebbsfleet Vale in Kent and Camborne in Cambridgeshire.
Cambridgeshire, where Northolt is located, has been racing to build more housing for years. Cambridge University’s reputation has made it a hub for innovative scientific businesses, but employers say they struggle to attract staff because housing is too expensive. House prices in the city are 13 times the average annual income, and in surrounding areas they are 10 times the average annual income.
Bridget Smith, leader of South Cambridgeshire District Council, the local government responsible for planning, said the crisis had made businesses think about whether Cambridge was the right place for them. “For these companies, it was either go to Cambridge or go abroad.”
Nine major residential developments are planned for the area, totalling more than 36,000 new homes by the late 2040s. These include the extension to Camborne and Eddington, a thriving development built in the green belt and funded by the university.
The council said the only thing holding back housebuilding was not just the planning system but a range of other issues including tight finances, high interest rates, water shortages and long wait times for grid connection.
Homes England, the UK government’s housing and regeneration agency, which is the lead planner for Northstowe, acknowledged the town had a rocky start. Peter Denton, chief executive of Homes England, said the first phase, built by another developer, “was not entirely successful” and lacked the necessary social infrastructure.
“It took a lot of upfront investment to make Nosto a success,” he said. The agency, which has helped build many roads, parklands and schools, intends to recoup the money from the public treasury by selling plots available for development.
Over the past year, the town has built a sports centre and a temporary community building, but still has no shops and very limited medical facilities. Northstowe Tap & Social opened just four months ago, serving coffee and pastries during the day and craft beer and burgers at night.
Early residents had to build the community from scratch. Thompson and one of her neighbors formed a group called Northstowe Foodies, which brought in food trucks to serve the town.
Victoria Fabron, 35, moved to the development two years ago, attracted by the modern design and promise of a new town center. She felt “very hopeful,” she said after leaving the community building one recent afternoon. Fabron, who lives with her partner and two children, said the community is “very active,” but people want more places to go.
“There’s not a lot to do, but I knew that when I moved here,” she said, adding that she expected there would be more amenities. “I just hope they deliver on their promises.”
For others, those promises have been dashed. Karys Brown, 24, who moved to Nosto with her 4-year-old daughter more than a year ago, said that things haven’t improved much in that time and that it’s hard for her to get around without a car. She’s skeptical about the town’s future: “I don’t know what it’s going to be like.”
This article was originally published on The New York Times.
By Eshe Nelson
Photograph: Sam Bush
©2024 The New York Times
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