Will new towns fix the UK's housing crisis?

With an estimated shortfall of 4.3 million homes in the UK, the Labour government has said "new towns" are a key part of its plan to build 1.5 million houses over the next five years. But are the plans enough to solve the crisis? 

Angela Rayner last month signalled the "largest housebuilding programme since the postwar period", inspired by the post-Second World War creation of towns such as Stevenage, Warrington and Milton Keynes.

Under the proposals, designed to address the growing demand for affordable housing, the government plans to create large communities of at least 10,000 homes each, of which 40% will be affordable.

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But the proposals have prompted scepticism in some quarters. The Centre for Cities, an urban policy think tank, warned in an analysis for The Guardian "that the government would need to build significantly more new towns and urban extensions than England has ever achieved to even make a dent in its 1.5m target". 

What did the commentators say?

Raising doubts over the viability of Labour plans to use new towns to address the housing crisis, the Centre for Cities' research found that the postwar new towns programme, which inspired Labour's proposal, contributed only 3.3% of all housebuilding in the 40 years after the 1946 New Towns Act.

Between 1947 and 1991, development corporations in England built 307,000 homes – "the same number the government will need to build on average every year up to 2029", said The Guardian. Maurice Lange, an analyst at the Centre for Cities, said that while "past experience suggests that the policy can accelerate development in certain areas", its role in increasing total housebuilding "is likely to be relatively small".

"Recent British history is littered with grand plans for thriving and bucolic new towns built from scratch," said City A.M. But the developments "rarely live up to their claims". If Labour wants to deliver its planned 1.5 million homes by the next parliament "experience shows us that they should focus on their urban extension plans, instead of relying on new towns, which often under-deliver". 

The town of Northstowe serves as a recent cautionary tale. Planning for a 10,000-home town near Cambridge began in 2007, but progress has been slow, with only 1,200 homes completed. Residents, who moved in a decade later, face inadequate amenities, no shops and long commutes to Cambridge. Over three-quarters (76%) of residents said they were dissatisfied with local services in a recent survey.

But if you are going to build new towns then "location matters", said Big Issue. "To fill an estimated shortfall of 4.3 million homes, we'd need to build 36 new Milton Keyneses. But where to put them?" The UK's housing crisis is most acute in the Southeast, said Paul Swinney, director of policy and research at the Centre for Cities, speaking to the magazine. "If you were going to build more new towns, the data would suggest you do it as close to London as possible," he said.

There are alternative solutions to the housing crisis besides new towns, said Jonn Elledge in the Financial Times. A 2015 report from the Adam Smith Institute estimated that 1 million new homes could be built within walking distance of a railway station on London's 'green belt' – "a form of British transit-oriented development that would take up just 3.7% of London's greenbelt, leaving 96.3% of it, an area many times the size of the city itself, untouched", said Elledge.

Another option "for expanding built-up land within cities" may prove rather "less popular", however. It involves focusing on "quite how much land Britain gives over to a little-played sport involving hitting balls with metal sticks". 

A 2021 report by architect Russell Curtis found that London's 94 golf courses occupy more space than the entire borough of Brent, home to more than 330,000 people.

"Given that golf courses are bad for biodiversity and walkers alike, this feels like a curious choice at a time of housing crisis," said Elledge. "Rethinking it could provide homes for as many people as Milton Keynes, and still leave the capital's golfers with a couple of dozen courses to choose from."

What next?

Speaking to The Guardian, a government spokesperson said that new towns were "just one part of our plan to get Britain building again and create the homes this country needs. They are expected to deliver hundreds of thousands of much needed affordable homes in decades to come. 

"We have been clear from the start this is a long-term project, but 1.5m homes will be delivered in this parliament thanks to our overhaul of the planning system."