Will Labour’s new towns succeed in fixing the housing crisis?

Angela Rayner’s announcement that the government is to build a new generation of new towns in England has prompted excitement, and a great many bids from local authorities anxious for much-needed accommodation and economic development.

It follows the start already made on delivering the 1.5 million homes promised in the Labour election manifesto, and has been topped off with a promise of ?350m to “get Britain building” – up to 2,800 extra homes via the affordable homes programme, and more than 250 more council homes via the local authority housing fund to provide better-quality temporary accommodation.

The photocall with the King at his own new model suburb outside Newquay was the PR highlight of this frenzy of activity. These are bold plans, no one thinks they’ll be easy to achieve, and the political dividend may prove elusive...

Housebuilding in the UK, especially of social housing and “affordable” homes, hasn’t been keeping up with demand since at least 1980, and the net number of new units added to the housing stock (as a percentage of the total) is running at a level probably not seen since before the industrial revolution (outside wartime). Even with some 200,000 to 300,000 homes being built per annum, as Labour plans propose, the shortage will remain.

There’s probably a backlog of 4 million homes – and demographics, along with the highly cyclical nature of the housing market, make it unlikely that Rayner will revolutionise things for “generation rent” in one term. The construction industry also points to a shortage of skilled labour for all these projects. But it’s a start.

Some 100 applications have been submitted by local councils to build these new towns in every English region, each development being of 10,000 residential homes and associated infrastructure (schools, GP surgeries, transport links and so on). The lucky 10 or 12 winners will be announced in about six months. The rumour is that they’ll be skewed southwards, and some will be on greenfield sites, though the priority will be brownfield and semi-developed greyfield.

It’s a tricky one. Rayner formally inherited this brief when she took over the department from Michael Gove last July, but the slogan “levelling up”, so closely associated with Boris Johnson, was quietly dropped.

There’s little doubt that most of the demand for accommodation emanates from London and the southeast of England, and there’s little point in ignoring that reality. Nonetheless, Labour MPs in the red wall, and more broadly in the North and Midlands, are growing uneasy about the proportion of new investment in the South – notably HS2, airport expansion, new reservoirs, and the expansion of the Oxford-Cambridge corridor.

Only the further redevelopment of Manchester around Old Trafford counts as a flagship north of Birmingham. The nagging question remains: what’s in it for towns like Wigan?

Yes. As ever, there is a cognitive dissonance, to put it politely, between people feeling that “their” area is surging ahead economically, with the concomitant boost to jobs and house prices, even with the expansion in supply – and deeply resenting such trends if they spoil the view, add to congestion, or (even more seldom admitted) attract the “wrong” kind of new neighbours.

Sadly, yes. If the architecture is poor – the vogue for tower blocks coincided with the advent of the earlier new towns. Also, if there are not enough jobs then a new town can feel pretty jaded quite quickly; the state of Skelmersdale by the 1980s is a powerful lesson in neglect.

The relaxation in planning rules will help the towns get built, but could also provide the conditions for new problems to arise – such as building on flood plains. Also, badly designed suburbs with poor road and public transport links can deteriorate into unloved appendices of their cities. The “Rayner generation” of new towns will be more market-driven than their predecessors, however, and perhaps more attuned to what people desire. Their inhabitants might be luckier.

It’s unpredictable, but voters tend to be ungrateful. So the nimbies will inflict electoral punishment on a party (local and/or national) that they hold responsible for “ruining our lovely peaceful village”; but the new inhabitants, with their spacious, energy-efficient new builds, will not necessarily be so thankful that they’ll vote Labour.

History shows the same. For example, when traditional Labour voters from the crowded East End of London were decanted out to the post-war wave of new towns in places such as Basildon and Harlow, they carried their old political loyalties with them – but as they grew more prosperous and were given the right to buy their own council homes in the 1980s, they tended to drift towards the Conservatives.

Milton Keynes, in many ways the most successful of the new towns experiment, grew so fast that it spawned two parliamentary constituencies, both more or less marginal for much of the time.