“For the first time in almost half a century, we will be imaginative and build new cities,” the Labor leader told the party conference.
He promised ten new towns “in every region of the country”, vowed to crush any local opposition with new planning laws and openly attacked NIMBYs “who always say ‘Yes, but not here'”.
For those who saw Sir Keir Starmer speak at the conference this month, this may sound familiar.
The leader belonged to Gordon Brown and this quote comes from his first conference speech as leader in 2007.
But 16 years later, most of the new cities he promised have not been built. So will Sir Keir’s ambitions evolve differently?
After World War II, this country was actually very good at building new cities. The New Towns Act 1946 became the basis for the building of 32 towns across the country – places such as Harlow, Stevenage, Crawley and Milton Keynes – in what has been described as “the greatest creation of planned townships ever”.
They left a lasting legacy. In 2011, they housed 2.8 million people in 4.3 percent of all households in the country.
They are also built at an astonishing rate by today’s standards.
The program took several years to identify sites and acquire land, but by 1952, 10,000 homes a year were being built in new towns, and this supply level continued for much of the next decade.
Britain has tried many times to replicate this in modern times, but failed. Gordon Brown’s commitment to eco-cities in 2007 was just one of many promises to build new “garden cities”, “garden villages” or “healthy new cities”. Nobody succeeded.
In 2009, four of the 57 sites planned by the Brown administration for potential new towns were deemed suitable for development.
Two of these were actually extensions of existing urban areas, and the third was a reconstruction of an existing city rather than one of the free-standing new cities originally envisaged.
Only one truly new town in the program was able to succeed: Northstowe. It will be built on the site of a former military base in Cambridgeshire. But as of May 2020, only 550 of the 10,000 promised homes had been built.
It’s not that governments have lost interest in building: there were several promises in the 2010s to create a new city of sorts. In fact, a new version of the Northstowe plan was announced to great fanfare in 2014, 2015 and 2016. But houses in these and other places stubbornly remained undeveloped.
Take Ebbsfleet in Kent for example: since 2002 the site has been a large garden city of 15,000 homes. HS1 opened in 2007, connecting London in just nine minutes.
But when I visited in 2016, 414 houses had been built there and the area was mostly bush and building sites.
The project manager took me to the top of a grassy hill overlooking the Thames Estuary. “This will be our Primrose Hill,” he said.
Almost eight years later, it is still a construction site. Progress has increased since my visit. The 3,000th home was built last year, but it is still 80 percent unfinished and won’t be completed until 2035. Something went wrong?
The first difference is that the new towns of the 1950s were primarily social housing projects. In Basildon, Essex, 69 per cent of the new town was social housing. In Peterlee, County Durham, the figure was 97 per cent.
“This figure, at around 80 per cent of social housing, is fairly stable in the first phase of post-war new town development,” says historian and author John Boughton, who has written extensively on the history of social housing in Britain.
Social rent is the reason cities have been able to develop so quickly. Today’s new urban projects are very large government-sponsored private housing projects.
But the private housing model has a catch in such places: until the city is completed, houses are difficult to sell, and until the houses are sold, it is difficult to raise money to build the city. As a result, small sections of houses disappear within decades.
“The attempt to work with private developers on more modern projects, the main driver of which is obviously speculative profits coupled with a reliance on private capital, has, in my view, once again doomed modern projects to failure,” Mr Boughton added.
In contrast, in Harlow in Essex, which was built specifically to accommodate East Londoners displaced by the Blitz, all housing was council housing until the mid-1950s. This meant that they were government funded and could be built immediately.
The second important feature of the first new cities was the use of development companies.
Thanks to 60-year, low-interest Treasury loans and separate funding for schools, health care and other services, these organizations were free to buy land on the cheap.
“Developers have a very specific mandate, laid out in legislation, with a specific mandate and authority to do whatever is necessary to build a new city,” says Kathy Locke, community director for the Town and Country Planning Association.
It is important to note that these companies owned the land: when they sold the land to private developers, rented out commercial buildings and collected social rents, they generated income that allowed them to repay their loans and invest in the site. Because they obtained land so cheaply, they were profitable: they could repay their loans early and thus make a profit for the government treasury.
This meant that the enormous value created by cities remained within them and was not used for profit. “A true development agency is an organization with a responsibility to act on behalf of the community it creates,” Ms. Locke says. “This means they can keep the huge value gains they get from the development and reinvest it into the site to maintain its really high quality in the long term.”
One of the failures of the new urban projects of the post-war period is that when these companies closed in the 1980s and 1990s, nothing took their place and this investment cycle stopped. Since then, there have been significant declines in some cases.
“I think the fortunes of all the new towns today would be very different if they had retained the fund that was set up to invest in them like that,” Ms Lock says.
Where is Starmer going? More failures of the last thirteen years or a return to post-war ambitions?
There are some good signs. Starmer needs development companies. He would like to see changes to the layout so he can acquire land cheaply. And he paid more attention to social housing than his recent predecessors.
If he wins the big elections, he will also have time.
“Building a completely new city takes decades. Milton Keynes continues to grow,” said Kate Henderson, chief executive of the National Housing Federation. “At the start of a new administration, you can make bold, long-term decisions to actually begin the process of identifying locations, deploying the appropriate delivery vehicle to achieve that goal, and setting the planning conditions in place to actually move forward.”
But there are also less good signs. So far, the Labor Party has not committed to providing the long-term government loans that could finance post-war new towns, or to finance the high level of social housing that made it possible. Instead, they said “the majority of the initial investment” would come from the private sector.
This causes skepticism among some. “New Towns was based on something that Starmer and his colleagues had developed. Don’t believe in social housing,” says the doctor. Glyn Robbins is a housing scholar at the London School of Economics and a member of the council’s housing advocacy group.
“Hundreds of thousands of working class people, including members of my family, have been able to move to places like Harlow because they know they will have really affordable rents and secure tenancies.”
Ms Henderson says while Starmer’s plans are encouraging, they “need to be complemented by funding and a long-term plan if they are to deliver results”.
Whether he has the courage to make these investments will be determined by history: whether Starmer will truly create a new generation of new cities or simply become a footnote in the list of failed speeches about them.