Dave Hill: How about a new New Town in London?

Someone, somewhere in the bowels of Whitehall might already have drawn a red line round a lump of farmland in some other part of England. But if the government wants to move fast on getting its promised New Towns programme going, it could do worse than pick a site or two in London.

A New Town inside a city? That might sound daft. It isn’t. Not when you consider that around one fifth of Greater London’s 606 square miles are designated as Green Belt, not when you note that some of it is what the government terms “grey belt” – in other words, not terribly green – not when you recall that London is in the grip of a multifarious housing emergency, and not when you recognise that London government has both the know-how and the planning tools to get big development projects done.

Such points were persuasively made in a report released in December by BusinessLDN, which made the case for the capital providing locations for “at least one of these communities”. The government says these must contain at least 10,000 homes and be well-connected, well-designed and jolly nice in general. London could do that. So how about it?

BusinessLDN’s Jonathan Seager, who wrote the report in partnership with leading planning and infrastructure firms, does not underestimate how huge and difficult building a New Town anywhere is. “It’s much bigger than housing,” he points out. “We’re talking about a place. You need infrastructure of all varieties. You need employment, you need a new community. You can’t just magic that stuff up”.

Exactly how all those pieces would be put together is not, as yet, any clearer than where. A New Towns taskforce, set up by the government and led by Sir Michael Lyons, is not expected to report until the summer. And a crucial ingredient for any London New Town would be a high proportion of low-cost rent and other “affordable” homes that Londoners on low and middle incomes could afford.

Can such an outcome be arranged? The government’s planning reforms so far and its gigantic target for London of 88,000 new dwellings in total being added each year, envisage private developers doing most of the building, including of “affordable” homes. But market conditions are difficult and affecting “affordable” housing providers too. Meanwhile, government finances continue to be tight.

Seager thinks it “plausible” that the private sector would invest in New Town sites, but would need “some catalytic investment from the public sector” to oil the wheels. That might take the form of financial help with buying land. “You’d imagine they’d create delivery vehicles or a planning framework which gives people a bit more certainty, and that will de-risk it,” Seager adds. “But if they want really high levels of affordable housing, they’re going to have to support it with grant.”

An enlarged Afford Homes Programme in the government’s keenly-awaited spending review, due in June, could – and surely should – assist London. Might some of that be tied-in to a New Town project, perhaps as part of a comprehensive package of investment covering all the necessary aspects?

We watch. We wait. What we know already, though, is that London has done this type of thing before, ranging from large housing estate regenerations to the Olympic Park. The mayoralty and Transport for London are mature, devolved authorities with the necessary powers to help make things happen and in the right ways.

A key one, highlighted in the BusinessLDN report, is the ability to create Mayoral Development Corporations (MDCs), responsible to the Mayor, which can supersede boroughs as planning and local transport authorities and use compulsory purchase powers to assemble the necessary land.

MDCs for the Olympic Park and its surroundings and for the Old Oak and Park Royal area of north west London were established years ago. Sadiq Khan now wants to set up another one in order to implement his Oxford Street pedestrianisation plan. “It’s the obvious delivery route in London,” Seager says.

Another area of uncertainty is how exactly a New Town might be defined. Could a substantial enlargement of an existing major development project be termed a New Town programme? “While the programme will include large-scale new communities that are separate from existing settlements, a far larger number of new towns will be urban extensions and regeneration schemes that will work with the grain of development in any given area,” said the government when announcing its taskforce.

“Plausibly, you could have any kind of New Town in London,” Seager says. “You could do an urban regeneration scheme. We do them all the time. You could have a grey belt extension. You could have a big urban extension, or you could have a sort of green field and grey field sort of scheme that could bleed out beyond the Greater London boundary.

The BusinessLDN report, very wisely, resisted any urge to recommend or speculate about where a London New Town in whatever form could actually go, though it does contain a nice map of “opportunity areas” identified in the current London Plan, with blobs and corridors picked out in yellow and blue. “Looking at delivering an urban extension linked to existing or of future OAs would be a sensible place to start,” it observes.

Naturally, there is a bit of chat about. Two outer London boroughs are rumoured to have already put themselves forward for consideration. It would be surprising if developers, too, were not taking an interest, perhaps wondering if new government money could help them with schemes gestating or underway. And last week, John Lewis, the man in charge of housing association Peadbody’s giant Thamesmead regeneration scheme, wrote for New London Architecture that “now is the time for Thamesmead to realise its potential as a successful new town for London”. Was he trying to tell us something?

“The capital’s unique powers and structures means it could quickly establish a framework to deliver a new town, acting as a trailblazer for the rest of the country,” the BusinessLDN report concludes. Rachel. Angela. Keir. Over to you.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support the website and its writers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things that other people won’t. Details HERE. Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky. Photo and map from BusinessLDN report.