As the Housing, Communities and Local Government Secretary Sajid Javid spelt out last week, we need more homes in the UK – homes for families, homes for the older generation, homes for young professionals. I want a country in which everyone in work has the best possible chance to get on the property ladder. At the moment, the cost of housing is too high – for the UK to be the great property-owning democracy it should be, we need more housing.
There are a number of ways of skinning this cat. Build on brownfield. Built high density, high-spec high-rise in our great cities. Build sensitive extensions to our towns. We need to do all of the above. But for us to achieve the necessary scale, we need to think bigger. We need to build new towns.
As a country, we’ve done this before – and done in well. After the war we built a host of new towns in the South: Stevenage, Hemel Hampstead, Harlow, Basildon, Bracknell and Milton Keynes, to name but a few. Taking this bold approach allows two things. First, it means we don’t have to keep adding endlessly to our existing rural towns and villages, stretching the infrastructure and eating into the countryside. Second, it allows central government to plug in the new roads, transport links, schools, clinics and the like, to make sure that everything works.
Brentwood Borough Council is fortunate in having identified a large area of land near West Horndon which has been accepted as a site for a Garden Village development. 3500 homes will be built, together with the infrastructure needed to support that number of properties and their residents. Dunton Garden Village will deliver housing, and bring new jobs and facilities and a big boost to the local economy. It's a big plan, and I was pleased to be able to discuss it with members of the West Horndon Parish Council recently.
Last week Sajid Javid set out plans for a new generation of towns along the ‘Varsity Line’ (the planned railway between Oxford and Cambridge – ‘the Brain Train’ as some have dubbed it. These new settlements will create homes, jobs and opportunities for generations to come – and they will help to protect the rest of the countryside in those counties by being able to provide sites for future growth.
New towns are not the only solution to the housing problem in the UK, but they are an absolutely essential and far-sighted part of it.