There hasn’t been a new town in England for more than 50 years – but as Labour promises to “take the brakes off Britain”, could that be about to change?
Sir Keir Starmer’s government has made housebuilding a key promise and pledged to overhaul planning laws to allow for greater and swifter construction of new developments.
So where are the new homes going to go? According to a thinktank, there’s one obvious place that makes sense.
The site could easily sustain a city-scale settlement of 250,000-350,000 people, the thinktank says.
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What are new towns?
In the years after the Second World War, a series of new towns were built – under the aptly named New Towns Act – to accommodate Britain’s population and alleviate stress on existing cities.
Places like Milton Keynes, Stevenage, and Crawley have flourished economically and are now home to tens of thousands of people.
Building a whole new town at once can allow for more joined-up thinking about infrastructure and planning, and the new town generally has a single planning authority.
Passengers on the platform at London King’s Cross Station, where the East Coast Mainline comes into London. Pic: PA
Where would a new town go?
According to UK Day One, a thinktank that says it is dedicated to supercharging UK growth through ideas, a new town should be built at the intersection of two key railway lines.
Tempsford New Town, as the authors call it in their report, would sit at the intersection of the East Coast Main Line (which connects London to Edinburgh) and the planned East-West Rail line (which will re-establish a rail link between Cambridge and Oxford).
The location of Tempsford
“The Tempsford New Town could be a major city with homes for 250,000-350,000 people, larger than Oxford or Cambridge and comparable to the largest post-war new towns,” the report says.
“It could also be a major employment centre, especially in life sciences, helping to relieve the acute shortages of laboratory space in Oxford, Cambridge, and London.”
Residents of Tempsford New Town, the report says, would enjoy short rail journeys to Oxford, Cambridge, and London.
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When could the town be completed, and what needs to be done?
In their report, Kane Emerson and Dr Samuel Hughes say that other than the completion of the East-West Rail line, there is one more infrastructure intervention needed.
They identify the “Welwyn bottleneck” – where the East Coast Mainline narrows from four tracks to two north of Welwyn – as an obstacle that would need to be resolved.
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“Under normal conditions, addressing the Welwyn bottleneck would likely pose significant problems in planning terms.
“However, the new government is not bound by the same constraints as previous actors. Labour will have the strongest pro-building mandate of any government since Attlee. It can simply ask Parliament to pass a hybrid bill giving it the powers it needs to fix the bottleneck.”
They argue that such a bill could be passed within a year, fixing the bottleneck and finishing the East-West Rail line could be done within four years and the first new residents could be in place by the end of this Parliament.