My IEA Discussion Paper Home Win: What if Britain Solved its Housing Crisis? describes a hypothetical near-future revolution in British housing policy, in which an unspecified near-future government decides to finally grasp the nettle, and sort out Britain’s housing crisis once and for all.
One ingredient of this housing revolution is a fictitious ‘New Towns Act 2027’, which leads to a revival of the postwar New Towns programme.
This week, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Angela Rayner, revealed a programme for New Towns which, at first sight, looks eerily similar to my made-up New Towns Act. Maybe the conspiracy theorists are right, after all, and the IEA really is secretly pulling the strings in the background!
If so, I need to get better at communicating my ideas, though. Because, despite the superficial similarities, Rayner’s plan differs in important respects from what I had in mind.
In my version, the point of New Towns is to deliver a large agglomeration of new housing quickly, without planning battles and NIMBY dramas. That’s all they’re supposed to do. Just that. Nothing else.
Raynertown, if it ever gets built, would admittedly be a better place than Niemietzville, because it is a much more ambitious project. Rayner, it seems, wants New Town developers to offer two out of five housing units at below-market rates, to build them to the highest environmental standards, and to co-finance a raft of local amenities upfront. Nice work if you can get it. But the risk, of course, is that, if you overload the project with too many policy objectives, expecting New Towns to solve all of the country’s social and environmental problems at once – they may never take off in the first place.
It is still early days, though, and the details of the policy have yet to be revealed. Maybe Rayner was describing her ideal vision of a New Town, rather than a set of non-negotiable policy requirements that she wants to impose on all of them.
If so – maybe the future I describe in Home Win begins now!
