New towns update: No new funding pot and 40% affordable housing walk-back

Housing minister Matthew Pennycook and New Towns Taskforce chair Sir Michael Lyons provided more details about what support can be expected to encourage the delivery of a series of communities and urban extensions with more than 10,000 homes each.

There are three proposed new towns in the North (Manchester Victoria North, Adlington in Cheshire, Leeds South Bank) and one in the Midlands (Worcestershire Parkway).

Pennycook and Lyons were tasked with answering questions from the Commons’ Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee on Tuesday morning. Here’s what we learned from the meeting.

Ready… Set… Consult!

Pennycook would not be persuaded or coerced into teasing any details regarding the final line-up of new towns. Instead, he asserted where the process sits today: namely in consultation land.

The Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government is in the middle of creating strategic environmental assessments for each of the 12 new towns recommended by the task force.

This process will conclude over the next few weeks, at which point the government will begin a consultation on the sites that it proposes are adopted, Pennycook said. This list may differ from the task force’s.

“I’m going to make decisions, as the minister responsible, for what sites we consult on as proposed sites to be adopted,” Pennycook said. “I’m then going to listen to the feedback from the consultation to make final decisions on the sites later on in the spring.”

Chris Curtis, Labour MP for Milton Keynes North, questioned whether all the consultation really met the “sense of urgency” regarding the need for new homes. He noted that creating a development corporation for each of the new town sites could take years if the government went down that route – delaying the new towns process even further.

Pennycook responded: “We are going to do it properly and in a way that doesn’t allow the programme to be challenged and undermined.”

“Some people would say that lots of consultations is does not equal doing it properly,” Curtis retorted.

• READ MORE: Pennycook insists govt has learned its new towns lesson

Spring starts

Cathy Francis, director of new towns, infrastructure, and housing delivery at MHCLG, emphasised that while the process may seem slow, the government was ready to hit the ground running.

Once the delivery mechanism for each new town is settled on, the government will not wait for that vehicle to be fully set up before it commences the programme.

“You will see work beginning earnest, and all the necessary preliminary work before a site can be ready commence this year,” Francis said.

No new funding pots

The absence of new towns in the Budget was noted by the committee members, with questions arising over what sort of financial support the government was prepared to actually commit to the project.

Pennycook said that the promised funds to help get the new towns off the ground will come from existing pots of cash, such as the £39bn Social and Affordable Homes Programme and the £16bn National Housing Bank.

More precise funding numbers will be announced in spring, he said.

He added: “I don’t have a set of funding pots in my head for various sites. We’re working that out, and that will be part of the decision we take and that we consult on before final decision.”

Francis chipped in: “We recognize that we need capacity to help local authorities bring forward these sites, and we will, as part of our recommendations to ministers, make clear what we think is needed in this Parliament, and those funds will be prioritised from our budgets.”

The 40% affordable target

Pennycook walked back the government’s commitment to achieving 40% affordable homes (of which 20% would be for social rent) in each new town.

The number, it became clear, was more of a goal than a requirement. Pennycook called it an “aspiration” that was “really important to the government”.

Still, viability may mean that 40% figure is not achievable, Pennycook said.

“It won’t be the case, I can assure you, that any new town site comes forward with very low levels of affordable housing,” he added.

Infrastructure concerns

Lyons was pressed over whether the task force adequately considered infrastructure pressures when making its shortlist. Lewis Cocking, Conservative MP for Broxbourne, referenced the proposed Chase Park and Crews Hill community in Enfield in his question, citing the high levels of traffic around that area in particular.

Lyons said that the task force was not looking for reasons to exclude a location from the list, but instead considered if those infrastructure problems could be resolved over the course of the new towns programme, which is expected to take between 20 and 30 years.

He also noted: “It’s very clear in our report that we have emphasized that a new generation of new towns absolutely must give a priority to public transport solutions.

“It simply cannot be the carborne examples that you find on many recent larger developments, partly because of the pressures on the on existing road networks, but partly because of the environmental cost and the health costs of continued growth in carborne transport.”

Lyons was criticised for this take by Cocking.

“If you think you’re going to create a new town in a particularly rural setting and no one’s going to use a car – I mean, you’re just on a different planet,” Cocking said.

“It’s a bit like turning up to a transport meeting and the person comes in a car and says ‘everyone’s got to walk and cycle everywhere’. It just doesn’t happen in reality,” he concluded.

• READ MORE: House of Lords weighs in on new towns

Watch the full committee meeting.