I am writing to you via Yes and Grow as I am finding it difficult to contact Britain Remade by email.
Could you email me and I can send you a two-page summary of a proposal that provides answers to the questions raised by yourselves and reported by Rosa Silver in today's Daily Telegraph.
I would be interested in your view on the 100+ sites bidding to be new towns announced today. Particularly the timescale ‘to be started before the end of this Parliament”. That doesn’t seem rapid enough to me.
I do think the new towns programme has been slower than it could be. Even the year to pick sites is quite long. It took us just a month to write up our report for example. But it sadly will take time to set up the development corporations, approve designs, get planning permission, etc. I think it would have been preferable for the Government to have a sense on what sites they would like to build new towns on before the election so that they could have hit the ground running on developing their plans and getting spades in the ground.
Thank you for your reply, if not me having to accept the logic of it. For at least 10 years it’s been obvious to pretty well everyone who’s looked at it that the country needed growth (GDP/head) and productivity improvements. Part of achieving that is building decent homes and infrastructure. Before the election I was optimistic that a Labour Government would quickly take up many of the ideas proposed by people like you. It now sounds as if that isn’t going to happen.
The brief of it is that if you build in areas where the sale price of a home is much higher than the build price, there is more surplus value that you can capture to fund infrastructure upgrades, greenspace improvements, and social housing, etc. If you build in a place where housing is already cheap, you may end up having to actually fund social infrastructure out of central government's money, which is difficult given how limited the fiscal headroom is.
These areas that have the potential for the most surplus value are nearby places like London, Cambridge, Oxford, Bristol, Brighton or York, hence why our new town proposals are all well-connected to one (or more) of these places. We've already got Oxbridge, but for too long we've effectively banned new homes to be built there.
Dear Ben,
I am writing to you via Yes and Grow as I am finding it difficult to contact Britain Remade by email.
Could you email me and I can send you a two-page summary of a proposal that provides answers to the questions raised by yourselves and reported by Rosa Silver in today's Daily Telegraph.
Yours,
tony@tonynordberg.com
I would be interested in your view on the 100+ sites bidding to be new towns announced today. Particularly the timescale ‘to be started before the end of this Parliament”. That doesn’t seem rapid enough to me.
I do think the new towns programme has been slower than it could be. Even the year to pick sites is quite long. It took us just a month to write up our report for example. But it sadly will take time to set up the development corporations, approve designs, get planning permission, etc. I think it would have been preferable for the Government to have a sense on what sites they would like to build new towns on before the election so that they could have hit the ground running on developing their plans and getting spades in the ground.
Thank you for your reply, if not me having to accept the logic of it. For at least 10 years it’s been obvious to pretty well everyone who’s looked at it that the country needed growth (GDP/head) and productivity improvements. Part of achieving that is building decent homes and infrastructure. Before the election I was optimistic that a Labour Government would quickly take up many of the ideas proposed by people like you. It now sounds as if that isn’t going to happen.
Can you run me through why only one in the North ….?
Given might be easier and quick to build there, with the right anchor (eg the New Oxbridge)
The theory behind where to build new towns is laid out in this post: https://benhopkinson.substack.com/p/where-should-we-build-new-towns
The brief of it is that if you build in areas where the sale price of a home is much higher than the build price, there is more surplus value that you can capture to fund infrastructure upgrades, greenspace improvements, and social housing, etc. If you build in a place where housing is already cheap, you may end up having to actually fund social infrastructure out of central government's money, which is difficult given how limited the fiscal headroom is.
These areas that have the potential for the most surplus value are nearby places like London, Cambridge, Oxford, Bristol, Brighton or York, hence why our new town proposals are all well-connected to one (or more) of these places. We've already got Oxbridge, but for too long we've effectively banned new homes to be built there.