New towns: a recommitment to good planning?
Eddie Millar is a Policy Advisor at the RTPI
MHCLG have just closed a consultation on the New Towns programme that fleshes out the government’s proposals. Aside from detail on the seven chosen locations, the major take-away is that the government’s ‘offer’ for these places is promising and demonstrates an appetite from the government to take placemaking seriously but remains light on important detail. In our response we ask the government for further information, particularly around the skills and resourcing requirements for development corporations (or equivalent delivery vehicles), and their proposed approaches towards infrastructure and engagement.
The government’s proposals for these forthcoming new town locations refer to embedding design and placemaking quality, delivering infrastructure upfront, and stewardship structures that can help ensure the long-term success of new settlements. This is music to the ears of advocates of high-quality planning, and the revival of the New Towns programme has allowed the sector to flex its collective imagination in a way that it hasn’t had a chance to in years. But it is important that the foundations of the programme – the workforce, the delivery, and the financing – can support its ambitions.
A suitable workforce
The planning and delivery of new towns will require skilled professionals with expertise in master planning and design codes. MHCLG’s skills survey, published last year, showed that these master planning and design code skills remain in short supply among local planning authorities. We have consistently highlighted the need for more planners, with the necessary skills, to fill vacancies in local planning authorities and help the government achieve their ambitions.
The proposals lack detail on how delivery vehicles will be staffed and where the planners working on these new towns will come from, but it is important that the capacity of planning authorities is not undermined by recruiting from the existing pool. A skills and resourcing programme to help build up in-house expertise for these delivery bodies would go a long way towards helping the new towns succeed.
Funding infrastructure
An infrastructure- and transport-led approach to placemaking helps build places which are well connected, economically successful, and resilient. Infrastructure is what separates a piecemeal collection of new homes from a thriving, liveable community. To ensure the immediate success of new towns, infrastructure needs to be delivered up front to build confidence and certainty for investors and stakeholders, and to attract pioneer tenants.
There has been some criticism from experts around the way this infrastructure is intended to be financed, with public private partnerships being favoured over the long-term public debt financing approaches used for the post-war New Towns programme. The consultation refers to ‘different models of bringing in private finance’, and the government needs to ensure that their preferred financing approach can work at the scale necessary to support new town delivery.
Delivering on ambitions
If the necessary support structures – skilled planning and delivery teams, a funding model which can support infrastructure – aren’t in place in advance, there is a risk that the stakeholder confidence and certainty so essential to new towns success is undermined. This revived new towns programme has, up to this point, been a powerful exercise in planning’s collective imagination. It’s important that, having reached this stage, the ambition of the new towns programme can be fully realised.
