New towns and their interface with wider government reforms

David Carlisle is the RTPI East of England Vice Chair and Planning Director at Stantec 

The ‘Initial government response - September 2025’ to the ‘The New Towns Taskforce: Report to government’ published last year, signalled government’s commitment to a new generation of new towns. How these new communities come forward will be influenced by wider reforms, including those related to the Planning and Infrastructure Act, devolution, and Local Government Reorganisation (LGR). Strategic planning at scale will be crucial for supporting government ambitions for economic growth and addressing England’s acute housing crisis, and the aspiration to deliver 1.5 million homes this Parliament. Momentum behind the new towns agenda is increasing, and the tasks of land assembly, designing new communities, and setting up delivery mechanisms require a comprehensive long‑term planning approach.

New towns will remain a policy priority, through the draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) policies, PM1: Spatial development strategies (SDSs) and HO4: Land for large scale residential and mixed-use development. Spatial planning authorities and strategic planning boards will allocate housing numbers across SDS geographies and identify broad locations for strategic development. Collaboration between landowners, developers, infrastructure providers, strategic planning authorities, local planning authorities and development corporations will be essential, particularly where new towns straddle SDS geographies, strategic authority administrative boundaries, and/or unitary administrative boundaries.

NPPF policy HO4 includes the sole reference to new towns, where it propounds the use of specific principles to guide placemaking. These are expected to align with the Taskforce’s recommended principles: vision‑led; ambitious density; affordable housing and balanced communities; social infrastructure; healthy and safe places; environmental sustainability; transport connectivity; business creation and employment opportunities; stewardship; and community engagement.

The principles will be subject to environmental assessment and consultation in due course. Guidance accompanying the draft Design and Placemaking Planning Practice Guidance (PPG) additionally expects new towns and settlements to reflect the ‘seven features of well‑designed places’: liveability, climate, nature, movement, built form, public space, and identity.

The draft NPPF’s removal of any reference to garden cities is noticeable given its significance to England’s planning heritage. However, ‘garden towns’ are still mentioned in the draft PPG: “garden towns…can benefit from a variety of character areas with their own identity”.

Between the PPG and the Town and Country Planning Association’s Garden City Principles, practitioners will have ample guidance available to influence place-specific approaches and implementation.

Stantec’s YouGov powered national report, ‘New Towns: Creating Communities, Building Trust’, highlights the need for “quality and longevity”, “positive environmental impact”, and “community wellbeing” as qualities of new towns that can shift public attitudes and build trust around them. In the east of England, Welwyn and Letchworth exemplify many of these traits and demonstrate how long‑term stewardship can sustain green infrastructure, heritage, and civic identity, albeit both garden cities relied on mixed public‑private funding rather than being fully self‑financing. Development corporations, stewardship trusts and/or delivery bodies should retain an interest in the land to aid capture of longer-term land value uplift. Many post‑war new towns failed in this regard having had their land assets sold off, eroding civic identity and weakening reinvestment efforts.

The Taskforce’s recommendations address delivery challenges, including the need to:

• Coordinate infrastructure strategies through effective new town delivery bodies
• Ensure long-term financing to attract private investment, including potential loans
• Prioritise new towns in future infrastructure budgets across government departments
• Explore tax financing instruments as part of long-term funding models for each new town

Related to this, the Taskforce highlighted a range of mechanisms that warrant further exploration, including revolving infrastructure funds, long‑term public loans, betterment or roof taxes, tax increment financing, business rate supplements, and transport levies. Government has convened a working group with local leaders and the treasury to consider how these tools could be deployed.

With the dawning of the new SDS system and the 30-month local plan process, the evidence burden on new towns should be proportionate to the planning stage, with flexibility built-in at the allocation and outline stages. Detailed matters should be deferred to the full/reserved matters for the relevant phase, guided by ambitious, adaptable masterplans and codes that leave room for innovation and refinements. The NPPF consultation acknowledges that ‘super strategic sites’ may require alternative metrics to assess deliverability, potentially using discounted cash flow-based methods alongside the residual land value approach. This would require capacity building and training for planning students and practitioners.

Ongoing viability reviews for multi-phase schemes can be deployed to account for new town delivery periods that will span economic cycles. Such reviews should be used to aid policy compliance over time, rather than insulate or fix returns. Government has confirmed that viability guidance shall be updated to cover new towns. This  may help clarify how viability is to be assessed and the need to strike a balance between a 50% affordable housing aspiration, land value capture, policy requirements, planning obligations, local Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL), and Mayoral CIL (as devolution and LGR takes shape).

SDSs should carefully consider housing apportionment decisions and avoid over‑reliance on one or more new towns that may increase market absorption risk and result in a homogeneous land supply pipeline. New towns will span multiple plan periods and typically deliver fewer units in the early years as access points, primary infrastructure, and sales outlets build up. As such conservative assumptions on their delivery trajectory will be necessary as they mature and establish their own demand through placemaking and provision of community facilities and jobs.

Recently published RTPI funded research, ‘Futureproof New Towns: International lessons on how to build flexible and adaptable new towns in England’ (RTPI, February 2026), offers five overarching  recommendations for futureproofing the next generation of new towns:

1. Ensure that planning policy is consistent over time so new towns can develop under consistent principles, ideally supported by Development Corporations
2. Harness the path shaping powers of planning, but avoid path dependency applying masterplans that define principles but allow adaptation
3. Go beyond the plan – the importance of ‘urban management’ and setting up partnerships for delivery across government tiers and sectors, with strong stakeholder engagement
4. Transport and land use planning must be integrated ensuring new towns are connected to regional networks and public transport
5. Mixed land uses and tenures lead to better outcomes, and supporting community‑led models of development can build support for vibrant and sustainable communities

In summary, adopting a flexible vision‑led approach, grounded in placemaking and stewardship principles, cognisant of the market and policy drivers will be critical. Adaptable planning professionals who are able to collaborate effectively, are design-literate and proficient in aspects of deliverability will be key actors in the realisation of the next generation of new towns.