Can new towns give Keir Starmer the answer to Britain’s housing crisis?

Development of brownfield land at Ebbsfleet. Many new homes have been built, but nowhere near as many as originally promised. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Observer

The best way to view Ebbsfleet is from a low hill above the muddy banks of the Thames estuary. Here, between the chalk cliffs, ponds and scrubland, a new community is gradually taking shape in what was once a cement works.

“As far as the eye can see, all the way out there, will be development,” says Simon Dudley, chair of the public development corporation tasked with overseeing the creation of a new town the size of Chichester. “We’re literally looking out on to the place we’re helping to create.”