Northstowe is a new town, billed as the largest since Milton Keynes was launched in the 1960s. It is, its developers say, “sustainable”. It “has a strong sense of community and an identity that is entirely unique” – so much so, it turns out, that it has no shop, cafe or GP surgery, which means that anyone who wants to buy a pint of milk has to take the not-very-environmental option of driving. “It has no heart,” one resident told the BBC, “it’s like a home without a kitchen.”
This place is eight miles from Cambridge, for which Michael Gove earlier this month promised to unleash a plan for 250,000 new homes, one that would make it the “Silicon Valley of Europe”. You have to wonder what he has been smoking. There are 1,200 occupied homes in Northstowe, which was originally planned in 2007, at which rate of progress it would take 3,333 years to achieve Gove’s dream, although they might have built a cafe by then. Milton Keynes’s growth was far greater, and even included shops and surgeries, but required vigorous state intervention. This is probably a truth too awkward for a free marketeer like Gove to acknowledge.
