Keir Starmer’s speech to the Labour party conference was good. It was that of an expectant prime minister, of sonorous phrases and few promises. Then came two words that fell flat: new towns. There would be “Labour new towns”, whatever they are, referred to in later briefing as in the south, on the “M1 corridor”, brooking no local opposition and “the equivalent of five Milton Keynes.” Land for them would be purchased compulsorily at a knock-down price. It sounded ominously like the HS2 of housing.
The best bit of gossip out of Liverpool was that the bedside reading of the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is Paul Johnson’s excellent bestseller, Follow the Money. Reeves should turn to page 231 and share it with Starmer. It discusses the curse of Britain’s geographical inequality, and the significance of Boris Johnson’s “defining mission”, levelling up. In his speech Starmer dismissed levelling up with a jeer. He later regurgitated what seemed the result of a good lunch with the construction lobby: five Milton Keynes sprawling across the south-east and an end to local democracy in planning. Housing policy was to be conducted from Westminster. Eat your heart out, north of England.
The reference to new towns came, we are told, from a meeting with the veteran Town and Country Planning Association. Champions of new towns since the 19th century, their founder, Ebenezer Howard, dreamed of new garden cities that would one day entirely replace filthy old slums. Spacious estates would cover the landscape and traffic would move freely through them. It was a socialist utopia.
The two-dozen postwar new towns were rarely successes, except where they filled with home counties commuters. The towns were artificial settlements planned by architects, not grown organically from existing communities. Some, such as the brutalist Cumbernauld and Thamesmead, were often disliked and have had to be extensively demolished. The most successful, Milton Keynes, was ideally located in the home counties and designed around a grid of roads, Los Angeles-style. It is hard to believe that would pass muster today.
Every doctrine of modern planning screams no. To urbanists such as Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, the “greenest” places in which to live are the biggest cities, such as Manhattan and central London. Cities are where journeys are shortest and not by car, while infrastructure is in place and can be more efficiently enhanced and shared. The key to low-carbon living is adapting back-lots and bringing upper and empty floors into use. In every London borough there is a Milton Keynes lurking unused. Densification is all.
Besides that, we now know the importance to a modern economy of the creative industries that flourish in the informal, messy backstreets so vital to keeping a great city churning. Planners were amazed to find that thousands of businesses existed in London’s Covent Garden when it was “saved” from redevelopment in the 1970s – and they were about to wipe out. Likewise with London’s Shoreditch, Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter and Manchester’s Northern Quarter.
Starmer’s new towns will require vast amounts of land to be bought and levelled, and then “hard-wired” with new infrastructure, railways and roads, car parks, schools, hospitals and a full spectrum of public services. Everything has to be built afresh, and thousands commuted somewhere else to work or play. A new town is not a natural economic entity. It is unbelievable that in a net zero age such a vast project can be contemplated.
Yet the lobby is relentless. The TCPA persuaded Tony Blair to back new towns, followed by Gordon Brown and David Cameron. George Osborne went potty for garden cities. His Ebbsfleet staggers on along the Kent estuary, though at least poor Eurostar is no longer forced to stop there. Osborne’s glamorous border-hopping Anglo-Parisian elite never quite took to Ebbsfleet.
As for Thamesmead, it remains the new town that dares not breathe its name. This concrete ghost estate was begun the 1960s as a modernist catastrophe. It was handed over nine years ago to the Peabody Trust which said it would cost £1bn to restore and which has since demolished more houses than it has built. This is an existing new town scandal that Starmer must resolve before starting new ones.
Economists accept and Starmer appears to agree that prosperity comes initially from “agglomeration”, from building up an economy where there is already talent, money and success – which means in Britain’s south-east. But there is a cost to this, and it is the steady draining of talent and enterprise from the rest of the nation. In cross-subsidies and welfare transfers, this impoverishment costs every south-eastern taxpayer a reported average of £4,000 a year.
In other words, levelling up must form the backbone of regional policy over time. Every ingenuity should go into the creative regeneration of Britain’s “second-tier” cities, of central Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Newcastle. Vast sums should not be wasted on costly, carbon-guzzling new towns in the rural south.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
