Simon Collier, a partner at David Lock Associates has posted on LinkedIn an excellent article published in the The Sunday Times at the recent bank holiday,(24 August, 2025). Written by Tom Knowles and Lottie Hayton, it tells us ‘How to build a new town’ . So far as the piece goes, with solid professional support from TCPA’s Hugh Ellis; Urban&Civic’s James Scott and Simon Collier it accurately high-lights the opportunities and the risks of building new towns. My own comment on the post endorses and but highlights one of the important remaining barriers to success lying further ahead. There is space here to say a little more on the point.
The biggest concern is deep-bedded local opposition to local change. Since the newly established RPG (Representive Planning Group) kindly allowed me to join their experts I have realised how many well-informed commentators are of the opinion that that most opposition to local change comes from a small percentage of the local area’s residents. Solid evidence this is so is encouraging. The silent majority are seen to be far less opposed to local change. Part of RPG’s remit is to find the means to rectify this imbalance. It an objective I support, especially as the new group is a rare example of cross-party or non-party membership, so essential to building deliverable long-term solutions. Once the New Towns Taskforce publishes its 10+ locations for new towns and urban extensions, tackling the issue of local support will be easier to comprehend. My fear, following publication, is the silent majority will stay silent, and the opponents of local change will grab the local media and once again project a misleading impression of local views.
Why? The most powerful, well funded group of local opponents of local change are local land owners. Not because they are against local change but because they want the selected new building locations to include their land, spatially well located or not. In other words they want to continue to play the old, elite membership Monopoly game, masquerading as the Call for Sites system. It epitomises the abdication by local councils of their long term civic responsibilities. As the CFS system is based on landowners wishes, and not on the best interests local communities the sites chosen under the CFS system have limited connection to a long term, local council based agenda of local priorities. Think about it. This clumsy spatial reality is inevitable. At its core is something dysfunctional. . The system is the cause of most distrust in town planning. The sooner it is listed for abolition in 10+ years time the better.
Lucky landowners with sites in the right place, with vacant possession at the right time are winning participants in a ritual which can take one or two decades. So naturally they are upset, or angry if their carefully laid plans to capture the jackpot are threatened. Who would’nt be vocal in their shoes. But we need their cooperation especially in the next 10- years until the CFS is replaced with community led spatial policy planning. Threats not to pay full market value where it demonstratably exists are unfair, unwise and not legitimate. Such threats are wrong and are counter-productive. Transactional market evidence is the benchmark of equitable treatment of landowners in a period of change. Locational uncertainty and timing uncertainty will stop hope value taking root. Hope value takes at least ten years to grow. Which is convenient. It is also a realistic time window to reverse a dysfunctional system.
For local councils, or local new town development corporations to identify, masterplan, acquire and allocate building land will take 10+ years of thought and leadership. Funding will not be a barrier for a change if designs create and deliver premium values. Done with top calibre skills they will. Investors will also be attracted by new rational thinking around spatial conflicts.,Which of course means delivering homes, places and workplaces that residents and future employers will want. Which is why overcoming the barriers ahead will need new experts: market experts, site assembly experts and communication experts skilled in political consensus building.
If the NTT becomes the catalyst for fundamental change in the process of creating and supplying house building land where it is wanted, when it wanted, with the development value going back to the local community whilst treating land owners with 100% fair outcomes, something quite remarkable will have happened. Do not worry about housing land supply during the intervening ten years. Owners of CFS land, faced with the prospect of new, high calibre open market competitors kicking in after the current round of local plans expire will revise, and accelerate their delivery timetables which will boost short term, ie. 10- supply pipelines.
Ian Campbell
9 September 2025
