My last blog (31 October 2025 New Towns Report: land ownership) made recommendations to head off local landowners opposition to the New Towns Taskforce recommendations in an equitable way.. In particular its focus was on Recommendation 22 which says landowners need to know what value they can expect first their land. There is an another Recommendation which is, I’m my opinion by far the most important in the Report. Without it being delivered new towns will be still-born. Recommendation 30 states New town delivery bodies should develop robust strategies to secure local support for each new town. Winning local support implicitly means tackling another local vested interest, local residents in the host area. Of course they have a totally different agenda. Local residents concerns and priorities are fundamental opposed to landowners priorities, although this is not always made clear as their spatial objectives often converge. The distinction matters when planning policy is at masterplan stage.
Winning local support for local land use change at scale, which is to say physical land use change on a widespread and long lasting basis, whether turning green fields into urban, living and working areas, or to enable the rebuilding, ie. the regeneration of existing urban areas to become new, higher density urban areas is, viewed through a local councils lens a very big deal indeed. In the Report there are 44 Recommendations. As I say, Recommendation 30 is the most important. Without its successful discharge in a local context the proposed new town will not happen. But it is far more than this policy objective which is at risk. Without local support for building lots of new homes in the designated area, few new homes needed locally will be built, whether as part of a new town or as on a haphazard call for sites open market basis.. The need to recognise and act upon this simple but often irrational impulse lies at the heart of stasis. . Without local support nothing significant will happen.
If you have read this blog before, you will know that securing and winning long lasting local support for significant, at scale house building is the most important theme running through this blog. Failure to win local support for new homes building over several decades is as I say the single biggest reason for loss of local trust. . It explains decades of housing policy failure, resulting in a spatial disease: a two generation long attack of stasis which started, as these blogs explain, in the nineteen seventies: five decades ago! . When the English mind-set of negativity towards local land use change first took hold, especially in rural areas, it was rooted in the passionate belief that that the status quo is good and change is bad. Why did this mind-set take root? A decade earlier,, in the sixties, when I was a residential land buyer in London and the Thames Valley the disease did not exist. What created this negativity remains to this day a contentious and polarising issue in almost every local community in England. But, extraordinarily it is a disease that caught hold in England in a far more virulent form in England than elsewhere in Europe. Finding an answer, which will enable the country to re-start economic growth, make home prices and rents once again affordable and do so with local support is one massive challenge. Having been an actor within it, first as a principal and then as an adviser for a working career, and following retirement having studied its unique symptoms closely for a generation, I believe there is a way ahead, which will provide the homes needed, the infrastructure needed, and the economic growth needed, starting with little delay and continuing beyond for two generations. But its implementation will need radical changes in the planning and incentives system.
I will not repeat here the reasons for spatial policy failure. They are detailed here in analysis and lessons contained in over 200 blogs.They are available here to be read. Instead I will now go straight to the solution. If implemented it will rapidly enable a lot of new house building to take place where needed with local support, initially by private developers/builders hungry to get ahead of future competition despite the regulatory burden and viability fears and motivated by the temporary tax incentives. And after a decade of intentional delay, in 2035 and beyond, a new process of housing land delivery will introduce active, public sector led spatial policy planning with local support.
- It is necessary to re-motivate developers/builders to start building out their existing sites now with tax holidays to accelerate building all homes, which are not yet started, provided actual building starts after Budget day (27 November 2025) and provided building the homes is both finished and let/sold by 31 December 2035. What this tax holiday is intended to do is break the current negative cycle of business sentiment; eg developers fears about viability of existing, potential, ready-to-gobuildung projects. (The Treasury will oppose. But they will also listen if there is cross-party support-see below).
- Introduce and deliver a new national spatial land register. It can be called the National Land Service. It will be a national register run by government of at scale new rural and and urban, ie. brownfield sites that local councils identify as places where they (not landowners) want to see new homes go in the future (after existing local plans end)and where they (local councils) will step-in to become the promoters and joint landowners when building starts after 2035on expiry of the tax holiday.
- An optional initiative is that existing residents, living within or close by the new, after 2035 designated locations receive a rates holiday for say five years whilst initial on site building upheaval is acute. This element has a wide range of variable options. Its primary purpose is to reduce or remove legitimate objections to local land use change which have maximum impact on existing residents in the designated locations.. It is therefore a means of managing future nimby rebellion as the time scale is far away.
Implicit in this way if proceeding is replacement of the existing call for sites system and its replacement with a new spatial policy introduced by, and led by the local council. Returning control to local councils of where change does, and does not happen is long overdue.
Ian Campbell
5 November 2025
