Wiltshire Council says a new town is required to meet their housing needs. This is rare, and far-sighted thinking by a local council. But hopelessly inadequate too! To hit their homes targets they will also need 300 new homes from the new town, wherever it is built, by 2038. The expiry date of their draft new local plan. They have, the government inspectors who are examining the draft say, drawn a line on a plan suggesting not where it could go, but where to look. But don’t go looking unless you want to join the ranks of strategic land speculators. Which can be fun and rewarding. Wiltshire, despite this step, have not asked anyone to do anything. It seems nothing more will happen for now. Someone needs to tell them a new town needs 20+, indeed a generation, of years of gestation to create a popular place. And this is before digging starts. Someone needs to tell them to wake up: and fast. As the local council it is their responsibility to find the land because the call for sites system is broken, and no longer trusted. If they are clever local leaders they will secure key locations before hope value takes hold ( ransom strips is the jargon) and increases the land price by massive amounts. Land scouts employed by house building firms will already be in their cars and knocking on doors. To use a metaphor Wiltshire Council has set a hare running. If they want to ensure Wiltshire’s residents are the winners, by fixing the rules in their favour, say so publicity now, and get on with buying strategic land without delay. Going public on fixing the rules, including compensation, will stunt the growth of hope value.
.The assumption must be that most of Wiltshire’s council leaders are sensible people, with the best interests of their residents at heart. So I struggle to understand their ignorance or plain naivety. Homes designed and built to highest standards, with plenty of visual appeal, not military style concentration camps, in suitable locations, to meet residents concerns about global warming, at prices and rents which the next generation can afford, connected to their prime employment catchment area, accessible by public transport solutions to other centres, to be delivered in a sustainable manner do not just arrive, using a pencil and a map. This level of foresight is advanced stuff. It seems Wiltshire is either unable to step up, or simply asleep on their watch, despite a momentary flash of insight.
Except I am equally fixated by my own council’s fluffy lack of foresight, London Borough of Richmond upon Thames by the way. They have lots of new homes to build, little or no unused land on which to build but show no evidence they see that future building duties are part of their existence! This hibernation style of mind-set, of which Wiltshire Council with ample open countryside is the classic example, coarsely shows us why this government will not meet its 1.5 million new homes target.
Why is this hibernation mentality so widespread? It is nine months since the new government came to power with a mandate for change. But local leaders views about building in their patch are unchanged. Hibernation is the reverse type of thinking that local residents need today, or future generations will need to build their futures. Instead England’s local councils need shrewd spatial thinking; and visionary leadership: call it understanding their civic duties to deliver sustainable futures. It seems that informed thinking along these lines has died out. If true, it is worrying. To me it looks as if civic thinking about land use is deeply hidden in a bog of permafrost. Someone needs to dig it out. Can the new PM do it? I believe his heart is in the right place, like the King’s but neither have the bandwidth.
Ian Campbell
3 April 2025
