Demos and Inner Circle Consulting join forces to help shape the delivery of New Towns
By Lucy Webb, Director at Inner Circle Consulting
New towns present a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make transformative change. And the scale of the new towns movement provides us with the opportunity to test and learn from new models of delivery that will help us not only shape these new communities but also to inform the way we deliver growth and regeneration projects across the country.
It was this opportunity that prompted ICC and Demos to come together to explore a new local partnership model for new towns that engenders a true stewardship approach. Whilst there is a huge amount of industry discourse out there about good design, infrastructure and how to pay for new towns, we felt there was something critical missing from the discussion, and that was people. The people who will live in these new towns, and their non-new towns counterparts, need to be fully considered in the building of them and the communities that they will shape.
To begin the debate, we published a short thought-piece in October encouraging those that are interested to reach out to us in joining the work – we have been delighted by the response so far. And last week we published the provocation paper, expertly authored by Lucy Bush, in which we bring together those conversations, research and policy responses to inform the discussion and to set out our challenge to all players in the system to join us in looking for at how we might bring some of these core principles to bear in creating new communities.
This isn’t just a tick box exercise but a critical action to ensure that these new parts of our urban (and suburban) form are recognised by incoming and existing residents as places they own, have a say in and reflect their aspirations for themselves, their friends and their families. Investing early in building the capacity of citizens to inform and shape the plans for our new towns will not only expedite delivery of them through greater support for the resulting planning application but will also build ownership of the homes, spaces and places from the very people they were intended to accommodate. You don’t need to be a qualified urbanist to recognise that better connected communities are more resilient and supportive which, in turn, reduces demand on public services and reduces cost to the public purse.
This is fundamentally about local stewardship as an embedded principle from concept to delivery and on to maturity. It’s a principle I’ve believed in my whole career, although I have lost some of the naivety I held around the concept 20 years ago. This is about doing things better but it also has to be about doing that in a way that speeds things up rather than slowing them down, that builds local ownership and accountability of managing and maintaining those places into the longer term and a way that builds communities that stick rather than picking up the bill in other ways as the years go on.
The paper cites a number of examples of attempts, current and past, to build stewardship into our planning and delivery. Many of these have struggled to achieve the success they were aiming for and others just weren’t able to go deep enough. They are nonetheless included, in order that we take the learning from these initiatives and rethink a model of delivery for growth at scale in 2026 and beyond.
The need for speed and economies of scale led to the recommendation to use development corporations transacting with mass house-builders to develop at pace. But we have seen time and time again that this results in an extractive model of delivery that leaves behind an incohesive community, further pressure on services and infrastructure and nothing for the community that was there before.
Residents, community groups and local institutions are the true experts of their places. They know the local strengths, challenges, needs and opportunities. Many are willing to give their time to help make those places thrive. But many are also fearful of what growth means to their neighbourhoods. They have seen the extractive models that have come before and they expect nothing but that reality for their own communities. What if we worked harder, across the system, to find a new way of doing things, a model that involves, embeds and gives back. As this paper suggests, a Development Corporation + model?
The intention is not to set out the solution at the moment but to invite the debate and discussion across the whole system to make sure our generation learns from the past, looks to the future and does the best possible job we can with this amazing opportunity. Do get in touch if you’d like to join us as we explore this further.
For more information on this work, reach out to Lucy Webb at [email protected]