New towns will again be a lasting Labour legacy, just as in the eras of Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson. Those monuments to optimism, created in the mid-20th century by pulling down slums and building better, will be joined by seven more in an attempt to ease the housing crisis.
Enfield has been the exemplar, its proposed 21,000-home new town enthusiastically backed by its previous Labour council, which was struggling with 3,000 families expensively dumped into miserable temporary accommodation, and, I’m told, 7,000 on the waiting list. But in May’s elections, the great anti-Labour storm brought in a regime resisting the new town in every way it can. A minority Conservative group, propped up by the Greens (yes, Tory-backing Greens), informed the government that it was “withdrawing”. Both parties had run on an anti-new town campaign.
Enfield council’s Tory leader, Alessandro Georgiou, gave me this quote, but no interview: “We were elected on a clear mandate to protect Enfield’s green belt, and we have honoured that commitment by formally withdrawing from the new town process.” But there is no “process”, as it was never in a council’s power to block a new town.
Devolution and localism? Only so far. Major infrastructure of national importance can’t, won’t and shouldn’t be stopped by local nimbys. Extending the grid, new power generation, waste recycling, transport by rail, air or ports, reservoirs and water treatment would never happen without planning from above. Building a new town falls under the regional control of the mayor, who has oversight of the interests of a far wider population. The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, is faced with a desperate housing shortage. He has the say-so here, and strongly supports new town plans for Enfield and Thamesmead. But pleading the interests of unhoused people rather than the voters in their patch will get councillors unseated, which is why they’re always brandishing alternative plans for building elsewhere, not here.
Enfield is the perfect borough for a new town, with excellent rail connections. Opponents protest that it is green belt land, but that’s not how much of it feels. Step out at Crews Hill station and all around is a cluster of glasshouses and garden centres, an unplanned sprawl. There is some charm in its haphazardness, but it is exactly what the government calls “grey belt” – technically green belt, but concreted over, one way or another. Chase Park, the other part of the plan, is described in government plans as “low-quality agricultural land”.
I was taken round by Ergin Erbil, who was the Labour council leader until he was defeated in May. He understands housing need: he has just moved into a privately rented two-bedroom flat with his wife and children. “I’ve a degree, a reasonable job, but we’ll never afford to buy,” he tells me. He agrees with Khan’s office: when the mayor and the then housing minister Steve Reed last year proposed cutting the affordable housing quota for fast-tracked developments from 35% to 20%, one official said: “20% of something is better than 35% of nothing.”
Local campaigners call Enfield London’s “green lungs”. But do golfing greens really count? Weirdly unnatural and often closed to the public, they are estimated to swallow billions of litres of water a year in England. The new town would mean building 5,500 homes over an area including Crews Hill golf club, to great protest from its members, who each pay up to £1,980 a year. Enfield has five other golf courses, part of a London “golf belt”.
Weighing some green belt loss against gaining 21,000 homes goes to the heart of political values. Enfield’s Green councillors made their choice: by protesting against the new town, they gave the council to the Conservatives.
New towns were always mocked by Tories for their New Jerusalem optimism. But the housing minister, Matthew Pennycook, tells me he has been speaking to planners from the last wave who can warn him of things they got wrong, and steer him towards what worked best. Don’t build them around the car, but rather public transport. Don’t build suburban garden cities when only high-density housing guarantees a big enough community to support frequent buses, busy shops, schools, clinics, leisure and new enterprises. Lack of civic planning failed to build enough housing for decades, while covering the countryside with isolated clumps of executive homes.
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And these planners have proved themselves: after the contemptuous snobbery that greeted its birth almost 60 years ago, Milton Keynes has recently been declared one of the UK’s best places to live.
