48,000 new homes to come in 14 newly launched ‘garden villages’ across England
Housing minister Gavin Barwell has announced a further 14 ‘garden village’ locations which will together bring around 48,000 new homes to England over the coming years.
The new villages, along with three larger new ‘garden towns’ in Aylesbury, Taunton and Harlow/Gilston, join seven previously announced locations and stretch from Devon in the south to Cumbria in the north. They will each bring between 1,500 and 10,000 new homes, with a total of nearly 200,000 now proposed altogether.
Local authorities have access to a new £6m fund over two years to support their delivery of the new projects, while the homes themselves will be partly financed from the £2.3bn Housing Infrastructure Fund announced by Philip Hammond in 2016’s Autumn Statement.
The 14 new garden villages announced are:
- Long Marston in Stratford-on-Avon
- Oxfordshire Cotswold in West Oxfordshire
- Deenethorpe in East Northants
- Culm in Mid Devon
- Welborne near Fareham in Hampshire
- West Carclaze in Cornwall
- Dunton Hills near Brentwood, Essex
- Spitalgate Heath in South Kesteven, Lincolnshire
- Halsnead in Knowsley, Merseyside
- Longcross in Runnymede and Surrey Heath
- Bailrigg in Lancaster
- Infinity Garden Village in South Derbyshire and Derby City area
- St Cuthberts near Carlisle City, Cumbria
- North Cheshire in Cheshire East
Gavin Barwell MP says: “Locally led garden towns and villages have enormous potential to deliver the homes that communities need. New communities not only deliver homes, they also bring new jobs and facilities and a big boost to local economies. These places combined could provide almost 200,000 homes.”
Reaction to the announcement has been mixed. Shaun Spiers, chief executive of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), remarks: “CPRE welcomes efforts to tackle the housing crisis in the form of high-quality, well-planned and well-located developments. Done well with genuine local consent, garden villages and garden towns can be part of the solution and certainly preferable to what is currently happening in too many parts of the country - poor quality new estates plonked down on the edge of villages and market towns, in the teeth of local opposition and in defiance of good planning principles.
"But CPRE will look closely at these specific proposals to ensure that they really are locally led; that they respect the green belt and other planning designations; and that they meet housing need, particularly the need for genuinely affordable housing for local people, and are not driven by over-ambitious, centrally dictated housing targets. Where communities support new settlements, they should be protected from speculative planning applications for a long time to come."
However, his regional colleague Kevin FitzGerald, honorary director of CPRE Hertfordshire, is wholly opposed to the proposals for Harlow and Gilston on the Herts/Essex border: "These plans herald the death knell of the rural character of whole swathes of Hertfordshire. Beautiful villages, supposedly protected by green belt, look set to be swallowed up by the urban sprawl of neighbouring towns. Housing targets are putting immense pressure on our area, and marginalising the basic purposes of the green belt which the government has pledged to protect."
Ross Clark of The Spectator says: “Concentrating new homes in purpose-built new towns, villages and suburbs, where services and infrastructure are built as part of the development, upsets people who live nearby but ultimately it is the least painful way of accommodating the new homes which are so desperately needed. The only way we are going to civilise housing development is by building homes in conjunction with infrastructure. We need to be building new homes in places where new roads, schools, drains, surgeries, shops and all the rest form part of the development. We need, in short, new towns along the lines of those built post-war.”
Cllr Dick Cole, leader of the Cornish devolution party Mebyon Kernow, believes the West Carclaze announcement is an old and much-opposed project dressed in new clothing: “The government talks about it being a locally led development, but the reality is that this is only happening because it was a government top-down initiative,” he told the Guardian. “They say it is a brownfield site, but many of the houses are on fields. It has been one of those projects that seems to have a momentum of its own, despite what local people say.”
Russell Quirk, CEO of eMoov and a former councillor and Planning Committee Chairman, believes NIMBYism needs to be pushed to one side to allow the number of new homes Britain needs to actually get built: “Whilst I am an ultimate democrat, when emotions and politics get in the way of common sense you have no choice but to remove the politics from the process. If that means short-cutting democracy to get the 200,000 homes built, then that is what the government must do, even if it is against the tide of localism and all such similar political rhetoric of the last few years.”