With the government set to announce details on a generation of new towns, CN visits the UK’s only 21st-century ‘garden city’
A former police station in north Kent is the best spot to contemplate the most successful new settlement the UK has delivered this century. From their converted office at the top of Castle Hill, those working at the development corporation overseeing Ebbsfleet Garden City have prime views of their handiwork.
Tidy rows of Monopoly houses snake up and down between chalk cliffs, while tower cranes sprout liberally across the landscape, their bulky frames looking positively wimpish in the shadow of the Dartford Crossing. It’s hard to believe that less than two decades ago, the area was nothing but abandoned cement works.
More than 4,500 homes have been built in the 1,000-acre Ebbsfleet Valley since its HS1 high-speed rail station opened in 2007. Yet from grand ambitions of a 43,000-home ‘Euro City’ surrounding Ebbsfleet International in 1994, today’s vision has been pared down to a much more modest 15,000 homes.
It’s against this backdrop of dwindling ambition that Labour is setting out its plans for a generation of new towns, each with more than 10,000 homes, set in tree-lined streets and surrounded by green space. Detail on these new towns has so far been scant, although a taskforce is due to suggest sites this summer. In the meantime, contractors can look to Ebbsfleet for clues on how they might progress.
“We have to be quite smart about how we manage resources, plan for investment and deliver it”
Ian Piper, Ebbsfleet Development Corporation
Ebbsfleet’s early days were characterised by economic uncertainty. When original master developer Land Securities (now Landsec) gained planning permission for 6,250 homes in Ebbsfleet Valley in 2007, a banking crisis was brewing that would temporarily stifle hopes of mass development.
“The whole project has now reached something of a stalemate,” wrote thinktank Centre for London in 2014, in a report calling for a development corporation to kickstart delivery. Its wish was granted. Ebbsfleet Development Corporation (EDC), an arm’s-length body of central government, was set up in 2015. Its role is multi-faceted: it acts as the area’s planning authority, oversees design cohesiveness and derisks private sector activity. “We spend a lot of time looking at what’s the most appropriate intervention we can make,” says chief executive Ian Piper.
Often, that intervention concerns infrastructure. “Even in simple sites, there’s often a lot of infrastructure that needs to go in first,” says Piper. “One of the major barriers to larger-scale development is that the infrastructure costs are quite a heavy burden for the master developer to bear.”
Ebbsfleet needed a lot of infrastructure to support human habitation, including nearby road improvements, entirely new grid networks and mammoth earthworks to level the jagged quarry.
The private sector is taking the lead where it feels able. Henley Camland is master developer for the 6,250-home Whitecliffe neighbourhood, investing in the necessary infrastructure and selling serviced plots to housebuilders.
But it can’t fill all the gaps. “For private sector bodies, their primary concern is managing their cashflow,” says Piper. “That’s where the public sector has traditionally played a role, in providing upfront funding.”
Piper says two early infrastructure investment decisions were a major tipping point in encouraging private sector buy-in. EDC invested £30m in two substations and a grid site and £45m in upgrading two junctions on the A2. “The A2 upgrades were key to accommodate growth,” says Piper. “Without those improvements, National Highways would have kept on objecting to planning applications.” The corporation is now starting to recoup that upfront cash from developers.
Not only is funding infrastructure an issue, so is timing the release of construction contracts. “One of the challenges that we face, and other new housing settlements will face, is how you align the delivery of homes with certain facilities,” says Piper. “You don’t necessarily want some of these things too soon, when there’s nobody here. It’s inefficient to have a GP with no patients or a school with no children.”
Ebbsfleet’s first primary school opened in 2020, when relatively few children lived in the area. This meant it had to accept pupils from further afield. As places filled up, some new Ebbsfleet residents found they couldn’t send their children to the local school. “It works its way out eventually when children age out, but for a couple of years there were quite a few anxious parents who understandably expected their children to be able to go to the school,” says Piper.
Section 106 agreements with housebuilders have been useful for delivering what the town needs at the right time. “There are certain triggers in [housebuilders’] planning permissions which demand that a school has to be put in after a certain number of housing completions – it’s quite an effective way of getting them into alignment,” explains Piper. The EDC is currently looking at whether to update the social infrastructure requirements of the original 2007 planning permissions to what would be expected of a similar proposal today.
Such public-private synergy has been successful in enticing housebuilders to build. Most major housebuilders have been involved in the project: Barratt, Taylor Wimpey, Redrow, Bellway, David Wilson and Persimmon have all built and sold homes in Ebbsfleet. “One of the reasons why the pace of delivery and the number of homes coming out of Ebbsfleet has been consistently high over the past five years is because there are always multiple housebuilders building and selling at the same time,” Piper says.
Empty space
However, bald patches on the landscape indicate where the challenges are too great to overcome. One particularly large crater marks where a theme park to rival Disneyland was intended. Plans stuttered after protected jumping spiders settled in the cement kiln dust left by decades of cement manufacturing. The developer, London Resort Company Holdings, closed down this January, unable to pay its debts.
In addition, the land around Ebbsfleet International station remains a car park, although plans were first lodged to create a town centre there in 1998. “It became clear the private sector was not going to bring it forward,” says Piper, adding that land values and the required infrastructure made the site “heavily unviable”.
Since it got permission from the government to buy the freehold in 2019, EDC is acting in the role Henley Camland is performing in the Whitecliffe neighbourhood, developing planning proposals and providing upfront infrastructure funding. A fully fleshed-out town centre scheme won planning permission in July. “It’s one of the things that we’ve been able to do as a development corporation which would be quite difficult to do if there wasn’t a development corporation,” Piper adds. “I’d say it probably wouldn’t happen.”
For all its support, EDC is no magic money tree. As an arm’s-length body of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, EDC has its budgets set during departmental spending reviews, which happen sporadically. Once it runs out of money, its coffers remain dry until the next spending review, which may not be for years. “We have to be quite smart about how we manage resources, plan for investment and deliver it,” says Piper.
It’s a far cry from the for visionary state-led masterplanning that characterised post-war new towns like Milton Keynes. That generation of new town development corporations were financed by 60-year fixed-rate loans from central government, originally directly from the Treasury. Of the 307,000 houses coordinated by these development corporations between 1947 and 1993, 231,000 were built by public authorities. Such levels of state support seem unthinkable in the 2020s.
What kind of state backing might Labour offer the next generation of new towns? Although designated new towns are each allotted their own development corporation under the 1946 New Towns Act, the government has not yet set out whether it will follow the established path. “It remains to be seen whether the government will introduce further legislation or rely on the current legislation to achieve its aims,” says Tom Pike, director of planning at consultancy Lanpro.
Hugh Ellis, director of policy at the Town and Country Planning Association, pointed out in a lecture in January that the New Towns Act has been amended so much that the definition of such a development corporation is muddy. He said he understood the New Towns Taskforce was actively debating whether new town development corporations should be led centrally or locally, or some combination of the two.
“[Traditional] new town development corporations offer the most powerful and unequivocal route, and they do one thing that locally-led doesn’t do – they bind central government to support the outcome,” he said, adding that private investors might be discouraged by the grim state of local authority finances.
Katja Stille, director of multidisciplinary consultancy Tibbalds, suggests Homes England could take a leading role instead. Tibbalds worked with Homes England at Northstowe, a self-proclaimed ‘new town’ with around 2,400 homes delivered out of a planned 10,000. Stille says that from experience, Homes England “can be visionary, have high aspirations and doesn’t shy away from addressing barriers that get in the way of delivering high-quality, affordable homes”.
The Ebbsfleet project has highlighted such potential hurdles. But the contractors involved feel more like pioneers than guinea pigs. Graham started building the £80m Alkerden Academy just before Christmas last year. Pat O’Hare, the contractor’s regional director for London, says he was encouraged by early discussions with the client during the tendering phase.
“If [the client] has that very ambitious, long-term view, but things happen – we get confidence. You can see when you walk onto site how well Ebbsfleet has managed it.” He says he would feel comfortable bidding for work on other new towns, based on his experience at Ebbsfleet.
And, of course, there is still plenty of work on offer at Ebbsfleet itself in the coming years. While Piper says his team is still exploring whether to bundle up work packages and let them to a single contractor, EDC and its development partners have so far meted out work in smaller chunks. O’Hare think this was the right choice. “The size of this job is massive – this is not a type of job that one contractor could deliver,” he says.
How might contractors win such work? “We want to encourage people with a similar ethos and objectives to work here,” says Piper. “We absolutely understand the commercial imperative – we’re not asking for freebies – but we want people who believe in the vision, who see themselves contributing to that.”
O’Hare adds that extra effort is required when working on buildings that are crucial for the success of a new community. “Educational facilities in a development like that are generally the focal point of the whole thing, so we have to get it right,” he says. “We realised our best people needed to be on this to meet that high level of quality.”
The regular caveats still apply. “We are spending public money, so we need to have value for money,” Piper says. “But we would like contractors to bring some innovation and new ideas to the table, as well as very competitive prices.”
He adds: “When you’re setting out to do something really big, there will initially be some scepticism about whether it’s ever going to happen,” says Piper. “That means that [contractors] are going to want to spend their time investigating opportunities that seem more realistic.
“We need to provide confidence. You need stuff to start happening. Don’t go out and tell people false promises – get them to come and see it for themselves.” Contractors thinking about whether to take on new town work might do well to take their own trip to the top of Castle Hill.
