Table of Contents
Summary
Much of Britain faces an acute housing shortage. To address this, Labour has committed to delivering 1.5 million new homes and a generation of new towns across the country.
To do most good, the New Towns need to be located in places where they can relieve suppressed demand in existing settlements.
In some cases, this means simply putting them next to existing cities, as at the Edinburgh New Town. There is scope for this at Oxford, Bristol and York.
In other cases, New Towns can be placed further away from existing cities, but should be connected to them through rapid and frequent rail links. This is especially true for London, the place where suppressed demand and housing need is most concentrated. The most efficient way to do this is normally by adding capacity to existing railway lines.
We propose building a Tempsford New Town at the intersection of the East Coast Main Line (ECML) and planned East-West Rail (EWR). With improvements to the ECML and completion of the EWR, this will probably be the best-connected greenfield site in Britain. The Tempsford New Town could be a major city with homes for 250,000-350,000 people, larger than Oxford or Cambridge and comparable to the largest postwar New Towns. It could also be a major employment centre, especially in life sciences, helping to relieve the acute shortages of laboratory space in Oxford, Cambridge and London.
Apart from finishing the EWR, one key infrastructure intervention is necessary to deliver this:
The ECML is currently bottlenecked by a short stretch north of Welwyn where it narrows from four to two tracks. Fixing the Welwyn Bottleneck is necessary to provide enough spare capacity to accommodate a new town. Value capture from the development it unlocks would cover the cost several times over.
Under normal conditions, addressing the Welwyn Bottleneck would likely pose significant problems in planning terms. However, the new government is not bound by the same constraints as previous actors. Labour will have the strongest pro-building mandate of any government since Attlee. It can simply ask Parliament to pass a hybrid bill giving it the powers it needs to fix the Bottleneck. This will deliver on Labour’s New Town election promises swiftly, avoiding the normal lengthy and litigious planning routes.
With focus, a hybrid bill could be passed in a year. Fixing the Bottleneck and the EWR could be done within four years. The Tempsford area has surplus road capacity, so work on the New Town could be parallel-tracked in the meantime. The first new residents could be riding the first new trains by the end of this Parliament.
The Tempsford New Town would have a commanding location at one of the hubs of Britain’s railway infrastructure
The Challenge
Many parts of Britain suffer from acute housing shortages. These shortages are a major driver of homelessness, poverty and deprivation, as well as a major cause of Britain’s economic underperformance since 2007. No task is more important for the new government than tackling them.
We can meet housing shortages through piecemeal additions to existing settlements, or through building new ones. Both of these are important, and there is no reason to choose one exclusively. But new towns have some special advantages that can often make them particularly attractive.
A new town is a large masterplanned new settlement. It can be adjacent to an existing city, like Edinburgh New Town, or amidst open countryside, like Milton Keynes. One of the key features of new towns is that they have a single planning authority and, often, a single landowner. In the modern British context this is generally a development corporation, a special dedicated planning authority with a mandate from the central government to foster development in the area. This means that new towns can be more coherent than piecemeal free market development, with more initial thought put into infrastructure requirements. The development corporation can use the revenues from selling housing to pay for public goods like public transport infrastructure, parks, civic buildings and council housing.
The scarcity of floorspace is heavily concentrated in certain areas, which map closely onto those where homelessness is worst. Source: Shelter.
However, not all new towns are equally successful. The deciding factor is often whether they are located in the right places, near to areas with high levels of suppressed demand and existing job opportunities. Siting new towns so that they can relieve pressure on high-demand areas is good for both the new town and the existing settlements. It is good for the new town because it means that there are more keen would-be residents, allowing the development corporation to raise more revenues from selling housing to spend on public goods. And it is good for the existing settlements because it relieves their housing shortages.
This is clearly evident in the experiences of the postwar New Towns. Milton Keynes, Stevenage and Crawley were designed to accommodate the growing population of London. They have flourished economically. They also played a valuable role in relieving suppressed demand in London, although of course they have not been enough by themselves to meet all of the area’s rising housing needs. Other postwar new towns have faced greater challenges because they were sited in locations where the underlying demand for new housing was lower. This tended to happen later on in the New Towns programme, as political pressure from more affluent and better connected areas displaced New Towns further from the major centres. It has even been argued that some of the later New Towns harmed the cities they were placed near by diverting scarce resources from their centres and undermining regeneration.
In some cases, the best way to meet this suppressed demand may simply be to build new towns adjacent to existing cities, following the famous example of Edinburgh New Town, or the twentieth-century Parisian garden cities like Suresnes, Drancy and Gresillons. The Cambridge New Town Project is an example of this, which should be continued and expanded. There is scope for similar projects at Oxford, York and Bristol, each of which has considerable demand suppressed behind a highly constrictive green belt.
Edinburgh New Town is a famous example of a successful new town adjacent to an existing settlement.
However, modern transport technology means that new towns do not need to be physically adjacent to an existing city to tie into it economically. The postwar new towns mentioned above, Milton Keynes, Stevenage and Crawley are physically self-contained, but they were still tied into London economically through excellent railway connections. Indeed, in the case of London, quality of transport into the centre of London is more important than physical proximity to the city boundary, because the city centre is where most of the jobs are. Being able to walk into an Outer London suburb yields fewer job opportunities than being able to take a fast train into the city centre. There is thus a powerful case for what urbanists call transit-oriented new towns as one way of meeting London’s housing needs in particular.
In the long term, it should be possible to create transit-oriented new towns through building new railways out of London to them, an option that was common historically right into the twentieth century. Unfortunately, this is likely to be difficult in the short term: recent British railways have been prodigiously expensive, and have taken many years to build. This may change if the Government brings through other reforms to lower the costs and difficulties of infrastructure provision. But it is likely to take many years.
The most efficient and practicable option in the short term is likely to operate through adding capacity to existing railway lines. There may be a number of options for this. Specialists consulted during work on this paper indicated that relatively inexpensive investments in signalling and trains would increase capacity on Crossrail and allow small new towns to be built out around the stations of Iver and Taplow. Others pointed to the capacity that HS2 will open up on the West Coast Main Line, or to the capacity that Crossrail 2 would create on the South West Mainline and the West Anglia Main Line. There may be other options still.
In this briefing note, however, we focus on what seems to us to be the greatest opportunity for a flourishing city-scale settlement, with the first residents moving in during this Parliament. This is a new town at the intersection of the East Coast Main Line and East-West Rail, enabled by capacity improvements to the former and the completion of the latter. We believe that the strength of the current government’s pro-building mandate gives it an exceptional opportunity to bring this remarkable opportunity to fruition.
The Opportunity
The East Coast Main Line (ECML) is one of the spines of British public transport. It begins at London King’s Cross and then passes through two existing New Towns, Stevenage and Peterborough. It continues on to Doncaster, Leeds, York, Darlington, Durham, Newcastle and Edinburgh. Over ten million people live within a thirty-minute journey from an ECML station. Over twenty million passengers ride the ECML every year.
For almost its entire length, the ECML has four tracks. There are just a couple of bottlenecks with fewer. The worst and most important is just north of the town of Welwyn, where the ECML narrows to two tracks, runs over the Digswell Viaduct, through a short tunnel and a few fields, and then widens back out into four tracks again.
This ‘Welwyn Bottleneck’ compromises the capacity of the entire ECML. Fixing it would markedly improve capacity along the whole line, and especially so for everything south of the other, less severe bottleneck near Peterborough. With some straightforward signalling upgrades, the capacity of the ECML could probably be doubled on the southern stretch. Fixing the Peterborough Bottleneck would allow this improvement to be extended to the entire line as far as Edinburgh. But even with no further improvements elsewhere, fixing the Welwyn Bottleneck would generate a substantial improvement in service for every existing city on the line while still leaving abundant capacity for a new city to be added.
The ECML narrows to two tracks at the Digswell Viaduct. By the time it reaches Woolmer Green, it has returned to four. The infrastructure of the whole of the eastern half of Britain is seriously compromised by this bottleneck.
Two factors hold up the Welwyn Bottleneck. One is cost: it would require several billions in upfront investment. Under normal circumstances, these are intimidating costs. But if fixing the Bottleneck were used to enable a large new town, the situation would be transformed. A new town in a high-demand location could easily generate tens of billions of value uplift. Much of this could then be captured using compulsory purchase mechanisms, or simply through a bespoke tax on value uplift introduced by adding a paragraph to any finance bill. This revenue would easily cover the cost of fixing the Bottleneck.
The key constraint on fixing the Bottleneck has been planning and politics. The Digswell Viaduct is a Grade II* listed structure, built in the 1850s and reclad in new engineering bricks in the 1930s. Fixing the Bottleneck would require building a second viaduct next to it. The existing viaduct would not be damaged by this, and it would of course be possible to make the second viaduct a visual duplicate of the first to minimise its visual impact. However, building a second viaduct would undeniably impact the ‘setting’ of the first one, affecting the view of it from down the valley. It would also require the use of some compulsory purchase in the village of Digswell, possibly including the demolition of several houses. The small station of Welwyn North would need restructuring, and some tunnelling work would be required.
From an engineering perspective, this work is complex, but not prohibitively so. It could probably be delivered in as little as three to four years. The planning difficulties would however be much more severe. Going through the conventional route to a Development Consent Order (DCO) could take at least six years of pure planning process, in addition to the four years of construction. It would suffer from severe risk of judicial review that could delay it still further. Indeed, many transport experts have regarded the planning difficulties as so severe that the project is simply not worth attempting. In recent years, the English system for infrastructure planning has become seriously deficient for dealing with complicated multilayered projects like this one. Planning, rather than engineering or economics, has been the key barrier, and there has not been the political will necessary to solve it.
The new Government has a unique opportunity to cut through this. It enjoys an exceptionally strong mandate to build the vital infrastructure that Britain needs. It could simply ask Parliament to pass a hybrid bill granting the powers necessary to fix the Bottleneck. A hybrid bill would completely bypass the convoluted DCO process and is essentially immune to judicial review. It would be dealt with by an ad hoc committee, so it requires minimal Parliamentary time. Drafting can be accelerated by instructing one of the specialist firms retained by DLUHC to work on it, and. an expedited passage through Parliament should then be enabled through an amendment to Standing Orders. With focus, the entire process could be completed in eighteen months, by comparison to the six years for a DCO, and with almost none of the risk of legal challenge attendant on the DCO process.
If a new town is added to the ECML, the second question is: at which point along its length? The ideal place to add a major station to the ECML would be somewhere where it intersects with another line that also has spare capacity. This would not normally be possible, since railway networks have naturally been designed so that they intersect in major existing cities.
The EWR is planned to intersect with the ECML at the hamlet of Tempsford. Elsewhere, it intersects with the Chiltern Mainline, the WCML, the MML and the West Anglia Mainline.
By good chance, however, the construction of East-West Rail (EWR) has created an exception to this rule. The EWR is a new railway line that is currently being developed to run from Oxford to Cambridge and then on to Ipswich, Norwich and Great Yarmouth. Although in general there are towns at the points where the EWR intersects with other lines (Oxford for the GWML, Bedford for the MML), the EWR Company wants it to intersect with the ECML in the middle of open countryside, by a hamlet called Tempsford in Central Bedfordshire. The area has limited environmental value, and its most notable feature is a disused RAF airfield.
An interchange station is planned for the site. This will be accessible to local people, but there will not be many of them, since the station will stand isolated in empty fields. The EWR Company has indicated that it is keen for development to take place around the station, but none is firmly planned. The EWR will have abundant capacity: indeed, it actually needs more development around stations to shore up the economic case for its eastern section, which is currently seen as doubtful.
The proposed station at the ECML and EWR intersection will stand in empty fields
We believe there is an exceptionally strong case for placing the new town here. A ‘Tempsford New Town’ would be 45 minutes from central London, where Britain’s housing shortage is most intense. It will be 20 minutes from Cambridge and under an hour from Oxford. Both cities also suffer from acute housing shortages, as well as shortages of laboratory space that are nearing crisis proportions. Boston had 6 million square feet of laboratory space under development in 2021, while Oxford and Cambridge together deliver about 300,000 in a given year, a scale of underperformance that risks downgrading Britain’s world leadership in life sciences within a generation. Tempsford New Town would drastically relieve pressure for both housing and laboratory space in these centres, strengthening one of the main motors of Britain’s economy. Tempsford would also have good connections to other major economic centres including Leeds, York, Edinburgh and the other great cities of the ECML, as well as being only one change away from Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol and Sheffield. In terms of road access, the area is well served by the A1 and A428.
In brief, this is probably the best connected greenfield site in Britain. The site could easily sustain a city-scale settlement of 250,000-350,000 people, twice the size of Oxford or Cambridge, and comparable to Utrecht, Bilbao or the largest postwar New Towns. It would have every prospect of becoming a major economic centre, supporting growth across the country as a whole.
The Plan of Action
The Government can and should deliver the Tempsford New Town quickly. The first building work should begin within two years, the first residents should move in before the end of this Parliament, and the first trains should be soaring over the new viaduct at Welwyn around the time of the next General Election. To deliver on this timeline, it needs to take the following steps:
Ideally, initiate work on the project immediately. There has been some suggestion that the Government will establish a commission to choose sites for new towns. Such a commission could be useful in identifying further opportunities, but the Government should get started on its top priorities without delay in parallel to the commission’s work.
Immediately begin work on passing a hybrid bill to enable the Welwyn Bottleneck to be fixed. The fastest way to do this may be through instructing one of the specialist firms that government has on retainer. To pass the bill in less than eighteen months, it may be necessary to amend Standing Orders. An EIA will have to be prepared.
Begin establishing a development corporation to deliver the Tempsford New Town. This should be done in parallel to the hybrid bill. The development corporation should be fully established by around the time the hybrid bill is passed. Development corporations do not currently have adequate powers to deliver infrastructure, so the Government should immediately fix this in the primary legislation on planning reform that it will be bringing through Parliament.
Press forward with the EWR, confirming the Tempsford route and station. This is already the default plan but it may need interventions to accelerate it.
Begin work on building Tempsford New Town as soon as the development corporation is established. Current roadworks mean there will be surplus road capacity in the area, so there is no problem with the first residents moving in before the ECML work is complete. The expectation should however be that the population will then steeply increase once rail capacity is in place.
Potentially, accelerate work on nearby reservoirs or water transfer systems. The Government should immediately meet with the water industry to identify what work may need to be done and what interventions are required to deliver it swiftly. Major upfront investments or planning interventions may be required to push through obstacles here.
Budget
Although new towns are unlikely to reach London floorspace values, well connected new towns can certainly be sought after. The best comparator is probably Stevenage, where floor space is worth about £3,500 psqm, although other new towns like Welwyn are much higher, averaging over £4,000 psqm. Assuming Stevenage floor space values and 80 square metres of floor space per home (approximately the UK average), 125,000 homes would produce a total revenue of £35bn. Assuming normal build costs in the region (£2,500 psqm), £3,500 psqm would generate £10bn of value uplift. The great majority of this could be captured and spent on social infrastructure.
Set against this, upfront costs of establishing the development corporation are slight. The Old Oak Common development corporation spends around £10m per year. The Ebbsfleet Development Corporation spends around £20m per year. The Tempsford New Town is a larger project, so the overhead costs would be expected to be greater. But even assuming £50m per year, this is only a small fraction of the value uplift available.
The largest investment required to make Tempsford New Town a model for sustainable and efficient urbanism is public transport. The Government’s aspiration should be to give Tempsford as good a system of public transport as any comparably sized city on earth, making it a model globally. This does mean a substantial upfront investment. Comparably sized cities whose transport systems are seen as outstanding include Bilbao, Utrecht and Wuppertal: these cities typically have tram or light rail networks of about 10-20 km within the city proper.
Building trams in the UK is notoriously expensive, averaging at £87m per km for recent projects according to recent research by Britain Remade. Assuming an extremely generous 20km network – giving it by far the best public transport of any comparably sized city in the UK – this would mean a total cost of £1.7bn. Although a large sum of money, it is readily apparent that even this is a manageable fraction of the sum available for social infrastructure. In reality, of course, it is also unrealistic to treat investment in public transport as a pure economic cost. Endowing Tempsford with an internationally leading public transport system would markedly increase floor space values, making back some or all of the investment in the form of increased value uplift. Stevenage, which we are using as a benchmark for floor space values, has no intracity rail system at all.
Needless to say, these are only broad estimates: a detailed budget for a new town lies beyond the scope of this briefing. But they underline the importance of getting the new town’s location right, and of developing and using effective mechanisms for value capture: a good location means ample value uplift over build costs, and with effective value capture, that means more investment for social infrastructure. The calculations given here show that the Tempsford New Town could potentially have a budget of many billions available for council housing, even absent any grant from the national government.
FAQs
Shouldn’t we focus on expanding existing towns rather than building new ones?
These are not mutually exclusive. We strongly support reforming planning rules to enable more development in and around existing settlements. But Britain has millions of homes fewer than it should: it is extremely unlikely that any one housing policy will solve this problem alone. The Government should pursue a suite of prohousing policies, all of which have something to contribute.
Aren’t new towns inevitably dysfunctional?
No. Some new towns have been dysfunctional because they were badly designed, or because they were located in areas with low housing demand. But there are numerous examples of highly successful new towns. York, Oxford and Salisbury were Roman, Saxon and Mediaeval new towns respectively. Edinburgh New Town is one of Britain’s most successful urban designs. Saltaire, Bournville and Letchworth are successful new towns enabled by railways. Not everyone likes the urban design of Milton Keynes, but it is prosperous and sought-after. A well-sited and well-designed new town can be hugely successful.
Why should there be a new town at Tempsford?
Above all, a new town needs good transport to major economic centres. Tempsford is expected to be the intersection of the East Coast Main Line (ECML) and East-West Rail (EWR). EWR will have surplus capacity, providing excellent access to Oxford and Cambridge, two important economic centres that both suffer from housing shortages. The ECML is currently at capacity, but its capacity can be increased by fixing the Welwyn Bottleneck.
If this is such a good idea, why has nobody done it before?
The EWR simply did not exist – the relevant stretch still doesn’t – so the opportunities it will create are completely new. Fixing the Welwyn Bottleneck has been technically possible for a long time, but no government has had the political will to do it. It is indeed a gigantic opportunity, but only for a government with a powerful mandate to deliver vital infrastructure projects and push through planning obstacles. Labour has just won a historic landslide based on a pledge to deliver projects exactly like this one: it is the best-placed government to make this happen that we are likely ever to have.
What would the benefits of Tempsford New Town be?
In the medium term, Tempsford New Town could be a substantial city of 250-350,000 people, larger than Oxford or Cambridge. It would make a significant contribution to reducing the housing shortage in the cities to which it was connected, most notably London. It could also be a significant economic hub, taking advantage of its proximity to Britain’s key centres for research and technology, all of which currently suffer under severe shortages of laboratory space. The resulting economic growth would generate additional tax revenues for improving public services.
Kane Emerson is Head of Housing Research at YIMBY Alliance, founder of Labour YIMBY and a former aide to Emily Thornberry MP. Kane is also Vice-Chair of Islington South CLP and Treasurer of Labour Party Irish Society.
Samuel Hughes is a research fellow at the University of Oxford. He has worked in a range of government and think tank policy roles, focussing on housing and planning.