The trouble with Labour’s new towns plan

Since last October, when Keir Starmer declared that he was a ‘Yimby’ – a ‘yes in my back yard’ – Labour has tried to position itself as the pro-housing party. We are now finally getting a glimpse of what this might look like in practice.  

Deputy leader Angela Rayner has promised a revitalisation of the postwar ‘New Towns’ programme, which, in the quarter-century from 1946 to 1970, delivered hundreds of thousands of new homes.  

This certainly signals the right ambitions, and if done in the right way, New Towns could indeed make a major contribution to solving Britain’s housing crisis. But they are not a panacea, and the devil is in the detail: there is a risk of overburdening the proposal by expecting it to fulfil too many policy objectives at once. But more on this in a minute.  

The original New Towns were an indirect response to Britain’s interwar building boom.