Good morning. Parliament starts the summer recess today, most of the Westminster political class will be making plans for a post-election holiday, but the business of government goes on and this morning ministers are announcing plans for what they say will be “a new generation of new towns”.
Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, is setting up a new towns taskforce which has been asked to recommend sites for new towns within 12 months. It will be chaired by Sir Michael Lyons, an economist, former council chief executive and former chair of the BBC who has unrivalled experience as an adviser to governments, particularly on local government matters. The deputy chair is Dame Kate Barker, an economist and former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, who has also led previous housing policy inquiries for previous governments.
The taskforce will recommend where new towns should be build. But, reading the announcement from the Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government, it is clear that many of these new towns won’t actually be new towns, but extensions to existing towns.
Rayner also wants these developments to aim for a 40% affordable housing rate.
Explaining what the taskforce will do, the department says:
The programme of new towns will create largescale communities of at least 10,000 new homes each, with many significantly larger. These places could deliver hundreds of thousands of much-needed affordable and high-quality homes in the decades to come, tackling the barriers to growth and helping more working people across the country own their own home.
The new towns will help unlock the economic potential of existing towns and cities across the country, and the government will continue to drive growth and regenerate areas that have been held back by constraints on their expansion for far too long. While the programme will include large-scale new communities that are separate from existing settlements, a far larger number of new towns will be urban extensions and regeneration schemes that will work with the grain of development in any given area.
These new communities will be governed by a ‘new towns code’ – a set of rules that developers will have to meet to make sure new towns are well-connected, well-designed, sustainable and attractive places where people want to live. They will have all the infrastructure and public services necessary to support thriving communities. The towns will also help meet housing need by targeting rates of 40% affordable housing with a focus on genuinely affordable social rented homes.
Rayner will be talking about this later. She is on ITV’s This Morning at 10.30am, and then on Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 show at noon.
Otherwise, the diary looks quite empty. But doubtless of God of News will provide something.
We are also covering the Southport riots, but on a different blog. Yohannes Lowe is writing that. It’s here.
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