Chelsfield has a history of protest. Soon after Philip Lamprell moved to the village on the very outer edge of southeast London 42 years ago, he and his neighbours were in uproar.
As the M25 was being built around the capital, plans were in the works for a major shopping centre beside nearby Junction 4.
“There were hundreds, if not thousands, of people out campaigning. We were marching across the fields,” says Lamprell, now 87.
The proposals were quashed. Several decades on, Junction 4 is still surrounded almost entirely by countryside. So is the eastern side of Chelsfield station, despite the fact that it has 20-minute direct trains to London Bridge.
But local opposition to building may not be able to halt the cranes and diggers in Chelsfield for much longer.
Well-connected and undeveloped, the site is one of the most obvious locations for Angela Rayner’s promised “new generation of new towns”, according to analysis by Centre for Cities, a think tank.
Building would depend on whether the Government’s New Towns Taskforce, a panel of experts established to advise ministers, has the stomach to target green belt land for development – but it looks likely that it will.
The newly appointed 10-person taskforce, headed by former BBC chairman Sir Michael Lyons and economist Dame Kate Barker, had its first meeting earlier this month, kicking off its mission to identify locations for Labour’s new towns over the coming year.
These will be new settlements or extensions of existing towns and cities comprising between 10,000 and 25,000 homes that the Government says will “tackle the national housing crisis and drive economic growth across the country”.
The taskforce, which also includes Bill Hughes, head of real assets at Legal & General, and Dame Diane Coyle, economist and director of the Productivity Institute, will report monthly to Rayner, the Housing Secretary, and will develop a New Towns Code for developers to follow.
So where are these new towns likely to be?
Based on the urgent need to ease the housing shortage and boost economic growth, Maurice Lange, analyst at Centre for Cities, argues that the taskforce should target land around commuter stations near major cities. This would allow growth around employment centres.
“You should think about where we have got pressure on housing – affordability is your rough guide there – and then what kind of developments do we want? We want it to be as car-independent as possible,” says Lange.
Lange looked at railway stations within a 30-minute commuting distance of 11 major cities and also those which are a 45-minute distance from London.
He then identified 135,000 hectares of undeveloped land within a 2km radius of each station that he argues should be considered for new town developments.
This excludes planning designation restrictions such as flood zones and protected ancient woodlands, but includes green belt land.
Assuming that only two thirds of this land would be for housing, and depending on the density of development, this would be enough land to build between 3.2m and 6.8m new homes, he said.
Around 2m of these could be built over the next 10 years if Britain could match the building rates of the post-war period.
However, an estimated 88pc of the sites identified around London were on the capital’s green belt land, where Lange says more than half a million homes could be built in the next decade.
Around Birmingham, Bournemouth and Bristol, the figures were respectively 96pc, 92pc and 66pc of sites on green belt.
Chelsfield, on the outskirts of Orpington in the London Borough of Bromley, is one of the most obvious sites for a new town, says Lange.
“As far as I can see, besides golf clubs and green belt, there is absolutely nothing that is stopping you from building all over this place.”
Nearby Sevenoaks in Kent is larger than it should be because the green belt has constrained development around Chelsfield, Lange adds.
There are clear signals that his approach could be in line with the thinking of the Government’s taskforce.
It was a Labour manifesto pledge to take a strategic approach to releasing green belt land for housebuilding and the Housing Secretary has taken swift steps to facilitate this with her draft National Planning Policy Framework, published at the end of July.
A Housing Department spokesman said: “We will deliver 1.5m new homes by the end of this Parliament and we can’t do this by using brownfield sites alone, which is why we will be more strategic in our approach to green belt land to build more homes in the right places, including via the New Towns Programme.”
The taskforce would likely get political backing from Labour to target green belt sites because the Treasury understands that new towns need to be in high-demand locations to boost growth, says Samuel Hughes, head of housing at the Centre for Policy Studies and a former policy fellow in the Housing Department.
“And green belt reform in the South is nearly harmless for Labour in terms of its potential negative electoral impacts for Labour, because it is nearly all in Conservative or Liberal Democrat seats,” Hughes adds.
“Probably the party elite have grasped that they can build in green belts without that much electoral blowback.”
Taskforce chair Sir Michael has also stressed the importance of public transport links for the new developments.
He has previously said that one of the flaws of Milton Keynes, which is seen as the poster child of new town success, was its design around cars and roads.
“As we look at a zero-carbon future, there are lessons to learn here of what you can’t afford to do,” he told the BBC earlier this month.
If Labour wants growth, the new towns will need to be concentrated in the South of England, with good connections to the biggest jobs markets, says Sam Dumitriu, head of policy at Britain Remade.
“Without that link to London, or Oxford and Cambridge, it is unlikely that people will want to move in the first place. In practice, new towns probably shouldn’t be built north of Cambridge,” says Dumitriu. “Chelsfield strikes me as a sensible location. It would effectively be an urban extension to London.”
Building new towns in the South is also much more likely to be commercially viable for developers, especially considering they must work with a golden rule that 40pc of new town homes be classed as affordable.
Higher prices and more demand means developers can build higher density developments, which are more profitable, says Hughes.
But Chelsfield locals are still not keen.
“We would be appalled,” says Lamprell, who is chairman of the Chelsfield Park Residents Association. “The problem with most of these developments is that there is no infrastructure to deal with the houses.”
A Bromley Council spokesman said: “Bromley has a strong planning policy framework in place to guide and control development, including protecting our important green belt land.” Discussion of locations is so far only speculative, they added.
Previous plans to build 800 homes just south of Chelsfield on the vacant Broke Hill golf course – a development that would have been less than a tenth of the size of Rayner’s smallest new town – were met with fierce local opposition and rejected by Sevenoaks Council.
Neighbouring Bromley Council objected on the grounds that the homes would undermine the green belt.
“You could almost call this Sevenoaks’s new town,” a committee chairman said in 2020.
So 25,000 homes might prove a shock.
Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.
