As Sue Riddlestone noted at the beginning of the session, we are in a climate emergency, and the hours of tackling train delays, cancellations and flooding added a further element of uncertainty to the HOMES UK conference.

Nevertheless, I chaired a panel discussion on the possibility and potential that new towns can bring. Joined by Sue, founder of Bioregional, Paul Silver CEO of Dorchester Living and Maurice Lange a data analyst at Centre for Cities, the session unpacked the lessons learnt from the past and how data can help to drive forward home building in the future.

Here are our three key takeaways:

1. With a renewed housing delivery target, the government needs to tie up the land at the beginning, focusing on getting the infrastructure in place first and supporting development companies to fund and manage community-focused assets. We must create networks of places to live and work to help reduce the overall carbon emissions associated with new towns, noting that the garden cities of the past are still car-dominated. Sue –an influential player in the Government Eco-towns challenge panel, and the Eco-towns Planning Policy Statement–highlighted that the continuous rebranding of these developments has done nothing to reinforce the values and ideas they were built upon. At their core, the strategies are good, but when we live in a world where we require three times the earth’s resources to sustain us, we must radically change our way of living before we can develop places that actually make a difference.
2. Stakeholders, developments and governments need to be prepared to take the long-term view. So often our delivery strategies are fixed on a home-by-home approach, for example ensuring that each home has an air source heat pump, but really, we want to be delivering sustainable heating at a much larger scale, including district heating networks, wind farms and solar fields within development. Paul highlighted where they have been able to do this on schemes with large land holdings and areas such as old runways that can be transformed into usable community assets. However, the government grant systems to support this level of infrastructure and the investment models we rely upon do not have this long-term vision in place, unlike the metrics and reporting tools that we will be using to hold these developments to account.
3. Finally, the Government will have to ask itself the cost of building a new town and how viable housing delivery of this scale is on a location-by-location basis. Maurice’s research has shown that new towns in areas where house prices are lower, naturally impacts the viability of development, conversely, the green belt surrounding London offers the sweet spot where the criteria stack up and we have the potential to create thriving new towns. The challenge is whether we are willing to rethink this urban boundary to meet housebuilding targets.

Elsewhere in the conference, we listened to panel discussions surrounding the increasing complexity of working at scale and how to recruit and retain a diverse workforce across the industry.

This included exploring how we can better support execs to cope under pressure as projects and liability have become so much more complex, noting that, when surveyed, 70% of the public associated the word strenuous with the construction industry. This reputation damage and that of major disasters such as Grenfell, can be really hard for the teams who are already working in the area as well as impacting recruitment. Conversations also turned to the Procurement Act and the route to market for SMEs. As an industry, we need to access this market efficiently, making sure there is a continuous level of quality.

Amidst the cacophony of the ExCel centre, trades selling their wares and free tote bags lining every wall, the HOMES UK conference offered some real opportunities to dig deep and to get under the skin of the challenges facing the industry. It was refreshing to see panels reflect questions back to the audience, asking if they had any ideas about how we could take systemic problems, as well as encouraging partnership and connection between the various facets of the industry who were present in the room.

It was encouraging to see RPs, developers, councillors and consultants rubbing shoulders and learning from one another. Set against a backdrop of new stories highlighting a housing stock that is currently not fit for purpose and crumbling in the wake of our changing climate, the challenge felt more real than ever. It only remains to be seen what we can deliver collectively to ensure that everyone has access to a safe and suitable home.