Keir Starmer’s promise that Labour will build 300,000 homes in each of the next five years has been met with some scepticism. The last time the United Kingdom managed to build more than that number of homes in the course of a single year was half a lifetime ago, in 1977. In 2023, the number was less than 200,000.
Starmer suggests that he will reprise the achievements of Clement Attlee’s postwar government and its work to build the welfare state: new schools, new hospitals, new towns and, above all, new houses. The problem is that the administrative infrastructure necessary to do all this no longer exists. Attlee and his Conservative successors, who were just as keen to build more council houses in the 1950s and 1960s, could rely on dedicated and talented local authority surveyors, solicitors and architects who knew how to get things done and who took the idea of public service seriously. They were done away with in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher, who excoriated their achievements as a failed utopia. Even if there are new pockets of competence—such as Sadiq Khan’s London, which has built twice as much social housing in the past year as all other cities in England and Wales combined—local expertise cannot be rebuilt all at once.
Angela Rayner, who is charged with delivering Labour’s housing programme, is relying on the market to do most of the job. She wants private-sector housebuilders to develop new large-scale developments in which 40 per cent of homes will be affordable. Rachel Reeves’s initial budget in October put an extra £500m into subsidies for affordable housing, bringing Rayner’s total Treasury allocation for 2024 to 2025 to £5bn.
That new money will at best add 5,000 homes to the annual total. To encourage local authorities to build them she suggested that the Right to Buy scheme will no longer apply to new council houses, ensuring that they will remain in the public sector. She will also make use of legislation, passed by the Conservatives last year, to end the obligation of local authorities to pay for the so-called hope value—the premium based on the expectation that land will get future permission for development—when using compulsory purchase powers to buy it. The extra value of land zoned for housing will be retained by the community, a change that will come in handy for funding the new towns Rayner is planning. She will set mandatory targets for how many new homes local authorities must plan in their areas. She will be expecting them to build on the “grey belt”, as Labour is now proposing to call the less attractive parts of the green belt. And she is planning to share the burden of finding space for new homes more equitably between big cities, towns, suburbs and rural areas.
Just as brutalist architecture came to be no longer regarded as an eyesore but a new kind of heritage—much as Victoriana and Art Deco before it—so has Milton Keynes been recently rehabilitated. Far from being viewed as a soulless sprawl, it is now described as the best hope for the future of British housing and urbanism. Rayner has asked Michael Lyons, a former BBC chair, to lead a taskforce that will produce by summer 2025 a preferred list of sites for new towns. Most of them will be extensions to existing settlements, and will have a minimum of 10,000 new homes. But a few will be much larger and will involve building on agricultural land. Milton Keynes, where the taskforce held its first meeting with Rayner, now has a population of 300,000. It’s not clear how many towns there will be of this size, but Starmer has spoken of at least two, and there might be as many as four.
Just after the July 2024 election, Samuel Hughes, the head of housing at the Centre for Policy Studies, and Kane Emerson, formerly of Emily Thornberry’s office, pre-empted the taskforce by floating a plan to build what they call an updated Milton Keynes for up to 350,000 people. It would be located at Tempsford, a Bedfordshire village of just 600 residents. Tempsford sits at the intersection of the East Coast Main Line between London and Scotland and a new railway route projected to connect Oxford and Cambridge, making it a natural growth area. A private plan for 7,000 homes and a science park is already being discussed with the local authority by Urban&Civic, a housebuilder owned by the Wellcome Trust. The plan is led by Nigel Hugill, who was responsible for the development of Stratford City, next to the Olympic Park in east London. But enacting it may not be plain sailing.
Presenting their plan, Hughes claimed that Tempsford “could be a major city… 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.”
The outcry was immediate. “It would be a disaster,” David Sutton, the chair of Tempsford Parish Council, told the Daily Mail. “It will fill every single piece of green space between Bedford and Cambourne and decimate our little village. This is land which has been farmed for generations. To me this is the government being lazy and cowardly. They see a chance to build a massive number of houses in a place where they won’t face opposition on the scale they would get if they were building onto Oxford or Cambridge. It’s simply not fair.” Sutton was conflating the vision of a lobby group with official policy, but Emerson and Hughes had in any case clearly underestimated the scale of resistance.
They did their Tempsford plan no favours by illustrating it with what seemed to be AI-generated images. They pasted in a somewhat unconvincing tram running just inches in front of six-storey terraced houses with Dutch gables, bay windows and chimneys. It is a vision that reflects Hughes’s previous association with the last Conservative government’s attempts to inject what it called beauty into urban planning. And it is to beauty what William McGonagall was to poetry.
The idea of beauty in urban planning is a questionable legacy of Michael Gove’s and Robert Jenrick’s times in government. It was injected into the political conversation by the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, on which Hughes worked as a researcher. The commission was co-chaired by the late Roger Scruton, who supervised Hughes as an undergraduate. Gove asked Thatcher’s favourite philosopher to turn his BBC documentary Why Beauty Matters into government policy, hoping that it would address Nimby opposition to his own unsuccessful target—when he was minister of housing, communities and local government—of building 300,000 homes a year. (It was a departure for Gove who, during a previous incarnation as education minister, cancelled a Labour school building programme by saying that Britain had “no need of award-winning architects”, suggesting they were creaming off money that could otherwise go to teachers.)
The commission delivered its report, “Living with Beauty”, at the beginning of 2020. “Ask for beauty”, it exhorted as part of a new framework, and “refuse ugliness”. (It might just as well have said, “Say no to concrete”; it was taken by many architects as a declaration of war on modernism.) Its most persuasive message was that we should be focused on creating places, rather than mere housing units.
Scruton did not live long enough to see the executive order Donald Trump signed promoting “Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” shortly before being prised from the Oval Office. But he would have recognised the language: “New Federal building designs should, like America’s beloved landmark buildings, uplift and beautify public spaces, inspire the human spirit, ennoble the United States, command respect from the general public, and, as appropriate, respect the architectural heritage of a region. They should also be visibly identifiable as civic buildings and should be selected with input from the local community.” Trump concluded that classical and other traditional architectural styles should be encouraged.
Scruton’s report made the case for an ill-defined “gentle” level of density that would allow for the building of streets, squares and mansion blocks, not faceless architecture. This would be achieved by drawing up local design codes to specify proportions, materials, window sizes and house layouts. “Beauty must become the natural result of working within our planning system,” the report states.
Scruton’s would-be successor as the government’s beauty arbiter is the unlikely figure of Nicholas Boys Smith, who was one of the chairs of the commission. A former adviser to Peter Lilley and George Osborne with no obvious qualifications for the role of an urban designer, Boys Smith reinvented himself as an authority on housing for the last Conservative government and is eager to play the same role for Labour. Even before the election, he had reached for his own generative AI tools to produce a vision for Labour’s new homes, and came up with an implausible, sun-dappled, traffic-free blend of Marylebone High Street and Bloomsbury, with glimpses of mysterious gothic turrets in the background. It was as authentically urban as Dick Van Dyke’s cockney accent. Boys Smith’s attempt at soothing architectural mood music involves lots of terracotta tiles, pavement cafés and, inexplicably, chimney pots. Machine learning has not yet absorbed the fact that London has been a smokeless zone since 1956.
Rayner was impressed enough to make Boys Smith the interim chair of the Office for Place, one of the few tangible results of Scruton’s report. The office began as a team within Gove’s Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and became an arm’s-length quango in 2023. Until it was taken back inside the ministry this November, Boys Smith was briefly in charge of drawing up the design codes for Labour’s new towns. But Rayner should have known even before the shocked response to the Tempsford plan that Boys Smith’s concept of beauty is not a magic bullet.
Look at the experience of Ben Pentreath, a contributor to “Living with Beauty” and part of the design team for the Duchy of Cornwall’s Poundbury development. Several of Pentreath’s plans have been met with local opposition, despite his celebrity status as Kate Middleton’s interior decorator. Pentreath has plans to build 2,000 homes on farmland on the edge of Faversham for the Prince of Wales. The area will include a large square of terraced houses—equipped somewhat inevitably with chimneys—and a cricket club. This will be funded presumably by the massive increase in land value that will go to the Duchy if it gets planning permission. The development has been described by the Kent chapter of the countryside charity CPRE as a “sprawling car dependent housing estate”. Pentreath had even more trouble in Truro, where for the Duchy he designed a Regency-style crescent overlooking a new Waitrose and the city’s recycling centre. He told the magazine Building Design about the harrowing experience of trying to explain his plans while “standing in a room with a mad mob of 200 people screaming at me”.
The thinking that went into building Milton Keynes is a better model. The city is the product of a sophisticated masterplan that makes the images of its would-be successors—whether they are AI-generated or, in Pentreath’s case, insipid pencil drawings—look like simplistic cartoons. Milton Keynes was conceived as a series of neighbourhoods, each with its own architectural language. There was a massive tree-planting programme and a monumental town centre with a half-mile-long shopping mall of travertine and granite, aligned on the path of the midsummer sun. These characteristics clearly established that Milton Keynes was going to be a city with a certain presence, not just generic urban sprawl.
New towns of the size and ambition of Milton Keynes—whether at Tempsford or not—will eventually make a real difference to our housing problems. But Milton Keynes took 50 years to grow to its present size, and it is hard to believe that any of the next generation of new towns will see removal vans arriving before the next election.
Most new housing is nothing like the Duchy of Cornwall’s model. Poundbury, King Charles’s finest achievement, is still home to fewer than 4,000 people. A more likely but still questionable model for the future, when housing is left to market forces is central Manchester, where just 500 people lived 30 years ago. It is on course to have 100,000 residents by 2025. In the past 16 years, the city has built 24 high-rises taller than 100m to accommodate more than 60,000 people. New homes will take the form of ever taller towers, of which there are about 70 currently in the pipeline. One is more than 250m high and would be among the tallest residential buildings in Europe.
The fringes of London are following the Manchester model. The jumble of used-car lots and old railway land in North Acton is sprouting high-rises such as the 180m-tall Icon Tower, which comprises 701 homes—a third of them affordable—across 54 floors. Most of the architectural freak show south of the Thames between Battersea and Vauxhall has a substantially lower proportion of affordable homes. This is where Robert Jenrick’s enthusiasm for Scruton’s beauty campaign did not stop him from allowing developers to turbocharge their permission to build a 31-storey tower, making it instead a 53-storey skyscraper.
Britain has enough architectural talent to offer much more appealing models for new homes than either of these extremes. In Liverpool, the Assemble group, a collective of designers and artists as well as architects, has been working in the Granby Four Streets area of Toxteth for more than a decade, supporting successful community efforts to save their homes from demolition. The architect Peter Barber has demonstrated that it is possible to build medium-density council housing that people want to live in. The innovative development company Pocket Living has used a number of architectural practices to find ingenious ways of building homes to budgets that first-time home-buyers can afford. The variety of their output eloquently demonstrates the fact that there is no single aesthetic code that can address all the complexities of British homebuilding and the nuances of the country’s tastes.
What Rayner has not yet done is address the single most crucial issue facing the UK’s dysfunctional housing system, which is to define a realistic balance between public and private. The housing emergency that every political party now acknowledges we face has lots of causes. The resistance of many communities to new development, whatever it looks like, is a real challenge. So is the lack of skilled labour to build houses. Any ways forward should consider the UK’s carbon budget. But achieving net zero is probably incompatible with Labour’s new housing target without massive savinvs in the carbon budget for other areas.
However, the most obvious issue is the long-term failure of the market to fill the gap left by the abolition of council houses. The private sector built 140,000 homes in 1977. Despite a vastly expanded housing market—the UK’s population has grown by 12m people in the past 50 years—and every kind of incentive for buyers, including subsidised mortgages, shared ownership schemes and stamp duty holidays, almost exactly the same number of private homes were completed in 2023. Just as the owners of private hostels have been unable to provide homeless families with civilised accommodation, so the private sector has never produced enough new homes to address all of the country’s needs. In the end, it is not in the interests of commercial housebuilders to sell too many homes at the same time, because it could depress the margins they can achieve. Real progress in addressing shortages has only been made in periods in which local government has played an active part in homebuilding: councils can budget to rent the houses that they build, rather than sell them right away to cover their costs.
It is a telling coincidence that the 1.5m new homes Labour is promising to deliver exactly matches the number of council houses that were sold during Thatcher’s 10 years in office. She brought the UK’s postwar political consensus to an abrupt end, and council housebuilding policies that were pursued by both main parties almost came to a halt. To turn Britain into a nation of property owners—and perhaps also into Conservative voters—she demonised social housing. To abolish a form of housing on which 22m Britons once relied, she had to find ways to persuade them that they were not losing anything of value. She set out to suggest that council housing was in itself a very bad thing, responsible for every kind of social problem—from vandalism and crime to family breakdown. Paradoxically, she also needed to present it as something that those of its citizens living in council housing wanted to buy from the government at a steep discount.
A climate was created in which those homes that could not be sold came to be considered worthless and marked for demolition. That climate is changing, but we are still feeling its effects. In the past decade, no fewer than 60,000 council homes have been demolished. Those homes have included such architectural landmarks as Robin Hood Gardens in east London, designed by Peter and Alison Smithson; a fragment of it was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum. In Glasgow, where 3,500 families live in temporary accommodation that costs the council £75m a year, the folly of demolishing 4,000 homes on two estates—and building just 518 new ones to replace them—is all too apparent.
It would have made more sense, financially and environmentally, to repair and restore apartments that were built to space standards more generous than what is on offer today. The Cité du Grand Parc in Bordeaux—a massive 4,000-apartment housing development from the 1960s, which was in as bleak a condition as any social housing in Britain—was rehabilitated by the Pritzker Prize-winning architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, thus showing that the knee-jerk inclination to demolish is not the only option.
Halting the loss of existing social housing through demolition or Right to Buy is one step. But Rayner is also calling for the raising of the new-build target to 370,000—still less than the 380,000 that France managed last year. The evidence of the past 50 years is that the only way to achieve this is through a renewed commitment to local authority housebuilding. Brutalism may be back in fashion, but council housing still has a way to go.
