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The garden village dream

A group of North Essex councils plans to build garden settlements that would deliver 40,000 homes in the county. Deborah Talbot finds out more.  Illustration by Helena Perez Garcia.  Photography by Alamy

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Are plans for garden villages in north Essex just a dream? #ukhousing

One year ago, the government announced a string of 14 new garden settlements and three garden towns across England. If all goes to plan, 48,000 homes will be built as a result.

The aim is to construct attractive, well-designed new settlements that meet housing need. Gavin Barwell, housing minister at the time, said they should be “places, not just dormitory suburbs”.

In North Essex, four councils are taking the idea and running with it.

The plans are certainly ambitious. The councils are joining together to form a new sort of development company with the aim of building three garden settlements made up of 40,000 homes – almost as many as the government has approved across England so far.

Colchester Council, Braintree Council, Tendring Council and Essex County Council – which together form the partnership – believe they can deliver the housing and ambitious social change. But opposition is already starting to mount.


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One of the three settlements will be to the east of Colchester, nestled close to its edge, and another is planned for what will be called West Tey, which lies between the west of the town and Braintree. A third settlement is planned for the west of Braintree.

The settlements will be built on greenfield land, some of which is agricultural.

They plan to set up a council-led development corporation, and anticipate having powers to borrow and compulsorily purchase land. The plans are yet to be fully agreed by central government.

Colchester says it will deliver a minimum of 25-30% social housing and a variety of mixed-tenure options, though the language from other partners sometimes slides into the more ambiguous “affordable housing”.

“I’m increasingly confident that this is a solution whose time has come,” Paul Smith

As the plans evolve, housing associations, key stakeholders, self-builders and residents will be involved in designing the settlements.

The prospect of being able to access grants and borrowing for what will be around 40,000 dwellings has got councillors excited. A core part of that enthusiasm, though by no means the only motivation, is the possibility of the first significant expansion of affordable and social housing for 20 years.

“I’m increasingly confident that this is a solution whose time has come,” says Paul Smith, Liberal Democrat leader of Colchester Council, which is run by a Liberal Democrat/Labour/Independent coalition administration.

Mr Smith is also a director on the board of North Essex Garden Communities (NEGC), which is the interim delivery vehicle for the garden settlements.

Colchester alone has 4,000 people on its housing waiting list and many more in sub-standard rented housing.

The council saw an opportunity in the government’s garden village proposals, says Tina Bourne, who holds the housing portfolio at Colchester Council.

“It needs to be futuristic. It needs to be properly integrated,” she says. “We don’t want to see the row of affordable housing, the row of private housing, and the council housing looking out on a boggy field, right on the east side, so it gets the worst wind.”

Mixed development, mixed tenure, multiple developers and delivery mechanisms will make the settlement look and feel very different from standard private delivery, Ms Bourne argues.

The councils want to make the building eco compliant, they want innovative design – including a mix of dense urban housing and more detached rural housing – and they want infrastructure such as schools, GP surgeries, rapid transport systems, new bus routes and cycle lanes to go in first.

The dreams don’t stop there. Labour’s Tim Young, deputy leader of Colchester Council and also a director of NEGC, argues that a core part of the plan is to create jobs – one for every house built. “And it’s important we live up to that,” he says.

Milton Keynes is an example of a successful new settlement
Milton Keynes is an example of a successful new settlement

And the final piece of the puzzle is that the council sees North Essex as a growth area for the digital and knowledge industries, which will be augmented by an A120 Enterprise Corridor between Stansted and Harwich.

But do the economics stack up? Rosie Pearson, secretary of the Campaign Against Urban Sprawl in Essex (CAUSE), which was set up to oppose the West Tey development, thinks not. CAUSE argues that the debt risk from the land finance costs if all land is bought upfront – which it believes may total up to £4bn – is too high, putting the social housing ratio, and councils, at risk.

CAUSE believes, says Ms Pearson, that “landowners and developers won’t play ball”. The group thinks the council will be entrenched in the kind of developer-led battles to evade having to deliver social housing that have dogged other private sector-led housing in the area.

CAUSE believes that a large town-style settlement of 14,000 homes is wrong for the more rural West Tey, preferring the use of brownfield land in Colchester itself, building mixed dwellings around existing rural villages and additional Poundbury-style developments.

But the council says that would be insufficient to meet housing need. Mr Smith (who has a background in the banking sector) and other councillors seem confident in their ability to deliver the social housing component.

What are garden settlements?

Garden settlements are a policy initiative by the Conservative government, but one which has strong echoes in Gordon Brown’s idea of ‘eco-towns’.

They are intended to be an answer to unplanned sprawl and, although a national policy, are a nod to the need to loosen the green belt’s stranglehold on development in the South of England.

Garden settlements are ‘new towns’ with defined borders and are situated away from major conurbations, although connected by transport schemes.

The last wave of garden settlements in the UK before and after World War II had mixed results, though they were initially popular. But there are big success stories, like Milton Keynes.

At the start of 2017, the government announced a string of new garden settlements – 14 garden villages and three garden towns – to be built across England. More are to come.

Garden settlement principles include community engagement; land capture and ownership for the community; mixed-tenure and affordable housing; green space and green community assets; resilient retail, recreational and cultural facilities; and integrated transport systems.

The key is land value. NEGC will apply for compulsory purchase powers to buy land at a much lower price than development land, meaning that the homes will be cheaper (since a large slice of housing cost is the high cost of land).

Councillors don’t believe CAUSE’s assessment of debt is accurate, saying landowners would not want to sell land up front for ‘tax-related’ reasons.

"Councils may also build themselves by setting up housing companies which are free to borrow"

The councils will also borrow at 3% from the Public Works Loan Board to deliver the necessary infrastructure before, or alongside, the houses.

And councils may also build themselves by setting up housing companies which are free to borrow. Then they can rent or sell depending on markets and need.

Mr Smith responds: “One of the advantages of the garden settlements on the development corporation model is that we can be flexible over time. If the market’s strong, we might sell more than 150 houses out of 200 built, and bank a good profit. At some point the market will dip down, so we wouldn’t be able to sell so many, but we’d rent them instead. By doing this we could run a counter-cyclical approach to the housing market that would allow us to provide social housing at a much lower cost.”

As both CAUSE and Colchester Council point out, the successful delivery of social housing as part of the garden settlements hinges on NEGC having the power to compulsorily purchase land.

North Essex and the development corporation model

North Essex and the development corporation model

The four councils in North Essex leading the garden settlement proposals are the borough councils of Colchester, Braintree and Tendring, and Essex County Council.

Together they have formed North Essex Garden Communities (NEGC) and will bid to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government for development corporation status, which would make the organisation an arm’s-length, council-led body which controls and manages all aspects of the development of specified areas.

The corporation would work with powers handed directly from central government, which would take control of the land for development and manage infrastructure.

What’s different about the new development corporation model is that it will be council-led, rather than central government-led – a power proposed in last year’s Housing White Paper and which passed into law in the Neighbourhood Planning Act 2017.

Councils such as Colchester hope that allowing local authorities full control will prevent the weaknesses of the first new garden settlement of Ebbsfleet in Kent, announced in 2014.

Central government set up a development corporation to manage mostly pre-existing private developer planning permissions.

Architect Richard Rogers has claimed the development is “unsustainable”, and even the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation is unimpressed by the quality of the housing and argues the homes are not in accordance with garden city principles.

NEGC is currently waiting for the New Towns Act 1981 (Local Authority Oversight) Regulations to be finalised, which will dictate the scope of the development corporation’s powers.

NEGC argues that they will be awarded powers. Barristers for the opposing parties – CAUSE and Hands Off Wivenhoe – say not, and are talking about a judicial review, though there are currently no plans to pursue a lawsuit.

And this is where the uncertainty lies. Central government housing policy is going through a period of flux, with both Labour and elements of the Conservative Party – Sajid Javid and Nick Boles – shifting the Overton window in favour of tougher measures against landowners and a greater role for the state.

Yet the enticements of the free market remain for core parts of the government – not least the Treasury, which has “slipped in a borrowing cap on the garden communities of £100m”, acknowledges Colchester Council’s Mr Smith.

And if the government decides to further diminish councils’ room to manoeuvre, the cards become stacked in favour of private development companies.

"Councils are risking debt and are gambling that the policy dice will roll in their favour"

The other possibility is a future Labour administration. The national party intervened against the Haringey Development Vehicle and recently announced it wants to force land sales at a lower value and build significant numbers of new council housing.

The policy uncertainty is layered on top of an imminent Brexit. A leaked economic impact assessment suggests that a hard Brexit will cut the region’s economic growth by 8%, a scenario NEGC has not yet been able to process.

With any significant change comes risk. Many residents are uneasy about the settlements. In a signal of how differently the plans are viewed, Ms Bourne says that using the term ‘development’ in itself has “negative undertones”.

And the stakes are very high. Councils are risking debt and are gambling that the policy dice will roll in their favour. But it is all for laudable ends. North Essex has some unanswerable problems to contend with that can’t be met with more of the same. Jobs, young people, the London drift, inequality and inadequate housing all present risks, too.

The garden settlements do involve thinking big – which is risky. But the councils just can’t afford to say no.

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