Suggestions to build more new towns for millennials (Could new towns help solve today’s social problems?, 8 August), are well-intentioned. But without a re-examination of garden city principles, this will only lead to more suburban sprawl and loss of treasured countryside. You reference Ebenezer Howard’s “utopian vision” of “self-sustaining communities” living in “municipal harmony”. However, Howard’s vision was of sustainable, walkable communities that used land well, set in a permanent green belt, and definitely not suburban sprawl.
I grew up in Letchworth, the first result of Howard’s vision, and this was instrumental in my choice of town and country planning as a career. Howard envisaged 5,500 building plots in his garden city with an average size of 240 square metres – a net density of over 40 homes per hectare (almost double what is generally proposed in recent so-called garden villages), when households were double the size they are today.
If we’re going to be serious about garden city principles, and insist on their inclusion in national planning policy, we need a debate about what they should mean in the 21st century. The starting point must be to reverse the thinking that led to a century of suburban sprawl being justified in Howard’s name. Only then should we consider building more garden cities.
Matt Thomson
Head of planning, Campaign to Protect Rural England
• Zoe Williams (Homelessness: it’s a very Tory kind of scandal, Journal, 14 August) rightly states that “homelessness is caused by policies”, but omits from her list the policy of uncontrolled immigration from the EU, amounting to the population of a medium-sized provincial city every 12 months. If Labour heeded those calling for a “vote until you get it right” second referendum, the Labour party would own that uncontrolled immigration – and the homelessness that results.
Christopher Clayton
Chester
• The government’s announcement of extra funding to end rough sleeping in England by 2027 is an important step forward, but more can be done (May pledges an extra £50m for homes in bid to end rough sleeping, 13 August). By working together, charitable funders and the charities they support will play a vital role in achieving this aim.
As London’s biggest independent grant giver, City Bridge Trust has provided grants totalling £6m for homelessness work in the past 10 years. We are currently partnering with several organisations to help fund longer-term projects to reduce rough sleeping. The City of London Corporation’s Social Investment Fund has invested £6.4m in this area, including £500,000 in YMCA London South West to provide 36 affordable homes.
Homelessness is rising, and we must tackle its root causes, and help people to live independently in safe, stable accommodation.
Alison Gowman
Chairman of the City of London Corporation’s City Bridge Trust committee
• Bernard Marder QC (Letters, 10 August) is right about the need for communities to benefit from increases in land values created by planning permissions, although successive Tory governments have reversed every such measure introduced by Labour. A Labour government would need at least two terms to have any chance of getting the principle to stick, and that’s well short of a given. The residential property revaluation that Marder calls for would bring more immediate benefit, because it would be simpler and couldn’t be reversed. By putting a slow puncture in house prices, it would begin to address the main problem facing a generation excluded from home ownership.
That problem is affordability, not supply. No one but the development lobby claims that releasing more land will bring down prices, because developers won’t increase supply to the point where they have to drop their prices. They will simply continue to reap the windfalls that planning permission brings, and laugh at the community that allows them. But that rising generation will be voting increasingly for radical intervention, and just as department stores are crumbling under a changing order, so will property values, maintained hitherto by low interest rates, inherited property wealth and the outrageous help-to-buy. It will be messy, not least for the banks, but it’s overdue.
John Worrall
Cromer, Norfolk
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