Up to 5,000 new homes will be built by 2019 to kickstart the UK’s first 21st-century garden city, the man charged with its delivery has said.
Michael Cassidy, the chairman of the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, which has been tasked by ministers with creating a 15,000-home community in a disused quarry in Kent, said he would marshall public money to help persuade private developers to speed up delivery.
The brownfield site on the Thames estuary has been earmarked for development since 2003 when Tony Blair said it would be the key part of a 120,000-home Thames gateway development. A high-speed rail link to St Pancras station in London opened in 2007, but only a few hundred homes have since been built.
“We would expect to deliver between 3,000 and 5,000 homes in the foreseeable future, I’m talking the next three or four years, but at the moment the delivery rate is much slower than that,” Cassidy told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Even though the first phase of the development is sold out, the next phase will see just 950 homes built by the private housebuilder, Redrow. It has been inundated with four expressions of interest for every home.
Cassidy admitted the private developers’ “instinct would be to take it slowly”, but said: “Our job is to get close to them, work hard alongside them and provide government resource to make it worth their while. They are not going to do it as a charitable enterprise.”
In March 2014, George Osborne pledged up to £200m in public investment “to support 15,000 new homes and create the first garden city for almost 100 years”.
That will be spent on “roads, water, sewerage and hard infrastructure”, a spokeswoman for the development corporation said.
Asked whether the land would be better brought under the ownership of the public development corporation rather than the current owner, Land Securities, Cassidy said: “We have to work with the tools we are given and in this particular case we are happy to actually join forces with the people who actually have the land ownership ... rather than go out on a great mission to change who owns it.”
Labour’s shadow housing and planning minister, John Healey, called for a “step change in ambition” from the government.
“New towns and garden cities must be a big part of any attempt to get serious about building the homes we need,” he said. “They’re particularly important given the record low rate of housebuilding we’ve seen in the last five years. The best year for housing completions in the last parliament was 2014, but that was still lower than the lowest year for completions under Labour in 2009.
“To get new towns and garden cities moving we need a step change in ambition from this government. The postwar new towns programme was building around 20,000 homes a year across a dozen towns at its peak, of all tenures.”
Ben Rogers, director of the Centre for London thinktank, which focuses on the challenges facing the capital, said developers were wary of building too fast.
“They have to make huge upfront investments in land remediation, in roadworks, in schools,” he said. “The property market is famously given to cycles and you never know when the next boom or bust comes along. For them it’s a very risky business and that is one of the problems with previous approaches to the Thames gateway. They have been ambitious and politicians love ambitious visions but developers are scared of them.”
