With Government plans to start building 1.5 million homes in new towns, garden communities and large-scale developments over the next few years, more than 250 experts gathered at the 5th annual Building New Communities Conference to consider the best means of advancing the modern era of house building.
The event at RIBA London on 29 April, chaired by Alex Notay, Chair of the Radix Big Tent Housing Commission, also saw the launch of the Essex Housing Awards, in association with Birketts. Read more.
Demonstrating the Government’s backing for the Building New Communities programme, Baroness Taylor of Stevenage, gave a keynote address and said: “Fundamental to our growth mission, which sits at the heart of our Plan for Change, is creating the next generation of new towns as we build 1.5m new homes of all tenures. I make no apology for the ambition of that target, and we will include the biggest boost to affordable and social housing in a generation.”
Providing an update on the Government’s Garden Communities Programme, Fionnuala Lennon, Head of New Settlements & Garden Communities, Homes England, said about one sixth of the programme’s 300,000 planned homes had been built, leaving “a substantial number of new homes and other assets still to be delivered.” However, she was confident the “vast majority of remaining projects” would start within the next four years.
Fionnuala noted how the programme had expanded beyond its original “garden communities” scope, saying: “New towns, eco towns, garden towns, garden villages, new communities and all those emerging large, new settlements without appendages, we can tell much about a new place by its title and how it’s referred to, but different name, same aspiration.”
This year saw too, the renaming of the conference from Garden Communities to Building New Communities, to encompass these changes and emphasise the renewed growth drive.
“There’s been a real energy to the day,” Fionnuala said about the conference. “I felt it in the air.”
She added: “We can look back and learn much from what’s gone before to help guide us in the planning and delivery of new places of the future.
“One of the common features about building new settlements is that they need vision, leadership, funding, commitment, legacy and significantly, time to deliver and build out.”
Yet, while the Garden Communities Programme had created “a cohort of practitioners, particularly in local government” who were skilled in “planning and delivery of new places at scale,” planning – and funding – presented challenges to creating new places, Fionnuala said.
“Lessons to be drawn include that while there is no doubting the commitment of partners, real challenges include the ability or inability of our current planning system to deal with such major new settlements, and capture land value, along with the need for ever more creative funding tools and delivery levers and mechanisms to support partners, both public and private sector, to deliver.”
Indeed, the “Creating Communities, not ‘Delivering Units’” panel heard that work had not begun on a single house in many London boroughs in Q1, 2025, again attributed to both difficulties in unlocking funding along with the challenges of the planning process.
In the fireside chat, Dr Catriona Riddell, Director, Catriona Riddell & Associates, said the strategic planning frameworks to be drawn up by local authorities – as set down in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill – would become ‘strategic investment frameworks’ in creating a ‘coherent, faster and more reliable system’ thereby increasing investor confidence.
In an on-the-day conference poll, 45% of attendees identified funding as the major barrier to housing growth (39% said infrastructure delivery was the biggest concern) and that new funding models were necessary. A session on “Sustainable financing for new communities” heard these settlements could be supported through government-backed guarantees to reduce borrowing costs for private sector partnerships; public-private joint ventures and equity stakes to fund large-scale development projects; a streamlining the funding and approvals process for major projects.
The “Managing Delivery and Long-Term Stewardship” discussion heard how “genuine community involvement” could achieve stewardship “without relying on charging residents.” And as the amount of green and open space increases in new communities – with some places achieving 40% – new finance models were needed to prevent new residents paying for say, a country park, while existing users did not.
Further discussion heard how community engagement was essential from the outset, particularly to reach the isolated and resolve tensions, for as Millie Dodd, Shared Voice, said: “Our research found that 78% of our database support the government’s new town initiative & 59% back building on green belt land. Only 20% of homeowners feel the same.”
The Building New Communities Conference is organised by White Label Creative and sponsored by Bond Bryan; Ebbsfleet Development Corporation; Ebbsfleet Garden City; English Estates; Essex Developers Group; Gillespies; Greenbelt; ITP; Mills & Reeve; Phoenix Sustainable Investments Ltd; Pinsent Masons; Sibson Garden Community; UCEM; Urban Design Group.
View the full photo gallery here.
