Housing and planning charity, the Town and Country Planning Association has today strongly welcomed Ed Miliband's commitment in his Leader's speech to the Labour Party conference for new garden cities as part of the solution to the nation's chronic housing crisis.
Responding to Ed Miliband's speech, Kate Henderson, TCPA Chief Executive said:
"The TCPA strongly welcomes Ed Miliband's recognition of our deepening housing supply crisis and worsening affordability with a Labour Party commitment to support new Garden Cities as part of the solution.
"A new generation of Garden Cities is long overdue. The TCPA has been running a re-invigorated Garden City campaign for the last two years, making the case for how large scale housing development can be highly successful, such as in Welwyn and Letchworth Garden Cities. Many of the Garden City ideals remain of critical relevance today, providing a foundation and an economy of scale for high quality, attractive and inclusive places, creating new jobs and truly sustainable lifestyles."
"The Garden Cities were fired by a sense of idealism and enthusiasm, with numerous voluntary organisations. Today, we can go further, placing local people at the heart of the process from the outset in order to shape our new communities and put in place long term community governance models."
The TCPA has this month published the first research of its kind to analyse the Census 2011 and latest population data to project the level of housing demand and need over the next twenty years. The stark findings from this report, carried out by the eminent housing academic, Alan Holmans at Cambridge University, set out the need for over 240,000 homes per year, while current housebuilding levels are around only 110,000 per year.
Kate Henderson added:
We urgently need a new vision for housing and the development of new communities. That new vision has to ensure a substantial increase in the supply of new homes and address affordability. At the same time, we must focus on building successful new communities, whether as part of urban regeneration or through new Garden Cities. This is essential not just to our economic future but also the social and environmental wellbeing of our country.
