Vicky Evans is a town planner at Arup, an engineering and development consultancy
The government’s New Towns Taskforce report is a crucial step, but we need to be honest about what it will take to deliver their recommendations successfully. To build 1.5 million homes this parliament, we cannot simply do more of the same – we need a fundamentally different approach.
New towns must be viewed as engines of economic growth, not just housing developments. This means getting infrastructure right from day one. Too often, people oppose development because of concern about avoidable downsides: congested roads, full GP surgeries and scarce school places. Infrastructure to combat these issues often arrives too late, if at all. We need to map what infrastructure each new town requires, identify what’s already planned and fill the gaps.
But here’s the critical challenge: we currently lack the skilled professionals to deliver this vision. The public sector is haemorrhaging talent to private employers. 82% of local authorities struggle to hire town planners, and civil engineering skills shortages nearly doubled between 2022 and 2024.
The original new towns succeeded because they attracted transformative talent with interdisciplinary expertise. Milton Keynes – one of the towns recommended by the taskforce – wasn’t built by housing developers alone, it required planners, engineers, architects and visionary leaders working together.
While this serves as a blueprint, no new town is the same and each will require different ways of planning, financing and collaborating. The twelve locations recommended by the New Towns Taskforce – with Tempsford, Crews Hill and Leeds South Bank identified as the most promising options for development – range from inner-city projects through to existing town renewal and creating entirely new settlements. Each could attract new residents for different reasons and has its own unique financial circumstances and employment offerings; one size will not fit all for the development of these future towns.
Government, business, and education must collaborate urgently to create a pipeline of skilled professionals that can meet the specific needs of each project. We need technical academies, apprenticeship programmes and career pathways that make public sector roles attractive again.
For example, our cross-discipline research conducted on transport projects indicates that when infrastructure planning is integrated from the start, they deliver 25% faster and 20% cheaper with greener outcomes. New towns represent a generational opportunity to transform how we build in Britain and boost our economic growth. But without the right skills and integrated approach to infrastructure, we’ll simply recreate the problems we’re trying to solve. The locations are confirmed – now we must build the capacity to deliver them properly.
