An economist and former BBC chair will head up the taskforce, which is aiming for towns with 40% affordable housingGood morning. Parliament starts the summer recess today, most of the Westminster political class will be making plans for a post-election holiday, but the business of government goes on and this morning ministers are announcing plans for what they say will be “a new generation of new towns”.Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, is setting up a new towns taskforce which has been asked to recommend sites for new towns within 12 months. It will be chaired by Sir Michael Lyons, an economist, former council chief executive and former chair of the BBC who has unrivalled experience as an adviser to governments, particularly on local government matters. The deputy chair is Dame Kate Barker, an economist and former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, who has also led previous housing policy inquiries for previous governments.The programme of new towns will create largescale communities of at least 10,000 new homes each, with many significantly larger. These places could deliver hundreds of thousands of much-needed affordable and high-quality homes in the decades to come, tackling the barriers to growth and helping more working people across the country own their own home.The new towns will help unlock the economic potential of existing towns and cities across the country, and the government will continue to drive growth and regenerate areas that have been held back by constraints on their expansion for far too long. While the programme will include large-scale new communities that are separate from existing settlements, a far larger number of new towns will be urban extensions and regeneration schemes that will work with the grain of development in any given area. Continue reading…
Source link : https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2024/jul/31/labour-housing-angela-rayner-conservatives-tories-uk-politics-latest
Author : Andrew Sparrow
Publish date : 2024-07-31 08:04:59
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