On 18 May 2026, the Labour government quietly closed its consultation on the next wave of "new towns" — sweeping new developments at Tempsford in Bedfordshire, Crews Hill and Chase Park in Enfield, Leeds South Bank in West Yorkshire, and Manchester Victoria North. Tens of thousands of homes. Vast swathes of green-belt and brownfield land. New infrastructure obligations imposed on neighbouring councils with no say in the matter. And a consultation period that was, as ever, the legal minimum dressed up as meaningful engagement.
This is what top-down planning looks like under Labour. It is what top-down planning has always looked like, under every Westminster government that has tried it. And it is exactly the wrong way to address Britain's housing crisis.
Britain Does Have a Housing Crisis — But Not the One Labour Is Solving
Let us be clear-eyed. Britain does need more housing. Young couples in Preston, Burnley and Lancaster cannot get on the ladder. Renters are being priced out of every market in the country. Council housing waiting lists are decades long. The shortage is real. But the shortage has two components that Labour's New Towns plan refuses to confront.
The first is demand. Net migration has been running at half a million a year. Every new arrival needs a home. You cannot run the immigration system at current levels and pretend the housing crisis is purely a supply problem. Labour will build new towns. The migration will fill them. The waiting list will be no shorter for British families. That is not theory. That is arithmetic.
The second is consent. Real housing supply comes from communities that want development — because the development comes with the infrastructure, the schools, the GP capacity and the jobs that make the new homes work. Imposed development, by contrast, builds resentment and political backlash, slows everything down with legal challenge, and produces dormitory estates that nobody actually wants to live in.
The New Towns Plan Bypasses Local Democracy
The most striking feature of the Labour proposals is how little say local people have in them. The government picks the sites. The government writes the planning policy. The government will instruct the development corporations. The local councils — and through them, the local voters — are reduced to spectators.
Crews Hill in Enfield is a particularly egregious example. The Mayor of London's own draft plan had repeatedly excluded the site. Local residents have campaigned to protect the green space for decades. Now Whitehall steps over the top of all of that and announces a new town. Tempsford in Bedfordshire is similar. The villagers of central Bedfordshire are about to discover that their views simply do not feature in the calculation.
This is the centralising instinct that has driven every bad British housing policy for forty years. It does not produce houses. It produces planning appeals, judicial reviews, and political grievance.
Brownfield First — But Real Brownfield, Not Greenwash
The argument I make repeatedly to constituents in Preston East is that we should be using brownfield land before we touch a blade of green-belt grass. The Labour plan claims to do this. It does not. Some of the new-town sites — Crews Hill, Chase Park, Tempsford — clearly involve substantial greenfield development. The brownfield label is being applied liberally and dishonestly.
Britain has over a million identified brownfield homes in its existing planning pipeline. Disused railway land, redundant industrial sites, abandoned retail parks, dead high streets crying out for residential conversion. The country is not short of land that could be built on without losing a single hedgerow. What it is short of is a planning system that prioritises that land, gives it real incentives, and gets out of the way of the people who would build on it.
The Real Reform: Local Consent, Real Brownfield, Honest Demand
The British housing crisis will not be solved by Whitehall imposing five new towns from the top down. It will be solved by three things, which Labour refuses to do.
First, cut demand to a sustainable level by controlling immigration. Until you do this, every house you build is consumed before British families can move in.
Second, build on brownfield first, with teeth. Mandate it. Reward it with fast-track approvals. Penalise authorities that sit on brownfield while reaching for the green belt.
Third, restore local consent. Communities that vote for development get the development, and get a share of the value uplift via section 106, infrastructure levies, and direct council tax dividends. Communities that vote against it are not steamrollered by a development corporation taking instructions from Whitehall.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would scrap the imposed New Towns model and replace it with a brownfield-first, locally-consented framework. We would deliver the homes that Britain genuinely needs while protecting the countryside that makes this country what it is. And we would address the demand side of the equation as well as the supply side — because pretending one half of the problem does not exist is how you guarantee never to solve it.
Concrete is not the answer to every question. Consent is.