These announcements, buried deep in the Budget detail, could radically change the way we deliver new homes.

Because rural councils will soon be able to acquire land for these "garden villages" at an affordable price, the development bodies they create will be able to afford to invest upfront in the schools, shops, GPs’ surgeries, workplaces, parks and sports fields to create sustainable communities. This will all be achievable at no expense to taxpayers, as the cost will be repaid by plot sales.

Landowners won’t get a windfall in the form of an unearned multi-million-pound payoff, but they will get decent compensation - more than enough to buy a much better farm or home somewhere else.

Keeping the cost of land moderate will make the homes built on it affordable too – and not just some of them. With plots readily available to all comers, prices will be driven down through competition, rather than up through shortage of supply.

All this is great news for people who desperately want a decent home in a well-served, attractive community. There will be plenty of choice, as low-cost plots can be made available for self-builders and those wanting to commission a home from a local builder, as well as to housing associations, small and medium-sized businesses, and new entrants to the UK housing market - including overseas builders used to mass-producing at scale - who will now be able to access plots without planning risk.

Most importantly, the change offers a new option for councils struggling to deliver the homes their communities need in the face of understandable concerns from existing residents about the impacts of new development - not just visually, but in terms of local services, traffic congestion, and affordability.

Meeting the deadlines for local plans will also become easier, as housing need can be more readily met with a single new settlement using New Towns Act powers, with delivery guaranteed through the development body. This makes for a simpler process, without the need to negotiate the difficult politics of multiple smaller urban extensions (or even a larger one) involving complex land holdings, viability issues and questionable delivery.

This opens the path to the US and European model, in which homes are often built to order within well-planned settlements, and where the necessary social (and other) infrastructure is delivered by a "master builder" and funded by plot sales.

As the development under this model can’t be controlled by one or two large housebuilders, no one can control house prices by drip-feeding homes to a desperate market – nor will they have to do so to meet high land prices.

House-builders will, however, have to compete on quality and price. The development body, engaging commercial expertise, will act for the community as a whole to deliver a great place. It will enforce the masterplan and design codes, and deliver all the services, selling plots at affordable prices.

I believe this will be especially good news for historic market towns and villages besieged by speculative development proposals. Councils that opt to deliver a new garden village to meet local needs will be able to rule out unwanted development on the edge of historic settlements, protecting the places people care about most - those in their own back yard.

It is also about creating sustainable communities fit for the 21st century. With low-cost land, it is far easier to deliver the premises for local entrepreneurs that are typical of older settlements. Shop units, offices and small business premises become part of the infrastructure investment, turning presumptions about what is "viable" on their heads.

This way, we can create communities that are far more self-contained than any recent urban extension.

I would struggle to find a large housing estate that has anything like the range of facilities and businesses found in my village of 1400 homes. Why? Because, in my village, premises are not capital investments competing for land with new homes, expected to make a sizable return for landowner, developer and national retailer. As a result, they are readily available at low cost.

Of course, people will travel to larger service centres for fashion retail and other ‘big trip’ items. But think for a moment – what does 21st century sustainability look like? In an age were electric vehicles are around the corner, the trip to town down the main road will no longer be unsustainable.

What is unsustainable is the traffic congestion currently found in historic towns as people travel by car (let’s face it, they don’t walk) from an edge-of-town estate to established schools, shops and workplaces in the town centre.

This congestion is not ‘solvable’ if we go on extending the edge of town. By contrast, those travelling into major centres from a new settlement can be picked up at a park and ride, and/or given rapid transport options such as executive coaches and bus links. Alternatively, they can be persuaded to use home delivery services instead of making the trip at all.

Today the default option for new homes is endless ‘anywhere town’ estates crammed onto the green fields around historic communities, built there in the name of ‘sustainability’, but in fact adding to congestion.

These are the green fields people value precisely because they are on their doorsteps, and are the setting of their historic communities. They are the fields that absorb flood water and provide access to the countryside.

This is also the land that is most costly, controlled by "land options" guaranteeing the highest possible prices with few, if any, services. As a result, people who move into the new homes have to drive across town for everything, leading to ever-more congested roads, overcrowded schools and surgeries, all at the cost of the historic settings of every market town and village.

No wonder new development is so unpopular.

Residents don’t get the homes they want, either. People are able to well describe their hopes for a home - typically, they look for a decent and affordable house and garden, in a strong neighbourhood, with local facilities and a good school.

Yet we almost always fail to deliver this, because the price of land is too high. In a society where only two per cent of the population aspire to live in a flat, around 40 per cent of what we build are flats.

In a country where, even in the ‘overcrowded’ South East, 87 per cent of the land is green fields, and where meeting housing needs would use less than one per cent of that space, we act as though we are so short of land that an Englishman’s home can no longer include a decent garden - or any at all. What are we thinking of?

A new generation of smaller garden towns and villages - and the extension of the power to use the New Towns Act (suitably modernised) to local planning authorities to achieve them - does not rule out more conventional development options. But I believe it adds a fundamentally game-changing option to the mix.

In time, it will alter perceptions of what land is worth on the urban fringe, as landowners on the edge of town will have to compete for development, no longer able to assume it will come to them sooner or later, and to command prices that reflect under-supply and a lack of alternatives.

This isn’t about more green fields being developed – it is about which green fields, and who gets the financial benefit of development.

It’s not about building new housing estates - it’s about creating sustainable holistic new communities.

Crucially, it’s about listening to what people actually want.

If each of England's rural local authorities builds just one or two new garden villages during the next decade, they can deliver the extra homes desperately needed in their communities in great, well-served new settlements, at prices people can afford.

And all without ruining the historic places we treasure.

19/01/2016

The Local Government Association says councils should have the power to charge big companies that sit on sites with planning permission.

The tax would act as a punishment to developers who land-bank, preventing homes from being built despite being given the go-ahead by councils.  Almost half a million homes have been granted permission but have not been started, the LGA has found.

The research also revealed that developers are taking a year longer on average to complete work compared to nine years ago, while planning applications given permission have also gone up compared to 2007/8.

“New homes are badly-needed and councils want to get on with the job of building them. If we are to see a genuine end to our housing crisis we have to be given the powers to get on with it.”

A spokesman for the Department for Communities and Local Government said: "The government is determined to see more homes built, we do not want to increase costs and bureaucracy that slow the rate of housing delivery or planning permissions being brought forward.

“We do want to see improvements in build out rates and we have seen the number of new homes increase by 25 per cent in the last year alone and are working with the sector to achieve even faster build out.”

A hundred communities in England have adopted Neighbourhood Plans.

Locality has allocated £6.7m in government grants to support community groups through the process since its introduction under the Localism Act in 2011.

Chief executive Tony Armstrong said people want to influence what happens on their doorstep. “Whether that’s ensuring there’s enough affordable housing for their children in the future, protecting green spaces or safeguarding their neighbourhood’s heritage, they get to say what’s important to them and, more importantly, they get to be listened to,” he said.

03/10/2015