Old ideas and new towns in Labour’s housing plan

I enjoy the Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast series as it gives a bit more air to issues of immediate importance. The episode on Labour’s housing plan (24 June) got me thinking. I used to work on Gordon Brown’s eco-towns project and found that the biggest objection was that new towns had failed in the past. We need to convince people that this programme signals change. This time, we need to do better.

Surely the best way is to use the new new towns to repair some of the less successful old new towns. Take Livingston, near Glasgow – not a disaster, but a “could do better”.

It was conceived as an oil town – it sat above the first, and one of the biggest, land-based shale oil fields in the UK. Surely it is time to reinvigorate Livingston’s very low-density town centre, its falling school rolls and its poor-quality housing stock to rebuild or refurbish something of the best quality – yes, more population, but with better services and facilities that serve everyone.

Before we plod into new green fields, we should expand and repair these new towns of the past to create more sustainable cities. It’s a much cheaper option. A test of a new town is its economy. What better fillip to Livingston’s economy and wellbeing than locating GB Energy there as well.
Wendy Shillam
Retired architect and town planner, London

• Re Heather Stewart’s article (Labour plans to build 1.5m homes. Will that help Britons struggling for good housing?, 23 June), the planning system is not the problem (although more local authority planners would certainly help). The issue is developers failing to build. In 2021, the Local Government Association estimated that planning permission had been granted for 2.8m homes in the previous decade in England but only 60% of them had been built. There is an obvious need for greater incentives, including penalties for developers that do not use the permission within a specified time. Even better would be a land tax, but it seems unlikely that even a government supposedly committed to “change” would go for that.
Prof Roger Brown
Southampton

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