New Towns

Nick Thomas-Symonds Excerpts

Wednesday 12th July 2017 Westminster Hall

[Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this important debate. I represent about two thirds of Cwmbran new town, in the southern part of my constituency. Unfortunately, the Government are proposing to relocate jobs away from the Cwmbran pension centre and out of the new town. Although we can certainly have policies in favour of new towns, I suggest that the Government need a coherent approach and should not be withdrawing jobs from new towns at the same time.

[Lucy Allan]

I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s contribution. I completely agree that a successful new town must have inward investment and jobs. It is about not just housing, but the whole community. We must look at new towns from that perspective.

Some years ago the Communities and Local Government Committee did some excellent work on new towns. It first looked at them in 2002, and it revisited them in the 2007-08 Session, but the Government of the day were reluctant to take on board its recommendations. The Committee visited Harlow, Corby and Telford, and did a significant amount of research. Disappointingly, there was the sense that new towns should be normalised and treated just like any other town. There was no recognition of their distinctive and specific needs, which is partly why I wanted to hold this debate.

Fortunately, the Town and Country Planning Association revisited those reports and produced some excellent work on how to use the experiences of the past to inform what we do for the future. It set up the new towns network to work with local authorities in new towns across the country and try to bring together some of these common themes. I only discovered that wonderful organisation while researching for this debate, which was fortunate, because had I come to this place without that knowledge, I would probably have been reinventing the wheel. I am grateful to it for its excellent publications, which I will happily send to any hon. Members who would like to see them. They contain a thorough analysis of the challenges. I am delighted to see that the Minister has a copy of one of them with him, and I hope that he has read it.

I have the great honour and privilege of representing the fastest growing new town in the country. Telford is a unique town. It has a specific identity and a proud industrial heritage as the birthplace of the industrial revolution. It is a collection of former mining villages on the east Shropshire coalfield. It has an enviable rural-urban mix and a fantastic quality of life, which we should seek to emulate in the house building drive that the Government are committed to. Despite the many hurdles that Telford has experienced along the way, and rural Shropshire’s considerable resistance to its development—for example, there was resistance to the building of the M54, the main link road to Birmingham, and it took many years of persistence to get that connection—it is now a dynamic, thriving centre of gravity for the entire surrounding area. Some of that was brought about by welcome Government investment in Telford. We should not ignore the part that the Government have played in their commitment to Telford, for which I am very grateful. I very much hope that, as the MP for Telford, I will be able to continue to secure such investment.

Telford is now a huge population centre and a huge business centre. It has inward investment, commerce and advanced manufacturing, and all sorts of high-tech and new economy businesses are coming to Telford, but it has never had it easy. Its success is all about its innovation and willingness to embrace change. All new towns have had to have exactly that spirit: they have had to have determination, optimism and hope to make the towns what they are today. The new town movement was conceived with the vision of hope, opportunity for all, clean air, green spaces and better living conditions, but in some cases that vision did not come to full fruition.

Telford has overcome those obstacles and is a shining example of what a successful new town can be. That is why I wanted to share its example today. It is now where all the houses are planned and all the jobs are going, so it needs to be where the schools and hospitals are built and where the infrastructure is located. I say that because we still have many battles with the surrounding rural Shropshire about what investment should come to Telford.

As I said, all new towns were based on a premise of optimism and a vision for a better future. The lessons we can learn from the past will play a fundamental part in tackling this country’s housing shortage.

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady, who is generous in giving way to me again. I entirely agree about the vision for new towns. When they were conceived by the post-war Labour Government in the late 1940s, it was not only with a vision of hope and optimism, but with the idea that things could be planned in advance, rather than only as a response to past problems. The new towns were settlements where we could plan for the future. That could be used again as a strategy for future new towns.

[Lucy Allan]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that important point. The long-term stewardship of the assets of new towns is fundamental to their future success. It is all too easy to say, “We have a local authority that is thinking only about the needs of today and is neglecting to look at the long-term vision.” We want the stewardship concept.