With Government plans to start building 1.5 million homes in new towns, garden communities and large-scale developments over the next few years, experts gathered at the 5th annual Building New Communities Conference to consider the best means of advancing the modern era of house building.
The event – led entirely by White Label and backed by sponsors – was held at RIBA London on 29 April, chaired by Alex Notay, Chair of the Radix Big Tent Housing Commission, also saw the launch of the Essex Housing Awards, in association with Birketts. Read more.
Demonstrating the Government’s backing for the Building New Communities programme, Baroness Taylor of Stevenage, gave a keynote address and said: “Fundamental to our growth mission, which sits at the heart of our Plan for Change, is creating the next generation of new towns as we build 1.5m new homes of all tenures. I make no apology for the ambition of that target, and we will include the biggest boost to affordable and social housing in a generation.”
Providing an update on the Government’s Garden Communities Programme, Fionnuala Lennon, Head of New Settlements & Garden Communities, Homes England, said about one sixth of the programme’s 300,000 planned homes had been built, leaving “a substantial number of new homes and other assets still to be delivered.” However, she was confident the “vast majority of remaining projects” would start within the next four years.
Fionnuala noted how the programme had expanded beyond its original “garden communities” scope, saying: “New towns, eco towns, garden towns, garden villages, new communities and all those emerging large, new settlements without appendages, we can tell much about a new place by its title and how it’s referred to, but different name, same aspiration.”
This year saw too, the renaming of the conference from Garden Communities to Building New Communities, to encompass these changes and emphasise the renewed growth drive.
“There’s been a real energy to the day,” Fionnuala said about the conference. “I felt it in the air.”
Building New Communities thought leadership
In the run-up to the conference, Building New Communities published two exclusive thought-leadership pieces from sector experts. In the first, Dr Catriona Riddell of Catriona Riddell & Associates (pictured at the conference in main image), discussed the impact of devolution and new local authority spatial plans on building homes and creating places. Read more.
In the second, Kevin McGeough, Head of Strategy and Placemaking, Ebbsfleet Garden City, explained how the development corporation at Ebbsfleet is “listening to build better” and “how resident insights are shaping life in Ebbsfleet”. Read more.
