New Towns

Richard Fuller Excerpts

Thursday 15th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Richard Fuller (North Bedfordshire) (Con)]

I would like to make it clear that I am speaking in an individual capacity as the Member of Parliament for North Bedfordshire. I congratulate the hon. Member for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch (Katrina Murray) on her speech and on the extraordinarily human way in which she described her life in a new town. For people in North Bedfordshire, the hon. Lady’s testimony may be a timely one. I would like to draw the focus of the debate to the proposals for new new towns that are recommended by the Government’s new towns taskforce.

Tempsford is a historic village in North Bedfordshire. It was the site of a decisive battle in 917 AD when the forces of King Edward the Elder stormed a Danish stronghold, killing the Danish King and effectively breaking Danish power in the region. It includes the former RAF Tempsford airfield, from which multiple special operations were flown to send people to help resistance movements in Nazi-occupied countries. It is a village of 234 households, comprising fewer than 500 people, and one that has been in two parts since the dualling of the A1 in 1962. It is also a village that, according to the report by the new towns taskforce, presents

“a unique opportunity with potential to provide over 40,000 homes in a standalone greenfield settlement”.

Tempsford is the largest of the proposed new towns and would turn this village of 500 people into a new town of at least 40,000 homes—that is 100,000-plus people.

I want to take a few minutes, speaking in this individual capacity, to raise points that have been voiced by my constituents in recent meetings with residents, the parish council and local councillor, Adam Zerny. One of the questions, of course, is, “Why Tempsford? It’s not what we want—we don’t want this change,” and so on. That is an important issue for consideration, and we await the final decision of the Government on it.

If that decision is made, the No. 1 source of scepticism is that much of Tempsford is a floodplain. There is a legitimate question about how the flood risk will be managed in any new town. Tempsford is a floodplain for both the River Ouse and the River Ivel. Sticking on the theme, local residents have for years dealt with a range of sewage overflow issues; I myself have been witness to a number of these incidents and have helped residents with them. This is important because the water company will obviously wish to improve this issue if we have a new town, so adequate funding must be available both to provide the necessary waste water and sewage water infrastructure and to solve the existing problems.

As the Minister will be aware, the pressure on water resources in Bedfordshire is extensive. We are also the site of Universal Studios’ new theme park, which will attract between 8 million and 10 million people a year—the equivalent of an additional population of 50,000 in terms of water usage. The site is being developed over the next five years. The River Ouse is the one source of water running through this area, which contains both the theme park and the new town, so we need to make sure there is a plan for this river. Bedford borough council has set up the North Bedfordshire water management group, run by Paul Leinster, formerly of the Environment Agency. I encourage the Minister to meet him to discuss the issues of both Universal Studios and Tempsford.

The Minister should also recognise that the proposal for this new town fits into a context of very rapid housing growth. Hon. Members should be aware that the number of households in Bedfordshire has been growing at two and a half times the national average for the past decade or more, meaning that we have already had a build-up of additional pressures on local services over the past 15 to 20 years. At the meeting held last week with the parish council and residents, the main issue other than the floodplain was the provision of local services, as people already do not have sufficient access to GP and transport services. Just a few miles away is the village of Northstowe, which is sort of the poster child for getting it wrong with local service provision. All the things the hon. Member for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch said should already be there were not there in Northstowe—there were no shops and no GPs for a number of years while residents were moving in. Obviously residents do not want to see that happen with Tempsford new town, if it comes forward.

Tempsford is a village that still runs on oil heating—there is no other power supply. A number of residents were keen to understand whether solar and ground source heat pumps would be a prerequisite for housing in the new town.

A key point for a village with a proposal for a new town of up to 100,000 people is, of course, its village identity and heritage, in particular around RAF Tempsford, and there is a lot of concern about one of the most important buildings there, Gibraltar Barn. Any plans must take account of that.

My residents are also connected to nature and wildlife. They chose to live in a rural area, and they are proud of their rural environment—the head office of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is just 5 miles away from Tempsford. It is crucial, if the Government move ahead with this proposal, that we do whatever we can to maintain the nature and wildlife of the area. There are also questions about the adequacy of road networks and the type of employment.

I will briefly cover a couple more areas. Professor Doug Clelland and Dr Nigel Moor, two independent planning experts, have completed research on Tempsford in the past two years and provided evidence to the House of Lords Built Environment Committee for its report “New Towns: Laying the Foundations”, relating to the footprint, scale and timeline. In the evidence, Professor Clelland and Dr Moor present a “compact centre” of 25,000 homes over 4.5 square miles with a footprint connecting St Neots to Sandy in an area between the A1 and the Great Northern rail line—an extensive area. There is also a wider footprint that could accommodate the building of an additional 15,000 homes in satellite developments stretching south from Tempsford to the village of Blunham and on to Great Barford, Wilden and Little Staughton then across to Hail Weston, including the villages of Staploe, Honeydon, Roxton, Potton, Everton and others, with a similar impact on the Cambridgeshire side of Tempsford.

I do not expect Members to know all those villages, beautiful though they are; they are well worth visiting, and Members should do so. I simply want to ensure that local residents are aware of the scale of what might take place if this proposal goes ahead in North Bedfordshire and in parts of Cambridgeshire. I am not sure that local residents have internalised that. If the Government decided to move forward with these plans, there is a lot of work they would have to do, in particular with regard to the use of farmland, as this is a primary agricultural area.

If I may, I will leave some questions with the Minister. First, the Government have a housing target of 1.5 million —personally, I am not sure they have got off to a particularly good start on that. That target may have an impact on the type of housing being built, so I would be interested to hear the Minister comment on that with regard to Tempsford.

Secondly, I have mentioned that the housing growth in North Bedfordshire is two and a half times the national average. It is the Government’s position that new towns should not count in that total, but come on—we are already struggling to keep up. There is no way we can plop this additional amount of housing on top of that pace of growth and expect things not to break.

Thirdly, will the Government’s specific social housing target apply in the context of these very large new towns? Fourthly, can I alert the Minister to the fact that the new town is potentially just one of six nationally significant infrastructure projects in Bedfordshire, two of which are directly within this footprint? One is the Black Cat roundabout, which is under way and will be completed, so that is fine. There is also a proposal for a large-scale solar farm of over 1,900 acres—that is the size of Gatwick airport and a bit more—within that satellite boundary. What on earth will happen with that? Clearly, it is a choice: we can do one or the other, but we cannot possibly do both.

Local residents are keen to make sure that their voice is heard. I had a meeting with the civil servant who is dealing with this issue, for which I prepared some documents, and she was 100% on board with that— I can see that the Minister is nodding. My residents are clear about that. Once the decision is made, if Tempsford is one of the new towns, I would strongly encourage the ministerial team to come and visit, have a conversation with the villagers and listen to them, because there is so much that can be done. As the hon. Member for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch said, in the end this is about people. If the Government take people along with them at the start when they make that decision, they will set themselves up in a much better way.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for this important debate, and to the hon. Member for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch (Katrina Murray) for bringing it forward. I have been rehearsing the name of her constituency in my head for quite some time, and I have made a mess of pronouncing it right from the outset, so I apologise to her. I also thank the 16 hon. Members who have spoken in the debate.

It seems that every time I return to this place, the Government have fallen further and further away from justifying their increasingly mistaken belief that they can deliver on their 1.5 million homes target. No one believes they are going to reach such a lofty, albeit much- needed, figure. We have pointed out that the Government’s efforts to reach that unrealistic target appear geared towards removing as much local input into decision making as possible, and towards shifting development from brownfield sites in cities and urban areas, where demand and infrastructure exists, to rural areas, where demand is often lower and infrastructure is far less well provided or even non-existent.

That brings me to the Government’s new towns policy, about which, as it is currently framed, we have significant concerns, which I will touch on shortly. At the Labour party conference at the end of September last year, the Secretary of State pledged that the Government would go ahead with work on new towns in at least 12 locations. Since then, it has emerged that only three of those new towns will begin before the end of this Parliament, with the rest to be built after 2029.

The three new towns that we will supposedly see begun before 2029 are Tempsford in Bedfordshire, Leeds South Bank, and Crews Hill and Chase Park in the London borough of Enfield. While His Majesty’s Opposition recognise the need to build new homes, we hope that the Government will work harder to listen to and address the concerns of local people living near these three sites than they have done with the hon. Member for Macclesfield (Tim Roca), whose constituency includes one of the other nine lower-priority new town sites. He highlighted some of the Opposition’s key concerns when he presented a petition to the House on 17 December last year about plans for the Adlington new town, and he did so again in his excellent speech earlier today. The concerns he outlined were about the adverse impact on the green belt and on agricultural land, strains on local infrastructure and services, and the adverse impact on local communities. We are sympathetic to those concerns, which are not restricted to Adlington.

One of the first new towns earmarked for building is in the London borough of Enfield, which has 37.3% green belt and 47.6% open space. According to the CPRE, the green space of Enfield, much of which is based on the borders of the Enfield Chase heritage area of special character, gives large parts of Enfield a rural character that is comparable to Richmond park or Hampstead heath, which are areas of significant local and historical value. The site of the proposed new town currently comprises commercial horticultural nurseries, garden centres, a golf course, working farms and greenfield land. The local businesses employ around 1,000 people, and all of this is threatened by the proposal. These are not vast swathes of undeveloped potential, but important green spaces that help as much as urban centres to define an area’s character and community.

Tempsford in Bedfordshire is much the same, and has been chosen as an area for a whole new stand-alone town. My hon. Friend the Member for North Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) highlighted, on behalf of his constituents, some of his concerns as the local Member of Parliament. It is vital that the Government work to fully and properly consult a local community like Tempsford—an area currently made up of small villages—rather than continue their top-down crusade against the countryside. That is why we Conservatives have repeatedly sought assurances from the Government about their plans for full and proper consultation with local people and communities. I hope the Minister will commit to that today.

The impact of new towns does not stop at the boundaries of the local authority area in which they are developed. My hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Lewis Cocking) has highlighted that the proposed Crews Hill development in the London borough of Enfield will be closer to the village of Goffs Oak in his constituency than to Enfield town hall. The imposition of a new town of 21,000 properties on the border of his constituency cannot avoid having a direct impact on his constituents. Will the Minister therefore commit to proper consultation of communities and councils adjacent to the local authority in which the proposed new town may be built? He is a decent man, and I hope that he will.

The Opposition recognise that the country is in desperate need of not just more housing, but more housing in the right places with the right infrastructure to support it. The hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Ms Oppong-Asare) made precisely that point in her speech. Identifying where places have the right infrastructure, brownfield or urban capacity, and where new homes are most wanted, is a key factor. The Government must get serious about their failure to improve house building during their first 18 months in power. They must stop making excuses and blaming everybody else, and instead look at how to get the country building in the right places.

That is why the Opposition have called for a brownfield-first approach to be properly actioned, not just paid lip service to, as it is by the Government. According to the CPRE, in a large number of local authorities there is enough brownfield land with planning permission to meet the targets set by the Government’s standard method for calculating housing need for at least the next five years. The same report shows that England’s brownfield sites increased in number, land area and minimum net dwellings by up to 54%, 6% and 34%, respectively, between 2018 and 2024. The Government will no doubt point to their brownfield passport policy in response to that criticism, but it should be noted that this policy, if actioned, is not without risk. It could result in bypassing crucial local input, minimising local community power in their own local neighbourhoods and rushing through developments despite legitimate local objections, which will do nothing for people’s faith in democracy.

Even if that proves to be a misplaced concern, brownfield passports do not deal with some of the deep-seated causes of brownfield delays. After all, we know that there are already hundreds of thousands of planning permissions on sites that have not yet been built, and it is a lazy generalisation and an inadequate explanation simply to blame all of that on the land banking of greedy developers, because the causes are more complex. Funding, complexity, increasing regulatory burdens, delays and other factors all play their part. If the Government do nothing to address those factors, all they will succeed in is achieving more undeveloped planning permissions. As we all know, people need real buildings to live in, not unexecuted planning permissions.

[Richard Fuller]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making the point about making brownfield sites a priority, and I think he is giving the Minister some very good advice. The first question that will be asked by people in Tempsford and the villages, who may see so much more housing come upon them, is, “Well, why haven’t you built in areas that are already developed? Have you maximised the potential in those areas?” It will be to the Government’s benefit if they can demonstrate, as I am sure the Minister will from the Dispatch Box shortly, that they will push existing urban areas as hard as they can to maximise housing potential and avoid some of the artificial blockages to which my hon. Friend is referring.