Leeds South Bank: Labour announces location for Yorkshire 'new town'
Leeds South Bank will be one of three “new towns” that the Government will start to build before the next election, the Housing Secretary has said.
The Government will “do whatever it takes to get Britain building”, Steve Reed told Labour members yesterday, on the opening day of the party’s annual gathering in Liverpool.
Work on 12 new towns will be taken forward, Mr Reed announced, as recommended by a report from the Government’s New Towns Taskforce.
The priority for construction in the current Parliament will likely be Tempsford in Bedfordshire, Leeds South Bank, and Crews Hill, north London, described by Labour as “most promising sites”.
Each of the dozen new towns will have at least 10,000 homes, and could collectively result in 300,000 houses being built across England.
Sir Keir Starmer said these new towns are the “physical embodiment of national renewal”.
However, questions will be raised as to whether Leeds South Bank should actually be called a new town.
Regeneration of the former industrial area south of the Aire, in Holbeck and Hunslet, including the old Tetley’s brewery, has been a priority for Leeds City Council for more than a decade.
The council wants to effectively expand the city centre into South Bank, and work has already begun on hundreds of flats.
One designation as being part of Labour’s new towns programme is that 40 per cent of the homes will have to be affordable.
Ministers plan to model the construction and planning effort behind each town on the regeneration of Stratford, east London, before and after the 2012 Olympic games.
The Olympic park, and the surrounding housing, was overseen by a development corporation, a body with sweeping powers which allowed it to compulsorily purchase land and grant planning permission.
In a nod to the new towns programme established by Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government, Mr Reed said: “This party built new towns after the war to meet our promise of homes fit for heroes.
“Now, with the worst economic inheritance since that war, we will once again build cutting-edge communities to provide homes fit for families of all shapes and sizes.”
“I am launching the next generation of new towns taking the lessons from the post-war Labour government housing boom… mobilising the full power of the state to build a new generation of new towns and restore the dream of home ownership to thousands of families across the country.”
Sir Keir added: “For so many families, homeownership is a distant dream.
“My Labour Government will sweep aside the blockers to get homes built, building the next generation of new towns.”
Among the steps Labour plans to take to speed up housing development is a “New Towns Unit”, aimed at pumping both private and public cash into transport links, GP surgeries, schools and open green spaces in its new settlements.
The Unit will work with leading architects to ensure the new towns have their own unique character and identity, intended to reflect their local area.
Today, at Labour’s annual conference, Chancellor Rachel Reeves will make her speech, announcing a new “Youth Guarantee” for young people.
This will mean that every young person who has been on Universal Credit for 18 months without earning or learning will be offered guaranteed paid work.
“We won’t leave a generation of young people to languish without prospects – denied the dignity, the security and the ladders of opportunity that good work provides,” she is expected to say.
“Just as the last Labour government, with its new deal for young people, abolished long-term youth unemployment, I can commit this government to nothing less than the abolition of long-term youth unemployment. We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again.”