Ebbsfleet: the ultimate commuter town that never was

Telegraph

3 days ago

On paper, Ebbsfleet should have been a huge success story: thousands of affordable homes built on a high-speed rail link into central London.
But 30 years after the grand plan for 43,000 homes in north Kent was hatched, just 10pc have been built.
Its huge train station, which Eurostar abandoned, is the 308th busiest in the country – little more than a ghost town even in peak commuting times. Trains take just 18 minutes to St Pancras.
Snails-pace construction work at the so-called garden city, on the south side of the Thames estuary, has made it synonymous with Britain's failed planning system.
While there have been improvements in recent years, the discovery of jumping spiders has slammed the brakes on part of the scheme. As the Government plots 12 new towns, how does it avoid another Ebbsfleet-style disaster?
A utopian vision
Plans were first mooted under John Major's government in 1994, with more than 40,000 homes suggested for the site. The initial idea was a utopia of avenues studded with trees, houseboats moored on the Thames and homes built among parkland.
But output was incredibly slow for years, with the financial crash hurting builders' appetite, and concrete plans for Ebbsfleet failed to take off.
Following years of stalled projects and revisions, that figure dwindled to 15,000 in 2014 under then-chancellor George Osborne, who christened it as Britain's first garden city for almost 100 years. At risk of the former quarry site becoming a gargantuan failure, an arm's-length body of central government, the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, took the reins a decade ago in an attempt to speed up delivery.
Now acting as the planning authority for the 2,500-acre site rather than the local council, the corporation has managed to raise housebuilding numbers under its watch – yet Ebbsfleet is still a shadow of what it was hoped to be.
'Last year we delivered 648 homes, and we're at about 5,000 in total,' explains Ian Piper, the development corporation's chief executive. 'We're around a third of the way through now. Until fairly recently we always talked about 2035 for completion, but I think it will go beyond that now to complete the job.'
In its first phases of construction, Ebbsfleet – like most new-build estates – came in for criticism for its ugliness. 'We are looking for a higher quality than the normal and what we are getting [so far] is the norm – standard off-the-peg stuff,' the former chairman of Dartford's planning committee complained in 2016.
There are fears that Labour's housing drive will spark a flurry of 'rabbit hutch' houses scarring the landscape, but as for Ebbsfleet, Piper believes the aesthetic has improved. 'If you look at some of the earliest stuff, before the corporation had been set up, it's still good but you can definitely see the transition and improvement compared with the more recent stuff,' he says.
Whatever the perception, there is demand from buyers, adds Piper. 'About 50pc come from within around 5km, so from Dartford and Gravesham boroughs, and then there's a good proportion that come from south London and outer London boroughs.'
Resident gripes
In 2007, Ebbsfleet International station was opened, bringing high-speed services to St Pancras, as well as Eurostar services to Europe.
When it first became operational it was billed as 'the ultimate park and ride station', but many of the town's residents instead opted to use the nearby Swanscombe station because of its cheaper commute. The cost of commuting from Ebbsfleet is high: three of the five car parks cost £15.60 a day to use (or £13.60 in advance), while a train season ticket taking the 20 miles of track to St Pancras costs £6,124. The station's 5,000 parking spaces are never full.
In contrast, a season ticket from Swanscombe to London Charing Cross costs £4,060. It's a longer commute time, but the cheaper price is favoured by most Ebbsfleet residents.
The ultimate commuter location has its drawbacks. The station itself is severed from the town, meaning those opting to walk face a 20-minute slog uphill.
On our trip to Ebbsfleet on a sunny afternoon, we saw just one other person making their way to the station. 'I think it's probably fair to say that the walking route from the station up here is not a great experience,' says Piper. 'But we're involved in significantly improving it to make it as attractive as possible.'
There are also gripes about the lack of facilities. A recent survey of residents found that just one in four were satisfied with the bus services in the area. Piper says: 'I think 95pc of homes are within a five-minute walk of a bus. A bus route goes right through the heart of the community and that is being expanded.'
And while respondents gave high praise for the area's sense of community, the majority said they found the lack of amenities an issue. A lack of health provision and sport facilities, bars and restaurants, and cultural centres featured heavily in the replies.
There's certainly not much around: there are two small Co-ops, a coffee shop, a pharmacy, and a community centre. There are plans to open a large supermarket.
'Timing is everything when delivering facilities,' Piper says. 'For instance, nobody's going to take on a coffee shop if nobody's around to go there because you'll [close down] within six months. Getting the timing right is tricky, and that's one of our key challenges now. You need to get the facilities there when they are needed – not too soon and not too late.'
Despite dissatisfaction with the facilities, Piper says Ebbsfleet retains its residents. 'You really don't see many 'for sale' signs around here compared with other places. There is a high level of community satisfaction.'
'Held back by arachnids'
It's not just slow building that has hit Ebbsfleet; the latest saga to stall development involves the discovery of a small colony of jumping spiders.
Derelict land previously home to a cement works was bought for £34m by the corporation in 2019, with the intention to build densely on the 309-acre site around the station. Fast-forward to today and the building potential has been stripped down to just 86 acres after Natural England dropped an arachnid-shaped bombshell on the garden city.
The presence of rare jumping spiders led to the scrubland being granted Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) status. Its designation meant building work had to be shelved, with the government-funded Natural England declaring that 'sustainable development and nature recovery must go hand in hand'.
HS1 Ltd, the company which runs the high-speed train line, warned that the 'designation will in effect void the whole purpose behind the construction of Ebbsfleet's station', yet the battle to overturn the ruling was lost.
Piper says: 'We objected quite strongly to the designation. But it was made clear there was no right of appeal, so we soon decided there was little we could do to change that. Some of the money was written down.'
As a result of the SSSI designation, which effectively bans any future development, the land's value plummeted to £9m – and the sum of that lost government cash is a hefty £25.2m. It also means around 1,300 homes have been wiped from the Ebbsfleet masterplan, along with a vast entertainment resort planned to rival Disneyland.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer waded into the debate earlier this year when he lambasted the spider dilemma for blocking his party's housebuilding drive. 'The dream of home ownership for thousands of families is being held back by arachnids,' he wrote in a Telegraph column.
'It's nonsense. And we'll stop it,' he declared. Yet stripping land of its SSSI designation is easier said than done.
Lessons for Labour
The Government has pledged to build 12 new Ebbsfleets, of at least 10,000 homes in size. More than 100 proposals have been submitted to the Government's 'New Towns Taskforce', which will review options and announce winners in the summer. No specific locations of the bids have been announced, but most are from the South East, South West, East and London. How does it avoid these future garden cities from going the way of Ebbsfleet?
It's not yet known if arm's-length development corporations will be set up for each location. They were used in post-war new towns like Milton Keynes, and by Lord Heseltine to successfully rejuvenate dilapidated parts of London, Liverpool and Manchester in the 1980s and 1990s.
Writing for the Adam Smith Institute think tank, Labour MP Chris Curtis has urged the Government to 'cut through red tape, streamline planning and empower development corporations'.
'We have seen what can be achieved when bold action is taken – Milton Keynes and the London Docklands are a testament to that,' he said. 'Now we must apply that same determination again, ensuring that Britain embraces a spirit of ambition and gets building.'
The new towns plan is part of Labour's manifesto pledge to ramp up housebuilding and deliver 1.5 million homes by the end of this Parliament. The target, which the Government is falling shy of, is deemed unachievable by critics. Yet Piper backs the proposal.
'It's ambitious but I think you've got to have a target to aim for, otherwise you don't change behaviours,' he says. 'It's absolutely right to be highly ambitious.
'It's easy to deliver quality housing on small sites, working with niche builders and top-quality architects. The big challenge is getting volume housebuilders to produce that level of quality, which is obviously what the Government would want.
'I think we've done that successfully here, we have a mixture of housebuilders – Barratt, Persimmon, Redrow, for example – all delivering homes.'
House prices in Ebbsfleet average £400,000 according to Rightmove, making it 'a relatively affordable place for the South East', according to Piper.
Residents in neighbouring areas such Swanscombe and Greenhithe have complained of a strain on local services and traffic as a result of the emergence of Ebbsfleet. There have also been issues with local residents being unable to send their children to the town's new primary school as places were originally filled by those living further afield.
Piper says: 'You need to build in your stewardship strategy right from the very beginning. We inherited a lot of things that were already in place, so we've had to do a lot retrospectively, which is 10 times harder.
'I also think in the very early days of the corporation the emphasis was almost exclusively on housing numbers. You can build houses but you're not actually building homes. You're certainly not building communities. We've therefore put a great emphasis on doing that.'
But perhaps the biggest lesson from Ebbsfleet's fragmented creation and spider-gate for the Government's future garden cities is forming harmonious relationships between its own departments.
After all, the Ministry of Housing (the department sponsoring Ebbsfleet's development corporation) and the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (the department sponsoring Natural England) work just metres away from each other in the same building in London's Marsham Street.
'Creating a place is dependent on a lot of other agencies and public bodies,' says Piper. 'There needs to be strong alignment at a national government level between different departments.'