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Yahoo
3 days ago
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Ebbsfleet: the ultimate commuter town that never was
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? 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.' 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.' 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. 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.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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Telegraph
3 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
Ebbsfleet: the ultimate commuter town that never was
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.'
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Ebbsfleet: the ultimate commuter town that never was
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? 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.' 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.' 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. 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.'
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Number of children in workless households hits 10-year high
The number of children growing up in homes without a working adult has hit its highest in a decade amid growing concern about Britain's benefits crisis. A total 1.45m children – or around one in nine – lived in a workless household in the first three months of 2025, up 169,000 compared to a year ago, official data showed. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said this was the highest level since the end of 2015, just after former Chancellor George Osborne announced he would limit welfare claims to a family's first two children. Rachel Reeves is facing mounting pressure to scrap the cap at a cost of around £3.5bn a year, with the Prime Minister reportedly asking the Chancellor to explore how it could be funded. Labour backbenchers have also vowed to rebel against £5bn in health and disability welfare cuts even as the cost of these benefits is on course to approach £100bn a year by 2030. Nigel Farage has pledged to remove the so-called two-child benefit cap as the Reform leader attempts to woo traditional voters in Labour's heartlands across the north of England and Wales. In a worrying trend, the ONS data also showed that children were now much more likely to be growing up in a household where the adults are not even looking for a job. The number of children growing up in a household in which all adults are economically inactive stood at 1.17m in the first quarter of the year. This is 137,000 higher than a year ago and roughly 100,000 more than a decade ago, when far more adults were seeking work. Around 1.6m children are living in roughly 440,000 households affected by the two-child benefit cap, according to the Department for Work and Pensions. The Resolution Foundation think tank has previously estimated that axing the policy would lift 470,000 children out of poverty at a cost of £3.5bn a year. Speaking at an event on Tuesday, Mr Farage said he wanted to scrap the cap 'not because we support the benefits culture, but because we believe that for lower paid workers, this actually makes having children just a little bit easier'. Former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown has also called for the cap to be removed, funded by a tax on gambling sites or a further raid on banks. However, official data also show that around two in five households – or around 180,000 – who are affected by the two-child limit are not currently in work Sir Keir Starmer ruled out scrapping the cap in 2023 and even suspended half a dozen MPs from his own party for voting with the SNP to remove it. The Prime Minister has since softened his approach, saying Labour would remove it but only when there was money to pay for it. Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, delivered the strongest signal yet that ministers intend to end the cap. Speaking on Tuesday, she said: 'We want to make this change happen, and it will be the moral mission of this Labour Government to ensure that fewer children grow up in poverty.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
7 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
Immigration is the reason our police seem more incompetent than ever
There are all sorts of downsides to an ageing society, but one of the upsides is supposed to be that it is a safer, quieter, more orderly society. But modern Britain doesn't really feel that way, does it? Yes, many forms of crime are down – although there is surely some ambiguity there. If you live in the jurisdiction of one of the many police forces which solves zero burglaries a year, how long before you no longer bother reporting such things? What about lower-level crime, such as shoplifting? So what happened? Mark Rowley, the Met Police Commissioner, has part of the answer: 'We're carrying the scar tissue of austerity cuts, and the effects of that. Forces are much smaller when you compare the population they're policing than they were a decade or 15 years ago.' Credit where credit is due: it's too rare for figures of authority to acknowledge when a problem is rooted (as so many are) in the Conservative party's last period in office. Rowley is quite correct that we'll be feeling the impact of short-sighted policing cuts under the Coalition for a long time. Too often, such comments are seized on by the Left as somehow conceding that any form of austerity was a bad idea. It wasn't, at least if you don't think that public spending can just increase forever. But George Osborne's strategy – avoid making any decisions and salami-slice every budget – was a disaster for the justice system. Not only did he cut thousands of police officers, but the Treasury also paid off thousands of our most experienced prison officers to retire early, with entirely predictable consequences. Rowley is, however, only acknowledging half the problem. The police-to-population ratio depends on two numbers, and officer strength is just one. The other reason that per-capita police numbers are so much lower than they were twenty years ago is the Conservatives' continual failure to get a grip on mass immigration. Actually, that sentence flatters the Tories a bit, because it implies they tried to grip it. Yet their record tells a different story. David Cameron fought two elections talking tough about bringing net immigration down to the 'tens of thousands', but in office was happy to let his home secretaries talk tough whilst the departments of Business, Education, and the Treasury continually bid up the numbers. As for Boris Johnson and Priti Patel, well, surely nothing need be said that googling the term 'Boriswave' doesn't cover. The impact of this is two-fold. A lower ratio of police to residents obviously has an impact on law enforcement (compounded by the courts backlog and prisons crisis). But a more atomised society with a high proportion of new arrivals – an 'island of strangers', as Sir Keir Starmer put it – also simply needs more police, as 'hard' policing has to compensate for the dilution of social norms which play a larger role in a more homogenous, higher-trust society. Sadly, it doesn't look as if the Government has learned any lessons. Rachel Reeves is reportedly locked in battle with colleagues over more police cuts, even as chiefs warn that it will make it impossible to hit Labour's vaunted crime targets. Just how hollowed out do forces need to get before ministers will accept the need to cut entitlement spending? I really don't want to find out the hard way.
