Last month, the House of Lords Built Environment Committee published its second report on the new towns programme. Its conclusion was blunt: delivering successful new towns under current constraints is “almost impossible.”
The committee’s concerns are well-founded. The report focuses on what it calls “the fundamentally human issues of what it takes to create thriving communities: vision, placemaking, design, and creating environments that are accessible, age-friendly and safe.” Lord Gascoigne called for “strong national leadership” and “clear coordination across government, all supporting delivery on the ground at the local level.”
These are serious structural recommendations, but reading the report, I was struck by what it doesn’t address. There is a great deal about governance, about design quality, about the need for a central coordinating body. There is far less about the people who already live in and around these places, and what they think about what’s coming.
The seven locations are already contested
The government has named seven proposed locations: Tempsford in Bedfordshire, Crews Hill and Chase Park in Enfield, Leeds South Bank, Manchester Victoria North, Thamesmead in Greenwich, Brabazon and the West Innovation Arc in South Gloucestershire, and an expansion of Milton Keynes. A public consultation on the proposed locations opened on 23 March and will close on 18 May.
But the public conversation has often started long before a consultation opens. In local Facebook groups, on council forums, in newspaper comment threads, on X and Reddit.
That matters. Not because community opposition stops projects from happening, the seven locations have been chosen and the programme will move forward regardless. But because managing entrenched opposition after it has crystallised costs significantly more energy, budget, and political capital than understanding the landscape early.
How Community Listening helps
We recently completed a Community Listening report for a major new settlement proposal. The project team needed to understand how the public was responding before formal engagement began.
The headline finding was counterintuitive. The loudest voices were overwhelmingly negative, the kind of response that dominates social media and local press. But when we looked at the full picture, the largest single group of the conversation was neutral. These were people still forming a view, asking questions, weighing things up.
That distinction between who is loudest and who is quietly seeking out information, offering ideas and solutions turned out to be the most useful insight in the entire report. It told us where the opportunity for co-creation and innovation was, not just where the resistance was.
Listening as a starting point.
I want to be clear: Community Listening isn’t the only tool needed to solve the problems the Lords committee has identified. It doesn’t replace governance structures, design quality, or long-term stewardship. What it does do, however, is give project teams an honest, evidence-based understanding of how a place or project is being talked about before engagement begins.
That understanding changes how you engage. It tells you what people actually care about, which is often different from what they say they care about. It helps you spot where concern could turn into organised opposition, and where there’s genuine openness to conversation. It means engagement can start from a position of understanding rather than assumption. And it helps identify overlooked conversations on channels where engagement may be overlooked.
The demographic dimension
There’s another layer to this that the Lords report touches on but doesn’t fully explore. Many of the locations being considered for new towns are in areas experiencing significant demographic shifts, ageing populations, younger families moving away, and economic stagnation. The case for building in these areas isn’t just about housing numbers. It’s about economic renewal, about creating places where the next generation has a reason to stay.
Understanding those dynamics at a community level matters. A place where older residents feel left behind by change, and younger residents have already left, is a different communication challenge from one where an existing community feels threatened by expansion. The approach can’t be one-size-fits-all.
What needs to happen
The Lords committee is right that the new towns programme needs stronger governance, clearer vision, and dedicated leadership. But none of that will be effective if it’s built on assumptions about what communities think, based on the loudest voices rather than on an evidence-based approach that breaks down barriers and moves towards cohesive communities built on understanding.
By Debbie Larrad