David Cameron opened the door to a new generation of “garden cities” today as he vowed to build Britain for the economic challenges of the coming century.
The Prime Minister said he would look to build airport capacity in the South East. “We need to retain our status as a key global hub for air travel,” he said, promising to look at the pros and cons of a new airport in the Thames Estuary.
Mr Cameron said he was braced for bad headlines as he set out an ambitious programme of big infrastructure projects that includes putting private companies in charge of major roads.
But he said that in recent decades Britain had suffered from a “failure of vision, failure of financing and a failure of nerve” — and that he intended to correct all three.
“There will be costs and protests,” he said in a speech in Central London. “I can see the furious objections — the banner headlines — already.
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“But rather than give in we should ask instead, what is it that people want for the future?”
In advance of publication of the Government’s planning reforms later this month, Mr Cameron set the scene for a big row with countryside groups by insisting that current rules were a drag on economic growth.
“The growth of our towns and cities has bene held back by a planning system which has encouraged development of the wrong sort in the wrong places,” he said.
Citing the “visionary plan” of Patrick Abercrombie in 1944, which paved the way for new towns across the South East that became “new engines of economic growth”, Mr Cameron said that Britain should recapture the art of “creating great places with the right social and enviornmental infrastructure”.
Places like Hampstead Garden Suburb, Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City were “not perfect but popular”, he said. They were “green, planned, secure, with gardens, places to play and characterful houses, not just car-dominated concrete grids”.
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Mr Cameron said that new planning rules would protect green belts and national parks. “But we also urgently need to find places where we are prepared to allow significant new growth to happen.”
The Government would begin consulting later this year “on how to apply the principles of garden cities to areas with high potential growth, in places people want to live”.
He added: “We must get our planning system fit for purpose. It needs to be quick. It needs to be easier to use. And it needs to better support growth, jobs and homes.”