Villagers slam government over 'silence' on proposed new town
The government is set to pledge construction on three new UK towns
A parish council chairman, whose village has been identified as a likely site for the construction of a new town, has hit out at the government for leaving residents in the dark over the proposals.
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David Sutton said he had 'no idea' what to expect if construction of a new town goes ahead in Tempsford in Bedfordshire.
At the Labour Party conference today in Liverpool, it is expected that the housing secretary Steve Reed will pledge to start development on Tempsford, along with Leeds South Bank and Crews Hill, north London.
However, Mr Sutton has accused the government of not informing locals about the plans, saying: “Nobody’s come to talk to us at all.”
He told PA news agency: “The biggest problem we’ve got at the moment is that even today, as an announcement’s being made, we’ve been given no idea whatsoever of the scale of what we’re being asked to live amongst.”
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Earlier this year the Government confirmed plans to build a new train station at Tempsford to provide connections between the East Coast Main Line and East West Rail.
“Nobody’s come to talk to us at all,” Mr Sutton said. “Nobody’s given us any indication whether it’s the rumoured 10,000 houses from before, 20,000, 40,000 was heard a couple of years ago, and last year 125,000, so what is it?”
The 52-year-old said some residents are “a lot more anti” the prospect of major building than he is, adding that he is “up for some sustainable development” in the village which has “no phone signal, no shop, no gas, no schools, no nothing”.
“There’s a reason there’s no other houses here at the moment, because we haven’t got anything,” Mr Sutton explained.
“We’ve got horrific flooding problems where every single year for the last 20 years people in our village have had sewage in their front rooms at Christmas.
“We need some help before we need to be the ones helping everybody else out with somewhere to live.”
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.
Mr Sutton told PA: “Of course (the Government) will say that but will they?
“If they’re not even talking to us at all, how can we be sure that when they’re promising they’re going to build stuff, how do we know they even know what we need?”
Work on 12 new towns will be taken forward, Housing Secretary Steve Reed is to announce, as recommended by a report from the Government’s New Towns Taskforce, published on Sunday morning.
Among the dozen locations are sites in Cheshire, Manchester, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Plymouth and London.
Each will have at least 10,000 homes, and could collectively result in 300,000 houses being built across England.
In its manifesto, Labour pledged to begin work on 1.5 million new homes over the course of the Parliament, to expand homeownership to more Britons.
