Chris Howell

I think everyone excited about New Towns should visit Northstowe, a new New Town outside Cambridge (about 40 mins away), and the largest New Town in England since Milton Keynes. It's been a disaster so far. It's been built very poorly/cheaply made and planned. The housing stock is ugly and cheap. It doesn't have a shop, a GP, or a gym, and it's been kind of a ghost town the times I've been. A lot of the residents are furious and feel totally misled into buying there. And yet *it's probably the most prime place in England to build a New Town*! So what's the problem? Partially it's lots of costs being put on to the new housing, including a 40% affordable requirement, which means developers build cheaply and cut corners to be able to have something to sell at a price people can afford (in the same way high land costs mean new builds are worse quality). Partially it's because Homes England, the Quango delivering it (and likely any future New Towns), is useless. Labour's supposed wave of New Towns (I actually doubt any will happen of any significant size) will suffer from all of these problems. And most won't even have the benefit of being a short commute away from Cambridge!

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🚨 NEW: Keir Starmer's COBRA meeting on the cost of living has now concluded No 10 said: "The Chancellor, the Governor of the Bank of England, the Energy Secretary and others updated on the situation - all making clear that the best thing we can do for the economy is to de-escalate and bring the conflict to an end. "The Chancellor set out the steps she will take tomorrow - in a statement to Parliament - that will help protect working people from unfair price rises. "She spoke about a plan to detect and crack down on companies if they exploit the crisis in the Middle East. "This will take the form of a new anti-profiteering framework which will help regulators like the CMA to root out price gouging. "This comes after the Prime Minister announced he is looking at giving the Competition and Markets Authority “further teeth” so it can better protect customers from being ripped off. "As part of that, the government will not hesitate to introduce new time-limited, targeted powers for the CMA and other key regulators if that is needed. "The exact powers are being worked through at pace with the Treasury, Department for Business and Trade, and key regulators including the CMA"

Very good piece and chimes with many of us who have been ministers. A little story. One Friday night as we were emerging from the pandemic I got a call from my private secretary. I was a junior transport minister. He said that the driving test site which had just re-opened had crashed. If you remember, driving tests couldn't happen during Covid, meaning that people couldn't drive at all - including those who had to get re-tested (older people, HGV drivers etc). There was a huge backlog of people desparate to get tests. Well obviously once it opened, so many people logged on it couldn't cope. The transport secretary had been dealing with it all day but by 10pm he had enough and as the most junior minister I was asked to take over. MPs were shouting at us because their constituents couldn't get tests, couldn't take up jobs, were losing income, etc. I said to my private secretary, get me the Chief Exec of the Driving Test agency on the phone to brief me and tell me what he's doing to fix the problem. "Minister, I can't do that" "Why not?" "Its 10pm on a Friday night". Silence. More silence. "Can you ask him to get on a call with me?" "Minister, we have asked, and he's not minded to" Gentle expostulation on my part. "But I'm working at 10pm on a Friday night. I am certainly not minded to, but it is his agency that is causing us the problem?" "I know minister. But I still can't get him on the call". Cut to the end, I pushed through. He came on the call an hour later. I got him to brief me with regular updates starting at 7am Saturday. We got the thing open and working by lunch time. But really! Without being rude to many of my former colleagues, I know many of them wouldn't have bothered. But more to the point, as a minister, why should you have to! If people were doing their jobs as they should, they should take ownership of precisely these problems. Small story, but repeated time and again. Side note - its not just the core civil service that are the problem but the myriad of ALBs (arms length bodies) and NGAs (non governmental agencies) that are even harder. Civil servants themselves have no control over what those guys are doing let alone ministers.